Three for Thursday: Time Mag Takes on Helicopter Parenting, NYT Tackles Rudeness at Holiday Dinners, Send in Your Amusing Holiday Anecdotes
Item #1: Time Magazine Takes on Helicopter Parenting
Recently, my twin fifth graders were given an assignment to create hats which represented a vocabulary word they’d been given. As the deadline for them to bring the word hat into school neared, I asked them two things: Did they need me to get them any supplies and how they were progressing. Other parents, I later learned, took a MUCH more involved role in the creation of their kids’ hats, helping the children come up with phenomenal ideas on how to graphically and physically represent a word’s meaning in hat form.
After The Eldest Boy told me about how awesome some of the other kids’ hats were – the ones who got help from a proud parent — I wondered if I was a lazy slacker mom for not suggesting more ideas and for not helping my children create more intricate hats. (I simply let them think it through and execute their ideas on their own.) Or was I, by my insistence that they do the project themselves, engaging in my own, small form of civil disobedience by refusing to hover over my kids?
Time Magazine would say that I was bucking the fear-driven helicopter parenting trend and actively participating in the backlash against it with my inaction.
In her story, “Can These Parents Be Saved,” Nancy Gibbs wrote in Time:
“. . . [T]here is now a new revolution under way, one aimed at rolling back the almost comical overprotectiveness and overinvestment of moms and dads. The insurgency goes by many names — slow parenting, simplicity parenting, free-range parenting — but the message is the same: Less is more; hovering is dangerous; failure is fruitful. You really want your children to succeed? Learn when to leave them alone. When you lighten up, they’ll fly higher. We’re often the ones who hold them down.
A backlash against overparenting had been building for years, but now it reflects a new reality.”
God, I hope that’s true. The backlash hasn’t quite reached my own little Boston area suburban hamlet yet; my 11-year-olds’ teachers still want parents to sign off on far too many homework assignments — indicating that mom or dad has seen the assignments or that the kid completed something — a fact about which I loudly complain on a daily basis. But my fingers remain crossed as I wait for this movement to land here. Underparenters unite!
Item #2: NYT Tackles Rudeness at Holiday Dinners
Right in line with my upcoming 2009 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card (see Item #3 below for my plea for you to help me out), today’s New York Times has a story featuring horror stories of rude relatives — of the ilk I’d love to see appear on my Bingo card — from people who’ve survived Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with their extended families and lived to laugh about it, because, seriously, what else can you do but laugh? (Laugh and pass the wine, I suppose. Or write memoirs about it. Or columns, blogs.)
One anecdote from the Times story involved a teacher who was pregnant with her first child when she spent Thanksgiving at her in-laws’ house:
“For months, the teacher’s mother-in-law had been saying that she wanted to be in the waiting room when the teacher went into labor, and the teacher, who recounted her story on the Mothers-in-Law Anonymous section of Grandparents.com, had been politely rebuffing her.
So at Thanksgiving dinner, with the family gathered around the table, the mother-in-law (referred to on this site as ‘MIL’) took the matter into her own hands.
‘MIL announced to me and the entire family the following,’ the teacher wrote. ‘I WILL be in the waiting room while [daughter-in-law] is in labor, and all of you are welcome to come too. MY SON will come and give me updates every hour on the hour.’”
That’s EXACTLY the kind of thing I’m looking for to include on my Bingo card . . .
Item #3: Send in Your Holiday Anecdotes
Don’t forget, I’m counting on you. I’m collecting your amusing family holiday anecdotes (like the one above) to help me fill the squares on my 2009 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card. I won’t reveal identities if you don’t want me to, so please feel free to e-mail me (meredithobrien@hotmail.com) a brief explanation of a humorous/insane/annoying instance which occurred at a family holiday event (like Thanksgiving). The people who submit the four best submissions will net signed copies of my collection of humor/parenting columns, Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum.
Image credit: Hugh Kretschmer/Time.
For the past few years I’ve addressed the issue of holiday stress – particularly when you gather multiple generations together for a high-pressure holiday dinner — by creating Dysfunctional Family Bingo cards. I take awkward-but-realistic scenarios that might occur during (before or after) your family’s Thanksgiving dinner and place each one into a box on a BINGO card and pray that no one checks off enough boxes to actually win.
Author and columnist Meredith O'Brien gives you a peek behind the picket fences of modern day life and parenting in the 'burbs. With humor and candor, it's her take on real parenting in the real world.
