Bad Parenting

If you are near my age, you grew up in an entirely different era than today's children do. An innocent childhood might have been during the Carter Administration, a much wilder youth spent in the Reagan years. Your parents were much more likely to be together than apart. Mom and Dad met most of your needs but they weren't your friends. You had secrets they didn't know about, they had lives that didn't interest you. When you got in trouble at school, your parents didn't take your side. You were resilient and learned the hard way how to survive without expecting them to always bail you out. That status quo worked just fine.

Fast forward to the present - Moms and Dads are Splitsville, parents and children are "besties", everyone's lives are open books, it's the school's fault and today's children will reach adulthood by the tender age of 28. Am I exaggerating? Of course, but in too many cases only slightly. Am I as guilty as the next parent? Often. But whenever I think about this generational change, one question lingers -

What the hell happened?

The short answer is, I have no idea. The longer answer is I have a number of theories but don't have an uninterrupted week to expound on them now - after all, Black Friday is coming. Priorities, right? Instead, I'd like to propose a little group therapy for parents. No, this therapy doesn't involve office visits, co-pays or scheduled weeping over childhood traumas that don't mean a damn thing anymore. I call it "Don't Therapy". Don't Therapy (patent pending) wouldn't fill one page of a self-help manual (so much for my book tour and royalty checks). Don't Therapy's philosophy can be described by one simple word - Disengage.

Disengaging would include following many of the core principles set by our parents. Remember them - the ones we blamed in early adulthood for our own poor use of free will? The same twosome who weren't paralyzed with fear regarding our whereabouts, safety and shenanigans. So, for fun and nostalgia, I've listed a few specific examples of disengagement that were culturally acceptable then but that we label as bad parenting now.

1. Bike Helmets - When I was a kid, the only people who wore bike helmets were the racers in the Tour de France. I get it - the exponential increase in the purchase and use of bike helmets by riders of all ages was due to more head injuries while biking. Or was it? My perception is that bike ridership by children is down. As a child, my bike was an extra appendage. For today's youth, that has been replaced by a gaming system controller or a computer mouse. Not much of a chance of a blow to the head there. Could it be that increased helmet usage in the last generation was more a result of a subtle play on parents fears and guilt rather than any real increase in the number of bicycle accidents? But, the modern parent who lets their child ride a bike without one is practically deemed unfit. Makes me miss my old Huffy.

2. Outdoor Play - Between the ages of 5 to 12, I routinely spent most of my free time outdoors, usually with my brother or friends. During the overwhelming majority of  those thousands of hours, my mother was not searching the horizon for my outline. She assumed I was safe. She assumed I was having fun. She assumed no one would snatch me. And she assumed I would return now and then with a scratch or bruise. But she didn't worry. Now that same woman (or man) would either be in the vast minority of Parentdom or is entirely non-existent. If he or she is still out there, they are often seen as uncaring or indifferent. But if memory serves, it was during those unsupervised stretches of my childhood when I learned to use my imagination, make friends, play as a team, resolve differences, become independent. Admittedly, when my kids were younger, I was not comfortable granting them the same freedoms my parents had unknowingly given me. Out of sight? Almost never.

3. Friends First - My Mom and Dad were not my friends. Sure - they loved me, laughed with me and we had fun together, but they were - first and always - my parents. The boss of me. That was understood and accepted. There are certainly parent/child relationships that are exactly as they used to be, but I believe there are also too many in which friendship comes first. Heck, I have wrestled with this dilemma myself. I think the rise of these "family friendships" is largely due to divorce as a continuing fact in American life. As a divorced parent myself, I have less time with my children than my parents did. Consequently, I have typically tried to make our time together more enjoyable by being  less in parenting mode, more in Fun Dad mode. Understandable, yes - but in the long run a disservice to them, subtly undermining the proper boundaries that should exist between parents and children. And aren't kids supposed to go through a period of their youth disliking their parents anyway?

Not surprisingly, as we have aged and had children of our own, the methodology of our parents - intentional or unintended - makes more sense to us now, their mistakes easier to understand and forgive. Sadly, parenting now appears to come from a variety of competing instruction manuals, each vying for our attention and wallet. Whereas it was once founded on evolving cultural traditions (both backwards and enlightened), parenting has been replaced by a never-ending series of course corrections, as if we think (often incorrectly) that we can do it any better than Mom and Dad did.


Whether they knew it or not, parents of the past ascribed to Don't Therapy - because they didn't always save us from ourselves, they didn't worry when we were out of their eyesight and they certainly didn't befriend us.

We've come a long way, baby . . . or have we?