RhondaStephens– We’ve got an entire generation of kids spitting up on outfits that cost more than my monthly electric bill. There were no designer baby clothes when we were kids. Why? Because our parents weren’t crazy enough to spend $60 on an outfit for us to have explosive diarrhea in or vomit on.
…we were three neighborhoods away, playing with some kids we’d never met, and we had crossed 2 major highways on bicycles with semi-flat tires to get there. Odds are, one of us had crashed at some point and was bleeding pretty impressively. No one cared. We were kids and if we weren’t acting as free labor, we were supposed to be out of the house and out of the way.
ht/ nm
One thing I remember from the 50’s. No tv at dinner. And you ate whatever was served. At the dinner table as a family and we prayed before we ate. And we meant it.
Ok truth be told we had no tv. My parents were young in their 20’s but they were grown up. They never acted like children.
Dayum! I turned 9 in 74 and have shared much of the same in rural Nebraska.
That was 40 years ago. My kid is not gonna be a millennial either. She’s got a retired Submarine Chief for a dad. 😜
You can’t be a parent today. It might put a strain on your friendship with your kid.
We spent our money on Catholic schooling. The uniforms were a great way to avoid the peer fashion pressure!
spankings and chores!
without those two items you might as well resign yourself to raising the next generation of maladjusted milquetoast pansies.
I had my fair share of trips to the woodshed. It helped me be the well rounded adult that I hope to be someday.
Riding bikes with no helmet or knee pads, I recall STANDING in the front seats of our station wagon between mom and dad as they drove, creating electrical shorts on our electric trains under the Christmas tree by laying tinsel across the tracks (loved the blue sparks!), no seatbelts, riding bikes on yet to be finished I-95 bridge while construction crews couldn’t give a rat’s a**, climbing roof tops, walking 5 miles or so to the ball park with friends as a young teen. playing baseball, hockey on roller skates, and touch football on asphalt streets, running the bases without a batting helmet, being disciplined by teachers with parental support, playing under the “fire plug” hours on end on hot summer days, enjoying my childhood while taking the bumps and bruises along the way as part of life
As a little girl (7 – 9 y/o) my wife (now, not then) would go to the Penn-Mar Shopping Center by herself and her mother would tell her to “Be careful crossing Marlboro Pike!”
My … how the world has changed!
But, somehow, this is “progress?”
izlamo delenda est …
In my day, when a kid was too rambunctious, they put the mom on dope, not the kid. I was quite errant from an early age, turn your back on me for a second, you’d spend the rest of the day searching for me. With my love of westerns and after seeing Easy Rider, I’ve spent the last 45 or so years “self-treating” my “condition” by motorcycle touring.
Am I missing the punch line here?
The author takes us down the drip, drip, drip of Memory Lane and exposes what responsible parenting v. indulgent, wussified, lazy parenting produces e.g., indulgent, wussified, lazy kids. How introspective of her.
Is she not the problem she rants about? Did someone force their way into her home and raise her kids for 18 years? My parents always told us, “it’s so much easier to say yes, than no”.
I get it, we all want the best for our kids, however, no amount of self-flagellation can atone for the sins lax parenting have wrought upon society. We’re all stuck with your kids lady!
I grew up in mostly hand-me-downs from some nice lady who was wealthy and was a friend of my mom’s. We were poor, but I never felt that way. Does that make sense?
Then we were enrolled in Catholic School, and had uniforms. I got to pick new shoes every school year or when my feet grew. That was my favorite. I still remember my oxblood loafers that I picked one year. They were so cool and unique. Some other girl in my class liked them so much, she made her mom buy them for her too.
I guess every “Single Mommy Blog” must read pretty similarly.
Same topics, same audience.
I’m with Engelburka. I don’t find a punchline, just some nostalgia followed by a hapless shrug.
We’re now into the second generation of spoiled pampered Snowflakes whose doting insecure parents (too often single Moms) are stretched beyond their means financially to raise their Special Angels at a standard of living/consumption that neither the parents nor children can afford. Or sustain.
The trouble with raising kids to be helpless and dependent is that it never ends.
I had a couple of beers with a friend of mine yesterday. H has a daughter in her early 30’s who is pathetic.
She and her ‘boyfriend’ got kicked out of their apartment, so they moved in with his grandmother. The idiot boyfriend had a pet python (only God knows why) which the grandmother forbade them to bring into her house. So…the daughter held her breath until dear old dad agreed to let it stay at his place overnight only. Anyway, after a couple of days it became evident that it was now HIS problem. Fortunately, he was able to give it to some reptile “rescue” outfit.
And now the daughter’s whining that she can’t entertain her friends at Granny’s house, and wants to have them over to Dad’s for a week-end party.
I told him he’s nuts if he even considers it.
He’s divorced and I think he’s letting his adult kid guilt him out.
Pathetic.
A lot of my Boomer friends, now in their 60s, have raised helpless kids, who are now in their 30s.
Those kids– often daughters who are divorced with kids, or never-marrieds with kids from various ex “partners”– can barely survive hand to mouth as it is.
Most are getting help from their Boomer parents and are dependent on it.
This will end in tears when the Boomers lose their jobs or see their pensions reneged on just when they thought they could consider retirement.
The middle aged children will flounder, then sink.
They won’t have any ability to help Mom and Dad when they grow frail and need help.
So it’s a Medicare/Medicaid shared nursing home awaiting a lot of unsuspecting Boomers.
I’d expect an increase in Craigslist ads seeking “mature MILF escort companion” work, too.
When I found out what caused kids I stopped doing it.
My parents gave me several pieces of parenting advice, which they said they were entitled to do, because they were my parents, but which I was free to ignore, because I was a new parent.
My favorites:
1- teach your child the meaning of ‘no’.
2- teach your child how to wait, because most things in life involve waiting at some time.
3- remember, you are raising an ‘adult’ not your child. Your child has to grow up prepared to enter a world that will not love him, indulge him or even support him. Your job is to prepare that future adult.
4-nothing in the world is fair. I used to ask my sons, if they exclaimed, ‘That’s not fair’, where was fairness ever promised? Is it stamped on your body somewhere?? Things tend to equal out according to our needs.
5- start decision making very early! There is acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior. The choice is always yours. Just weigh the costs and make your decisions. This training started at about the time the kids started crawling around, making choices in what to play with or not.
Those lessons and so many others have paid off: two sons, never in jail or arrested, always self-sufficient and responsible. (With no external stability available due to the hardships of a very mobile and frightening military life during the Vietnam and Cuban Missile crisis era). They raised 5 sons, between them, and they too have never been arrested or jailed and are self sufficient and responsible. Now we start in the next generation, a great-grandson. All thanks to my very wise parents and their lessons, so far, so good. Thanks Major Robert and Mrs. Lois Burns, now deceased and missed dearly).