Parenting stuff

[celticdragonfly]

I'm going to share some links selenite gave me

Firstly, The Parent Trap:

We've taken a lot of the fun out of parenting. Or to echo Longman, the "social costs" of parenting continue to rise, and, more significantly, perhaps, the "social returns" continue to decline.

Parenting was always hard work, of course. But aside from the economic payoffs, parents used to get a lot of social benefits, too. But in recent decades, a collection of parenting "experts" and safety-fascist types have extinguished some of the benefits while raising the costs, to the point where what's amazing isn't that people are having fewer kids, but that people are having kids at all.
...
There's also the decline in parental prestige over generations. My mother reports that when she was a newlywed (she was married in 1959) you weren't seen as fully a member of the adult world until you had kids. Nowadays to have kids means something closer to an expulsion from the adult world.

This one makes me laugh. Anyone who knows us know that we're still sticking with the Then option. But the scary thing is not just the number of parents who want to use the Now answer - but how much pressure you get against you for being a parent sticking with the Then answer.

Comments

[patgund.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the parents that want to sugar coat and pad the world, to protect against their children learning that actions have results they may not like, bother me.

What bothers me more is what the kids from that type of parenting will be like as adults. I've seen the results of entitlement mentality here - I don't want to see the US falling into that trap as well.

[joyeuse13.livejournal.com]

This is one of the things that scares me the most about being a parent: having to constantly defend my parenting decisions to uninvolved observers.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

That article is frighteningly correct. When I was six and in first grade, my parents trusted me to walk home by myself from school, a distance of about a half-mile or a little more. I can't imagine allowing my own son to do that nowadays.

[archangelbeth]

Haven't read the link yet, but the cartoon... Heh. Yeah.

Mind, I'm the one who, when she slips from trying to stand on the couch, says, "You were the one flailing around up there. I'm not sympathetic."

[castiron.livejournal.com]

I'm particularly struck by the comment about how parents are getting increasing responsibility but decreasing authority. (It's the Dilbertization of parenthood!) Like those cities that fine or even jail parents if their kids miss too much school -- I've always thought that some kids would probably take advantage of that to get their parents in trouble, and what recourse do the parents have at that point?