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I ‘ve enjoyed every word of the helicopter parents versus adventure-parents conversation, and while I am probably just echoing Liza’s great post of this morning, I’ll say that there’s a microversion of the heli-debate that isn’t about class or income or education. It goes like this: Just about every time my kids have made some huge developmental leap, it’s happened around their cousins or grandparents. Like the time I left my then-baby with my dad for a few hours while I ran to a doctor's’appointment. After about 45 minutes I dutifully called home to see how it was all going.
Me: How’s Coby?
My Dad: Oh he’s climbing up and down the stairs.
Me [flipping out]: He doesn’t know how to climb up and down the stairs
My Dad: He does now.
Like Emily B, I’ve been hugely influenced by Blessings of a Skinned Knee. It doesn’t incline me toward sending my kids out to roam the local creeks unescorted. But I am constantly aware that my boys really do have better adventures when I am waaaay out of range. That said, this Coby-stairs story is funny only because he didn't fall on his head and injure himself. Which makes me wonder whether the over-/underparenting calculus just comes down to blind luck.
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Ladies, you can fret about your mothering methods all you want, but you will never, never beat Big Edie Beale.
Big Edie and her daughter, Little Edie, are the stars of the 1976 cult classic Grey Gardens, a documentary madly beloved by fashionistas, feminists, and gay men the world over. In the '40s, they were glamorous relatives of Jackie O; by the '70s, the Edies were living, Tennessee Williams-style, in a squalid Hamptons manse, locked in a toxic battle of wills (not to mention a toxic fug of cat-piss fumes). On April 18, HBO is going to be airing a feature film based on the documentary, starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore. Fans cried foul at the casting of Gertie as Edie, but the official trailer has been making the rounds this week, and gosh darn it if Drew isn't spot-on. (See the O.G. Little E here and here.) And how gorgeous are those period costumes?
I did an interview once with Doug Wright, who wrote the book for the 2006 Grey Gardens musical. As Wright described it, the whole saga of the Edies can be read as a parable about overparenting:
I'll watch the film once and think, wow, Big Edie was really a toxic narcissist who forced her daughter to live according to her rules, and in doing so undermined her daughter's entire life. ... And then I'll watch the documentary a second time and think, wow, Little Edie was really ill-equipped to live in the world; thank God her mother gave her sanctuary. And I think at the end of the day, both things are true.
Something to think about for those of us (be-childed or otherwise) planning to spend April 18 fashioning turbans out of hand towels.
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Believe me, Ellen, I probably practice better-safe-than-sorry parenting more than I preach it. I watch my oldest son the entire way if he so much as walks across the street to ask the neighbor kid to play (and we live on the world's quietest cul-de-sac). The fact that our subdivision spills out onto a windy country road is enough to make me want to move before he gets his driver's license (and I have my fingers crossed that the driving age will be 18 by the time he's 16). When you've spent nine months taking vitamins and shunning booze, sushi, and undercooked eggs so as not to harm the wee one you're carrying, when you've invested in car seats to keep them safe, and kept the baby in your room at night for months just so you can reach out and touch him to make sure he's all right when he's sleeping, you're not going to start letting him play in the street overnight.
If the last five-plus years have taught me anything, it's that parenting is actually just a series of agonizing decisions and dilemmas, from breast-feeding or formula? when the kids are infants all the way to when can they start dating? and what college can we afford and can they get in? when they're older. Some decisions come easily and some require much discussion with my husband and with friends who have kids the same age. One of the hardest things—and yet at the same time the most rewarding—is letting them take those steps toward independence: letting them play unattended in an upstairs playroom, letting them play outside by themselves. Someday soon, that will expand to visiting friends more than a few houses away and riding bikes beyond my sightline. Nobody wants their kid to be the next Etan Patz. We just had a terrible, terrible tragedy here in Cincinnati, where a 13-year-old girl was killed while jogging near her home. But, as Emily pointed out, abductions are extremely rare. Kids are far more likely to be injured in a car accident, or falling down at home, or stricken by a terrible disease. No matter what you do, there are risks. I want to foster independence in my kids, at age-appropriate levels, so that as they can grow they can make decisions that will keep them safe. For example, say I tried to shelter my kid from dating, driving a car, and any exposure to alcohol in high school. Something tells me his first trip home from college would see him driving drunk to introduce me to his pregnant girlfriend.
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Emily has written lovingly about her sons numerous times here on XX Factor and contributes frequently to Slate's irregular Family columns, so, just as she has demonstrated as a lawyer, journalist, Slate senior editor, and co-founding editor of Double X, I know she is a high achiever in her mommy job. Most mothers are not as accomplished. On the other end of the parenting spectrum from Emily, I had so many mishaps when my adult children were young (especially my daughter who I had, unmarried, when I was 22), I probably should have been charged with child endangerment. The thing is, raising children is a moving target and most of us, even my pediatrician friends, make it up as we go along. As much as we try to maintain policies and structure in our homes, conflicting agendas, wanting to please our children, the gravitational force of the daily grind, absent baby sitters, new friends, sick siblings, sick friends, and new siblings all impact our decisions. Although I was immature, careless, and accident prone most of my questionable parenting moves still somehow turned out OK. Although I expected too much of my little girl, she more often than not lived up to those expectations. At least twice, her lack of supervision led to panicky alarm. Once in Mexico, like the children in Babel, her whereabouts were not traceable overnight. Another time in Key West, Fla., she disappeared in a bookstore. (After police were called, she materialized from behind the chapter-book shelves where, blissfully reading, she'd lost track of the time.)
Despite these parenting accidents, at the same time, I was responsible for her values and self-worth, and on that front, I didn't renege. Stealing was ugly, lying was dirty, other people's feelings were fragile, and she was, always, very loved and cherished. The lessons we pass on to our children come from years of teachable moments. Better safe than sorry is, as Emily says, a pat homily that can't be applied to a nuanced situation. But in a complex, always-changing, child-raising obstacle course, parents need to develop our own aphorisms to guide us.
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Better safe than sorry: It's unassailably pat. But that's not the real framing of the choice. Actually, there are always nuances: How old is your child, what kind of neighborhood are you letting her walk alone in, at what time of day? And what's the cost of never letting her out of your sight? Because there is one. Wendy Mogel, psychologist and author of Blessing of a Skinned Knee, who I've written about before, calls overprotected kids "teacups" and "krispies." They get to college and they can't fend for themselves because their parents never gave them breathing room.
Maybe the risk you took was too high, Bonnie, because the vacant lot your daughter walked through was trashy and isolated. The story of Etan Patz, which I know, is undeniably and stupendously awful. Beyond the paradigmatic parent's worst nightmare. But a friend of mine whose pediatric practice consists largely of helping abused kids reminds us that child abduction in this country is extremely rare. Almost all of the time, harm comes to kids from adults they know, not ones they don't. We're so transfixed by the worst nightmare scenario that we miss the more mundane but prevalent risks. Or we snatch from our kids any semblance of independence. My friend whose kid went to the store on the corner by himself e-mailed yesterday to say she hopes he can go to the park by himself—or with my older son—in a year or two, or sooner. I hope so, too.
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