Picket Fence Post

Three for Thursdays (or Four for Fridays if I don’t post on Thursday) will be a regular feature here on the Picket Fence Post. This feature will include newsy/fun/intriguing items that I stumbled upon in the past week. If you happen to see something — an interesting news story, a funny video, an outrage, etc. — that you think would be perfect for Three for Thursdays, please be sure to send it my way.

Item #1: Grey’s Finale

Will Meredith and Derek finally end the on-again/off-again romantic dance and commit already? Certainly the challenges of being a couple can provide drama and comedy, if it didn’t, then Mad About You would’ve been canceled after its pilot episode. Will Miranda figure out a way to repair her relationship with her estranged husband and reunite her family? Will Christina emerge from her “Like a Virgin”-singing funk? We’ll find out tonight in the Grey’s Anatomy finale. But, as with most bonus-sized finales — tonight’s show is two hours long — they tend to disappoint. Hopefully that won’t be the case tonight. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that nothing totally absurd will happen. Like Gizzie, part II.

Item #2: First-Born Rule-Followers and Their Strict ‘Rents

I KNEW IT! As the oldest child in my own family, I’ve always felt as though it’s harder to be the older kid than the younger one, even when you factor the hand-me-downs into the picture. Now a study in the latest issue of the Economic Journal confirms it.

“The study showed that older siblings were much less likely to drop out of school or, in the case of girls, get pregnant, than the youngest in the family, perhaps because of a lifetime of being held to higher standards,” reported MSNBC. “That stricter parenting style [used with the older child] often shapes the first-born kid into a play-by-the-rules perfectionist.”

While this may explain some of my own personality traits, it proves problematic for me as a parent because I have first-born children (my twins) and a younger child and I recognize that I am much more chill about exactly when the younger kid hits his milestones (walking, talking, reading, etc.) than I was with the first two. I am (*hanging my head in shame*) more lax in reprimanding and boundary-setting with my younger kid than I was with my elder two. (The younger kid watches things I would’ve never allowed my older two to watch when they were his age.) Whereas everything in the house had to be sanitized when my twins were babies and I was a new parent, by the time the third kid came, the five second rule ruled the roost because, as I’d come to believe, a little dirt wasn’t going to kill him.

That being said, is there any way for parents to avoid saddling our first-born kids with feeling as though they have to be super-responsible and allow their younger siblings to benefit from relaxed parenting, or is this simply the price the older ones have to pay for getting the first crack at all the new stuff?

Item #3: Stalled Adulthood

Now that I’ve sufficiently panicked parents about the disparities in the way they raise their older and younger kids, I found another news article that blames clingy parents who don’t want to let their kids grow up for stalling their Gen Y children’s evolution into responsible adults. (How does this work with a first-born Gen Y kid who feels overly responsible for everything while, at the same time, is being clung to by her parents? The kid winds up feeling horribly guilty about being responsible and moving out of the house in her early 20s?)

Sue Shellenbarger, writing for the Wall Street Journal’s working parents blog On Balance, cited research from a Princeton University professor theorizing that there’s a cultural trend toward extending childhood longer, coupled with a working parents guilt factor (”working parents have less time for their children when they’re small — and thus ‘less of an itch to see them depart’ in their twenties”).

I’d like to offer an unscientific hypothesis: Could the twentysomethings’ resistance to starting their independent, adult lives be traced back to the fact that they weren’t taught how to be independent adults because their parents babied them too much? This group of mid-twentysomethings could benefit from Christie Mellor’s wisdom in her Were You Raised by Wolves: Clues to the Mysteries of Adulthood, a snarky instruction manual on how to be a grown-up. Maybe if people started buying this book, along with The Joy of Cooking, for college grads, the newly-minted adults would start to understand what the business of being a grown-up is all about.

Image credit: ABC.