Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Grandparents Want Hip Names

A few weeks ago, I wrote a column about how I thought the media were unfairly maligning Baby Boomer grandparents — specifically grandmothers – portraying them as too narcissistic to be bothered to do “grandmotherly” duties and pitting them against one another.

This week I saw yet another grandparent-centric article which deepened my suspicion that the media have grown tired of the old working mom/at-home mom “mommy wars” and is trying to drum up some excitement for the so-called ”nana wars.” This page one article in the Boston Globe focused on the fact that some grandparents don’t want their grandkids to call them by traditional names and prefer either their first names or something quirkier, hipper. The article entitled, “They love being grandparents, but call them something else,” begun this way:

“As the youth-obsessed baby boomers advance, albeit reluctantly, into the next phase of their lives, they are embracing grandparenthood with the same gusto they have expressed for everything else, be it exercise or adventure travel. They’re loading the grandkids’ video games onto their own iPods, listening to their music, and taking them on trips.

But grandparenting comes with a catch: It means you are getting old — or at least older. And that’s not sitting well with a generation that grew up on The Who singing, ‘I hope I die before I get old.” Sure, they want to be grandparents. Just don’t call them that.”

The article offered examples of grandparents who prefer to be called by their first names or unusual monikers such as Bubbles, Sharky, Pebbles, Rock, Gram-E and Nanno. Somehow I don’t think we’ve seen the last of the this-generation-of-grandparents-isn’t-playing-by-the-so-called-”rules” stories.

Item #2: ‘Free’ the Kids

I’m currently finishing reading the book Free-Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy, with whom I’m hoping to conduct a Q&A for posting on this blog next week. She makes the compelling argument that we’ve become too over protective of our children in all areas of their lives. And she’s not the only one who thinks so.

In my June Parents & Kids Magazine column entitled, “Free the Children: Not a Slogan for This Generation of Parents,” I addressed how different childhood is for kids today versus when we were youths (like when my parents used to regularly send me to the store to buy them cigarettes whereas today they’d be jailed for doing so). The column calls attention to an incident this spring involving the police, a 10-year-old boy and a mother who let said boy walk down the street solo to soccer practice and got harassed about endangering her child.

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I loathe the phrase “mommy wars,” a short-cut term designed to represent the so-called “divide” between the moms who decide to continue doing paid work after having children and those who decide to become at-home parents. I see it as an overly simplistic controversy that does an injustice to women but makes for good drama, pitting moms against moms.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve begun to notice a slow uptick in the number of stories about grandmothers which have begun to lay the groundwork for a new media-manufactured controversy: The Nana Wars. When I see articles with headlines like, “When Grandma Can’t Be Bothered” — about grandmothers who don’t want to be unpaid childcare workers in every free moment – and another portraying grandmothers as competing against one another to buy the best, most impressive presents for their grandchildren and thereby winning their affections, I can’t help but shutter. I thought that once my kids were adults, I would no longer have to worry about “wars.” I guess I was sadly mistaken.

My Pop Culture & Politics column this week takes on the notion of so-called “glam-ma wars,” which I hope is a short-lived thing.

Image credit: Mommy Track’d.