Picket Fence Post

“If your mom’s your best friend, who’s your mother?”

So asked the editors at the Reuters news service in the headline to a story which decries the rise in the number of mothers — an expert calls it “epidemic” — who seek to be their children’s best friends instead of boundary-setting parents.

The Reuters article quotes clinical psychologist Stephan Poulter who says that many of today’s parents do not want to establish and enforce house rules. “. . . [K]ids need a parent, not another friend, and this [being best friends with your children] leaves them motherless,” Poulter told Reuters. “This can create a lot of rage in boys, and daughters who are drug-orientated and out of control tend to be motherless daughters of this type.”

I cannot wait to show this article to my kids, who constantly accuse me of trying to single-handedly destroy their happiness by doing irrational and cruel things such as insisting that they bathe regularly, that they go to bed at what I consider to be a reasonable hour (8:30, that’s the goal anyway) and by making them wear coats and long pants in 50-degree weather even when they say they’ll be laughed at in school because all the other kids in their class are apparently donning beach wear. In April. In New England.

Image credit: The WB.