5 good reasons to be a bad parent
Last summer, my son Sam was turning two and delirious with new superpowers. At the playground he was like an overeager puppy: he?d tear around, climb the big kid slide, jump screeching into the splash pad and, when he wasn?t eating it, bury himself in sand. I was interviewing for a new job, so I had one eye on him, noting if he was in mortal danger, and the other checking my phone for LinkedIn notifications. One day, another dad stopped me and said I really should keep my boy under better control because he was setting a bad example.
Every playground has two basic cliques: good parents and bad parents. If you?re good, you?re hyper-vigilant about safety, humblebrag about your homemade non-GMO flatbread, provide impromptu sermons on the latest studies about screen time evils, and manage to turn every play activity into a civics lesson. The good ones practice enlightened parenting (parents and kids are in a partnership, not a hierarchy) or RIE (a trendy Californian model that bans toys) or they?re simply (but it?s never simple!) classic helicopter parents. Bad parents, on the other hand, are self-absorbed and neglectful. They?re careless: they feed their kids industrial farmed blueberries, let them spend mindless hours staring at an iPad, and dress them in poly-blend T-shirts branded with a certain popular cartoon with safety-minded talking dogs. (There?s a definite class divide at work here: good parents are typically wealthier, upwardly mobile and able to afford what?s organ...
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COMPETITION: Win a 5-star Family Holiday in Limassol, Cyprus
27-04-2024 08:05 - (
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