By Jessica Cobb of Domestic Pirate
“Kids these days, am I right? If only their parents raised them this way, that way, or upside down like the way I was raised. I turned out perfectly fine!”
We bitch about kids who don’t have to accept the consequences of their actions. ENTITLEMENT.
We wonder why college students get to the real world and fail. SHELTERED.
We mock parents who swoop in and save their kids from any potentially uncomfortable situation they could ever get into. HELICOPTER.
We scoff at people who create disaster kits, plan escape routes, and have emergency supplies in their cars. PARANOID.
We scold parents for putting their kids in a backpack with a leash. LAZY.
But.
We scream at people who leave their kids to work out problems on their own. NEGLECT.
We tsk at people who require their teens to hold jobs and pay for their own car insurance/cell phones. ABUSE.
We call the police on parents who let their children play in their front yard. FERAL.
We wonder how someone could think they were prepared enough to have kids when they don’t even have a bandage in their car for boo-boos. UNQUALIFIED.
We malign people who have children that get into terrible, unimaginable accidents. CRIMINAL.
You cannot have it both ways.
Do not complain about helicopter parents in one breath and call for a mother’s incarceration the moment her child manages to get themselves into a dangerous situation in another.
Do not mock the grandmother who uses the backpack leash on the 3-year-old she is a caregiver for but sling vitriol at the dad whose toddler wanders away in a department store.
Do not insist that the guardian of a child who gets into a tragic accident deserves punishment equal to (or worse than) a man who rapes an unconscious woman.
The thing about having a child in today’s society is that you must be prepared to hear all these words as synonymous to parenthood: Entitled. Sheltered. Helicopter parent. Paranoid. Lazy. Neglectful. Abusive. Feral. Unqualified. Criminal.
I’d like to offer some new words to try applying to our interactions with other parents:
Encouragement.
Understanding.
Support.
Empathy.
Grace.
Humility.
Friendship.
We make mistakes. All of us. Every. Single. Person. On. This. Planet. To think otherwise is ignorant. To claim otherwise is deluding yourself. When those mistakes involve our children, we have enough guilt. We give ourselves all the flagellation that we deserve, in most cases more. Even when we don’t make mistakes, we feel like we are and we punish ourselves for the imagined issues we’re causing our children.
And when those mistakes are critical, or fatal, to our children, we are expected to not only deal with the ramifications, grief, and fear within our family, but to also deal with the vitriol of the world being flung in our faces as we wipe tears and try to breathe through heaving sobs.
As if this parenthood gig isn’t tough enough with our self-doubt, making us question every little thing we do. We don’t need our communities, near and far, judging us, too.
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About the Author
Once a Privateer in a Renaissance Festival, I am now a full time mom. When I’m not taking care of the Captain and our 4 Cabin Kids, I am blogging at Domestic Pirate. I am obsessed with pirates and the internet, and am convinced that the dough is always better than the cookie. Follow Jessica on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.