"Deteriorating work ethic and massive sense of entitlement," my friend posted on Facebook yesterday, linking to the Deborah Kolben article in the New Yorker about how we're all fucking up our kids by spoiling them. The example set forth in this lazy, shitty piece of journalism not up to the usual standards of either Kolben or The New Yorker, was a straw-dog comparison of spoiled little shits in Los Angeles v. a 6-year-old girl from the rainforest who was awfully helpful and very good at housework.
The conclusion, assumed as foregone before the first paragraph was done, was that our kids are completely screwed, and the fault lies with us, the loving but inept parents who've botched the job of raising them. And thus, goes the entirely unproven argument, we have raised a generation of "adulescents" who don't want to get up early in the morning or buckle down to jobs.
Oh for fuckity fuck's sake.
This is only the most recent in a long, long line of "these kids today!" and "parents are to blame!" memes that interlock and whorl together back through time to Ancient Greece and beyond. "I'll tell ya, these kids today don't know how to kill a mammoth! All my kid cares about is looking at cave paintings and planning her Sweet Six!"
Meanwhile, we go through the high mass of citing all the usual suspects. A Nation of Wimps, which I like to subtitle A Bookful of Hysterical Anecdotes With No Basis In Reality. The Free-Range Kids Blog, which is all well and good within reason, but which is cited way too often by people who don't seem to actually read it (the author is much more nuanced than the polarized conversation allows). Miserably, I pointed out that my friend's son is perfectly capable of doing all the things "kids today" supposedly can't, and that she was judging people she had know personal knowledge of -- just this mythical set of shitty parents out there. "Worry about your kids rather than judging other parents based on bad science," I lectured her, and she (being a gracious friend who understood my passion was more about feeling than being as assy as I sounded) agreed that "these kids today" wasn't a productive approach. What she worried about, she said, was a societal shift away from accountability, and THAT is something I can get behind. But I'm not going to blame parents or say only young adults are responsible. This isn't a parenting issue, and it's not the result of too much kindness or love. It's bigger than that, and harder to solve.
I knew a kid whose mom worked the night shift as a nurse, and whose dad worked the day shift as a doorman. He was about the same age as the little girl from the rainforest cited in the New Yorker article. He was alone most of the day, and would come wandering down the back alley between our houses looking for something to do, something to eat, someone to wipe his nose. "Mom's asleep," he'd explain. These were working-class parents, they were doing their best and I am not shitting on them. I'm just pointing out that this little guy wasn't learning self-reliance, he wasn't becoming some amazing work-ethic-imbued superdude, he wasn't sweeping the campsite and asking how he could pitch in. He was lost and -- having dated my share of former lost boys -- I predict he'll spend his adulthood looking for the attention, care, and love he missed. In fact, the biggest "adulescent" I ever met was the product of a mom who largely emotionally ignored him in favor of non-helicopter parenting.
Meanwhile, I'm not going to apologize for noting that the atmosphere of benign neglect that stood for parenting in the '70s left most of my friends with pretty hideous stories to tell -- of being bullied, molested, or beaten up on the way home from school, stories that are sad, open-ended anecdotes rather than character-creating origin myths. Yes. I want to be present, available, and involved. Suck on it, Hara Murano.
And by the way, in the New Yorker article, Kolbert whines that she triiiiied to make her kids do chores, but they were baaaad at it and she had to clean up aaaaafter them. Boo fucking hoo. You really thought they'd get it the first time? You really think parenting is about setting rules and watching your kids run at them like hurdles in the 100 meter hurdle race? You put the hat on. Your toddler takes it off. You put the hat on. You repeat until you want to scream. Finally either your toddler gets it, or you get a hat with a strap, or his ears fall off. Similarly, you show your kid how to do a chore. He gets it wrong. You show him again. You have him clean up after the chore done wrong. You help him do this, you do not do it for him. You do this until you want to scream. Finally, either he gets it, or you change tack. If it were easy, Elizabeth, there wouldn't be parenting books.
There is no Nation of Wimps. There is a Nation of People Who Don't Check Their Sources, but that's not a function of bad parenting.
(And p.s., this Matsigenka tribe with the 6 year old who's good at housework ... "The average tribal woman marries around age 16, and women have an average of eight to ten pregnancies." So while you're wishing your daughter would be more like a rainforest child, stop to consider whether you also want her to be a Quiverfuller.)
Showing posts with label good manners. Show all posts
Showing posts with label good manners. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Is French Parenting Better? No, It's Just Frencher.
Posit: Bad manners are good for you.
