Picket Fence Post

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.

The Picket Fence Post family survived two Thanksgiving dinners this past weekend and managed to fill two squares on the Dysfunctional Family Bingo card . . . though I’m not sayin’ which two because my loving family members read this blog.

*waving, ‘hi’ to family*

The day after Thanksgiving I (at my parents’ house where the kids watched about 47 hours of TV), we attended a Christmas parade featuring giant balloons (Cat-in-the-Hat, Strawberry Shortcake, etc.) and a few street cleaners which were, no lie, part of the procession. The kids’ favorite part, I suspect, was gathering the pieces of candy which were hurled in their general direction by parade participants. Given that two out of the three kids didn’t really eat much at Thanksgiving dinner — unlike their parents who stuffed themselves –they must’ve been hungry.

As soon as the parade concluded, we went inside the mall along the parade route and got in line to visit Santa. Panic ensued when the skeptical Eldest Boy told me, “I’m not going to see him. He’s not the real Santa. I’m going to write [the real] Santa a letter.” And the kid refused to get in line.

I was concerned that his move would taint the experience of his siblings and prompt a crisis of Christmas faith, but The Girl and The Youngest Boy were distracted by the fact that they didn’t know exactly what they want for Christmas (making Christmas shopping vexing!) and didn’t know what to say to the big guy in red. (The Spouse and I suggested that they tell him they’ll send him a letter with a specific request later.)

(more…)

When I first started blogging in 2005, I dedicated an entry to something called, “Dysfunctional Family Bingo,” a term coined by a Brookline, MA psychologist in 2000 who was trying to come up with a funny way to cope with the inevitable madness that occurs during big holiday dinners.

I completely adore the concept.

Dysfunctional Family Bingo is like a regular Bingo game, except that the squares are filled with crazy things that could happen during a holiday dinner (there’s an ugly argument over politics, your kid breaks a family heirloom that was put in the middle of the coffee table, someone gets food poisoning, etc.). The idea is that you and your snarky friends print out the cards and secretly play along during a holiday event, like Thanksgiving. If one poor soul gets “Bingo” by unfortunately experiencing enough outrageous moments to win, that person calls the others and earns the group’s sympathy and perhaps earns a free drink the following week when you all get together to tell Thanksgiving dinner tales.

It’s a subversive way to recognize that there’s no such thing as a “perfect” holiday dinner, no matter what Martha Stewart may tell you. Everybody’s got some loony story to tell.

So in honor of Thanksgiving and the stress that sometimes accompanies big family dinners — whether or not you’re hosting — I’ve made up a 2008 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card.  If you’re expecting a particularly stressful Thanksgiving dinner this week, print it out and play along. Hopefully you won’t win.

See my 2008 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card here.

Got any Thanksgiving horror stories of your own that you want to share with the class? Please post your story (or stories) in the comments section below. And remember, in the words of the immortal High School Musical folks . . . ”We’re all in this together.”

Image credit: Meredith O’Brien/Picket Fence Post.