{"id":30659,"date":"2015-03-14T10:54:34","date_gmt":"2015-03-14T14:54:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30659"},"modified":"2015-03-14T10:54:34","modified_gmt":"2015-03-14T14:54:34","slug":"the-parenting-style-of-the-greatest-generation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/03\/14\/the-parenting-style-of-the-greatest-generation\/","title":{"rendered":"The parenting style of the Greatest Generation"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the Wall Street Journal<\/em>, Dave Barry<\/a> considers the incongruous fact that his parent’s generation clearly had more fun than his did:<\/p>\n

They didn\u2019t go to prenatal classes, so they didn\u2019t find out all the things that can go wrong when a person has a baby, so they didn\u2019t spend months worrying about those things. They just had their babies, and usually it worked out, the way it has for millions of years. They didn\u2019t have car seats, so they didn\u2019t worry that the car seat they just paid $249 for might lack some feature that the car seat their friends just paid $312 for does have. They didn\u2019t read 37 parenting handbooks written by experts, each listing hundreds, if not thousands, of things they should worry about.<\/p>\n

It would never have occurred to members of my parents\u2019 generation to try to teach a 2-year-old to read; they figured that was what school was for. And they didn\u2019t obsess for years over which school their kids should attend, because pretty much everybody\u2019s kids went to the local schools, which pretty much everybody considered to be good enough. They didn\u2019t worry that their children would get bored, so they didn\u2019t schedule endless after-school activities and drive their kids to the activities and stand around with other parents watching their kids engage in the activities. Instead they sent their kids out to play. They didn\u2019t worry about how or where they played as long as they got home for dinner, which was very likely to involve gluten.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not saying my parents\u2019 generation didn\u2019t give a crap. I\u2019m saying they gave a crap mainly about big things, like providing food and shelter, and avoiding nuclear war. They\u2019d made it through some rough times, and now, heading into middle age, building careers and raising families, they figured they had it pretty good. Not perfect, but pretty good. So at the end of the workweek, they allowed themselves to cut loose \u2014 to celebrate their lives, their friendships, their success. They sent the kids off to bed, and they partied. They drank, laughed, danced, sang, maybe stole a piece of an IBM sign. They had fun, grown-up fun<\/em>, and they didn\u2019t feel guilty about it.<\/p>\n

Whereas we modern parents, living in the era of Death by Handshake, rarely pause to celebrate the way our parents did because we\u2019re too busy parenting. We never stop parenting. We are all over our kids\u2019 lives \u2014 making sure they get whatever they want, removing obstacles from their path, solving their problems and \u2014 above all \u2014 worrying about what else will go wrong, so we can fix it for them. We\u2019re in permanent trick-or-treat mode, always hovering 8 feet away from our children, always ready to pounce on the apple.<\/p>\n

Yes, we\u2019ve gotten really, really good at parenting. This is fortunate, because for some inexplicable reason a lot of our kids seem to have trouble getting a foothold in adult life, which is why so many of them are still living with us at age 37.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re lucky they have us around.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

H\/T to Lenore Skenazy<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the Wall Street Journal, Dave Barry considers the incongruous fact that his parent’s generation clearly had more fun than his did: They didn\u2019t go to prenatal classes, so they didn\u2019t find out all the things that can go wrong when a person has a baby, so they didn\u2019t spend months worrying about those things. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,13],"tags":[407,374,956,375],"class_list":["post-30659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-usa","tag-babyboomers","tag-children","tag-millennials","tag-parents"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7Yv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30659"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30660,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30659\/revisions\/30660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}