I’ve written about 25 blog entries over the past several years that I’ve never published because I didn’t think they were good enough. So, for New Year’s, I’m cleaning them up and clearing out my backlog of drafts.
Roger Ebert, who for some reason has one of the smartest and most consistently readable blogs on the Internet, wrote the other day about child-rearing. His basic argument is that kids today are crippled by the short leashes their fearful parents keep them on. I think he makes a lot of mistakes of the “my generation is better than yours” variety, but his core premise, that something is twisted and wrong in modern society, rings true to me.
One thing Kara and I have in common is that we were both given a lot of leeway by our parents, in comparison to our friends. I think she took advantage of that more than I did–I was always kind of an introvert–but that’s just who we were/are. Today we’re both of the general mindset that what really matters in life is going places, doing things and meeting people, and I think that has to do an awful lot with the environment we grew up in. Too much safety and stability really is debilitating.
About eight months ago, we moved from the suburban community where my immediate family lives to Frederick, MD, with the idea that a city would be a nicer environment to live in. Frederick is a small city, but we live right downtown and are–at least theoretically–constantly surrounded by opportunities for human contact.
My commute to work sucks pretty hard, but I really do like Frederick. It’s charming. What has surprised me, and I think Kara as well, is that we feel just as socially isolated as we did in the suburbs. I’ve tried to strike up conversations with some of our neighbors and it’s just been weird. People our age go to shops and bars and clubs to socialize with other members of their group and ignore the rest of the world. What I’m increasingly realizing is that there’s nothing wrong with our little city1; this is just the world we live in. Spontaneous face-to-face socialization has taken a back seat to adding people to your friend list and lurking moar.
People of our generation and the adjacent ones seem to be, broadly speaking, the product of parents who instilled a crippling fear of the post-1960s world in their children. A lot of them just don’t talk to each other. At the same time, people in their 40s and older are still gregarious.
It’s only gotten worse since we were kids, not very long ago. Check out the Parenting section on Yahoo! Answers sometime if you really want to be depressed. Like one of the commenters on Ebert’s blog entry said, every question that begins with “should I let my child…” is answered with “of course not, are you nuts?”. Everybody wants to know if their kid has ADHD2. Everybody’s kid has been diagnosed with some obscure personality or learning disorder from the DSM-IV. Lots of people want to know how to get their kids’ teachers and/or principals fired. One parent who asked how to deal with a neighbor kid bullying her son received three answers, all of them telling her she should press charges. Are these people for real? Wait, stop, I already know the answer to that question, and it’s freaking depressing.
You know what it really comes down to? Selfishness. People treat their kids like cherished possessions. There is a tiny chance, every time you let your kid out of your sight, that he or she is going to be injured or abducted or murdered or molested or something. Anybody who lets that happen to their kid is going to feel terrible. Most parents would apparently rather stifle their children than accept that risk. I’m just thankful that mine didn’t.
1. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with us, either. We’re mostly sane and we aren’t frightfully ugly or anything.
2. I have been diagnosed with ADD, or whatever the cool kids call it nowadays, so I am allowed to make fun of it with impunity.
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