Dersen Lowery
Laurentson INC
StructureDamage
489
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Posted - 2013.05.13 15:24:00 -
[1] - Quote
Herzog Wolfhammer wrote:The Northeast is a strange place. Basically, kids are raised like veal cows. They hardly do anything. There's no resources or logistics for it. Since the late 1980s, "helicopter parenting' became all the rage. That's when kids started wearing helmets to ride tricycles. Back in the 70s, we didn't wear helmets. Some of us ended up in the hospital because of it. Nobody died.
The particular culture you grow up within matters at least as much as the geographical location. I also grew up in New England, and we had the run of the whole neighborhood. A friend of mine once hacked a lawnmower engine on to a pedal go-cart, and we tooled all over the place on that thing--no helmet. I have no scars from any of that, even though I once broke my arm in a rather fantastic way.
I'm out in flyover country now, and yes, we have helicopter parents too. They tend not to be farmers. (There are farmers in New England, too.) I would say that it is not so much "feminization" (because ugh, gender stereotypes) but "suburbanization," the urge to have your own castle and your own land and much more control over who's around and where your children are and who they're with.
If only the parents in gated communities--the ultimate suburbs--had any idea what their kids were actually up to... because kids have a basic impulse to learn about the world, which involves assessing risk, which involves experiencing risk, which you can't do if you have helicopter parents--or rather, which you can't do while your helicopter parents are paying attention.
There's another disturbing trend that college professors have noted: narcisstic parenting, which is basically the impulse behind helicopter parenting. The idea is that the child is nothing but a series of accomplishments for the parents, who are hyper-anxious of being seen as perfect and over-achieving, which makes them incredibly controlling of their children. These are the parents who lash out at other parents who "make mistakes" (or actually make mistakes), in order to keep up appearances. They're terrible parents, because they're not acting out of interest for the child at all. They're acting out of pure selfishness.
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