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

[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]

I get too dang much kiddyporn spam -- as in, any -- to want the kid walking anywhere unsupervised. She's way too friendly, in many ways. It terrifies me. I know I'm going to have to let her run around unsupervised eventually, and I managed to survive (despite being perhaps more fearless than I should have been) doing so when I was 12+, but till then? *shudder*

[carbonelle.livejournal.com]

We used to have neighborhoods--though I admit I only go to live in them once or twice myself--with loads of trustworthy adults (aka "moms") in nearly every house. Now? Not so much.

Now my own BunnyBright won't get to walk the neighborhood alone until she's much, much older, but that's for reason of black bear and cougar.