Much has been made lately of Pamela Druckerman's recent book, Bringing Up Bebe, a collection of completely subjective and unsubstantiated anecdotes about how placid and polite French children are as compared to the wild hellions of the USA. People have been going nuts over this book. Less nuts than they did for the Tiger Mom's book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, but that's to be expected; the Chinese version of this story enumerates a series of humiliating battles that sound downright abusive to our gentle ears. The French version just scolds us for being crappy. Sorry. Crappé.
The Tiger Mom book I just wrinkled my nose at and moved on. I read The Joy Luck Club. Hell, at my last job I could peek over the top of my cubicle and see my pal Cindy, proud product of Tiger Parenting, who also went to an Ivy League school (a better one than mine, even). There we were, at the same crappé workplace, both avoiding college reunions because we were supposed to be better and brighter by now. I'm okay with not being so tiger-y. Besides, though I've seen the angry responses to Amy Chua's book all over the interwebs, I also live in San Francisco, where every neighborhood has its own Chinatown, and nobody -- nobody -- fawns over my kids like the Chinese grandparents I meet on every walk. So stuff it, Tiger Mom who wasn't even advocating for this approach in the first place.
But the French stuff worried me. I love good manners. One of the first things I noticed about my husband -- after his glorious mess of hair, tree-like height, hilariousness, and that other thing I shouldn't mention on a mommyblog -- was his gentle, unobtrusive Midwestern manners, still in place after twenty years' exile. He didn't even notice that he automatically walked on the correct side of the sidewalk. I swooned. Meanwhile, tell a nine-year-old today that he should "be a gentlemen and let ladies go first," and he'll treat you to a polemic on feminism and the gilded cage of chivalry. Just because they're right doesn't mean they're not annoying. I readjust to explain manners in a non-sexist way; I haven't succeeded yet.
Bottom line, my kids are annoying in restaurants, though I'm pretty good at getting them under control. However, the online world being what it is, I know what many childless people think of even the best-behaved children, and have witnessed the sneering and judgment that goes on constantly even when a kid's meltdown is entirely age-appropriate and developmentally necessary. I know, frig those a-holes, but whatever, I can feel their glares burning into me when my kids do normal kid stuff. Should they be standing still, hands clasped, in two straight lines like Madeline?
Fortunately, I have French friends! At a rare evening out, I leaned across the table and quizzed my favorite one whose daughter spends summers in France and the rest of the year in Marin. It's true, she told me: her daughter eats leeks in France, mac and cheese here in the States. She behaves like a lady in France, like a hellion here in the States.
Why? "Because she can," my friend stated. "It's true, the demands on children in France are greater. Wherever you go, everyone has the same standard, and you stick to it because it's supported at every contact point." She really talks like that. She's a fancy business lady. "Here, it's different, so they are more free to act like themselves."
Oh, wait, what was that? Was she really saying that having worse manners is a good thing?
"Look what you grow up to be," she said. "Would you rather be restricted by society's rules, or bravely striking out to be an individual?"
Well, when you put it that way.
I'm not trying to say one way is better or worse. That's what Druckerman did, and it sold books but is a cynical and idiotic way to look at parenting. I'm saying, when things are different, there might be valid and positive reasons for their differences, and considering those differences in depth is more productive than just crapping on one or the other.
I have another friend who stopped bringing her daughter to rec center classes because she didn't like her being taught to docilely line up and follow a teacher's orders blindly. She hated that rote passivity. Of course, she'll encourage her daughter to behave in school up to a point, but she also recognizes that as adults, as long as we're wearing pants and not punching anyone, our society values and requires brave individual thinking. Not to get rich. But to be a good person.
It all reminds me of when I first moved to the west coast and thought "this whole place was settled by cowboys!" and longed for the stuffiness of my home, which was settled by a bunch of Puritans bent on being holier than everbody else. I had to laugh at myself. I suppose it's the same thing for Europeans: America was settled by a bunch of lunatics, and here we are, 400 years later, still acting out.
So okay. American kids might not have perfect manners, but mine will have the best ones I can muster in the circumstances. And in the meantime they'll benefit from those other imperfections, the ones that make people move here in the first place. I'm okay with that, too.
And as for eating leeks, my friend said that her mom has an astounding garden, and that eating food that came from the ground is part of her daughter's daily experience. Freshness and earthiness are a pretty stellar combination. And it's true -- when we get our CSA deliveries, the girls will demand broccoli right out of the bag, because they can tell from the almost-spicy, almost sweet crunch that they were picked that morning. (Well, all they can tell is that it tastes good; I fill in that information myself. It'd be better if they could see it for themselves, but in a parallel balancing act of cost and benefit analysis, I elect to stay here in the teeming urban center that is Bernal Heights.)
