11/15/2004|||110051438739731076||||||

PARENTS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

Children's author Michael Rosen (registration required) wonders whether the rules of modern-day parenting are breaking down. Like many a liberal North London dad, he functions as a combination of butler and cashpoint machine. Now he is beginning to suspect that all his self-sacrifice may not be quite so sensible after all:

"I see other parents following the pattern: they’re at the school gate morning and evening; they’re at the swimming pool, the ice rink, the playing field and the dance class. There are the folks down the road, packing their huge able-bodied sons’ gear into the back of the car to drive them hundreds of miles to their universities.

And those with grown-up children talk about lending them money that doesn’t get paid back, giving them the old car, finding them flats — no, wait a minute. They’re still at home — the 22-year-olds, the 30-year-olds, the 35-year-olds. Thousands of them.

"And now I think about it, I’ve got one of my own down the end of my garden — in what used to be my office and library. And downstairs in the basement there’s a teen who thinks that it’s my job to go down, pick up his dirty plates, bring them up and put them in the dishwasher. He thinks it’s imperative that he doesn’t do a part-time job, and is peeved that I don’t buy him his tickets for Arsenal.

"...I realised that my neat little model of the chain effect is breaking down. That idea I was cherishing about parents doing all they could without complaint in order to set their kids up to be self-sufficient is defunct. It seems as if the kinds of things our parents did for us, so setting us up for life, are not having the same effect on our offspring when we repeat what our parents did. And all the time there was my mother’s odd mocking little phrase in my ear: “Let self-sacrifice be its own reward.”

"By trying to be the way our parents were, or better, we’ve ended up infantilising our own children. I’ve come to realise that was then, a different society. Doing in this society what our parents did for us in theirs doesn’t set our children up for self-reliance. It just makes them want you to give them a better mobile phone."

|||Clive|||http://clivedavis.blogspot.com/2004/11/parents-of-world-unite-childrens.html|||11/15/2004 10:24:00 am|||||||||

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