Much has been made lately of Pamela Druckerman's recent book, Bringing Up Bebe, a collection of completely subjective and unsubstantiated anecdotes about how placid and polite French children are as compared to the wild hellions of the USA. People have been going nuts over this book. Less nuts than they did for the Tiger Mom's book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, but that's to be expected; the Chinese version of this story enumerates a series of humiliating battles that sound downright abusive to our gentle ears. The French version just scolds us for being crappy. Sorry. Crappé.
The Tiger Mom book I just wrinkled my nose at and moved on. I read The Joy Luck Club. Hell, at my last job I could peek over the top of my cubicle and see my pal Cindy, proud product of Tiger Parenting, who also went to an Ivy League school (a better one than mine, even). There we were, at the same crappé workplace, both avoiding college reunions because we were supposed to be better and brighter by now. I'm okay with not being so tiger-y. Besides, though I've seen the angry responses to Amy Chua's book all over the interwebs, I also live in San Francisco, where every neighborhood has its own Chinatown, and nobody -- nobody -- fawns over my kids like the Chinese grandparents I meet on every walk. So stuff it, Tiger Mom who wasn't even advocating for this approach in the first place.
But the French stuff worried me. I love good manners. One of the first things I noticed about my husband -- after his glorious mess of hair, tree-like height, hilariousness, and that other thing I shouldn't mention on a mommyblog -- was his gentle, unobtrusive Midwestern manners, still in place after twenty years' exile. He didn't even notice that he automatically walked on the correct side of the sidewalk. I swooned. Meanwhile, tell a nine-year-old today that he should "be a gentlemen and let ladies go first," and he'll treat you to a polemic on feminism and the gilded cage of chivalry. Just because they're right doesn't mean they're not annoying. I readjust to explain manners in a non-sexist way; I haven't succeeded yet.
Bottom line, my kids are annoying in restaurants, though I'm pretty good at getting them under control. However, the online world being what it is, I know what many childless people think of even the best-behaved children, and have witnessed the sneering and judgment that goes on constantly even when a kid's meltdown is entirely age-appropriate and developmentally necessary. I know, frig those a-holes, but whatever, I can feel their glares burning into me when my kids do normal kid stuff. Should they be standing still, hands clasped, in two straight lines like Madeline?
Fortunately, I have French friends! At a rare evening out, I leaned across the table and quizzed my favorite one whose daughter spends summers in France and the rest of the year in Marin. It's true, she told me: her daughter eats leeks in France, mac and cheese here in the States. She behaves like a lady in France, like a hellion here in the States.
Why? "Because she can," my friend stated. "It's true, the demands on children in France are greater. Wherever you go, everyone has the same standard, and you stick to it because it's supported at every contact point." She really talks like that. She's a fancy business lady. "Here, it's different, so they are more free to act like themselves."
Oh, wait, what was that? Was she really saying that having worse manners is a good thing?
"Look what you grow up to be," she said. "Would you rather be restricted by society's rules, or bravely striking out to be an individual?"
Well, when you put it that way.
I'm not trying to say one way is better or worse. That's what Druckerman did, and it sold books but is a cynical and idiotic way to look at parenting. I'm saying, when things are different, there might be valid and positive reasons for their differences, and considering those differences in depth is more productive than just crapping on one or the other.
I have another friend who stopped bringing her daughter to rec center classes because she didn't like her being taught to docilely line up and follow a teacher's orders blindly. She hated that rote passivity. Of course, she'll encourage her daughter to behave in school up to a point, but she also recognizes that as adults, as long as we're wearing pants and not punching anyone, our society values and requires brave individual thinking. Not to get rich. But to be a good person.
It all reminds me of when I first moved to the west coast and thought "this whole place was settled by cowboys!" and longed for the stuffiness of my home, which was settled by a bunch of Puritans bent on being holier than everbody else. I had to laugh at myself. I suppose it's the same thing for Europeans: America was settled by a bunch of lunatics, and here we are, 400 years later, still acting out.
So okay. American kids might not have perfect manners, but mine will have the best ones I can muster in the circumstances. And in the meantime they'll benefit from those other imperfections, the ones that make people move here in the first place. I'm okay with that, too.
And as for eating leeks, my friend said that her mom has an astounding garden, and that eating food that came from the ground is part of her daughter's daily experience. Freshness and earthiness are a pretty stellar combination. And it's true -- when we get our CSA deliveries, the girls will demand broccoli right out of the bag, because they can tell from the almost-spicy, almost sweet crunch that they were picked that morning. (Well, all they can tell is that it tastes good; I fill in that information myself. It'd be better if they could see it for themselves, but in a parallel balancing act of cost and benefit analysis, I elect to stay here in the teeming urban center that is Bernal Heights.)
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