I saw a meme that said:
Some come from the generation of, “If you quit crying, I’ll buy you something.“
We come from, “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about.“
Times have changed…
My Momma tells the story about me throwing a fit in a store and how she held me down and spanked my bare legs — proudly sharing the moral of that story was that I never threw a fit again to get something when already told “no.” I’m sure my feelings were hurt much more than my legs and I lived.
I also learned that when my Mom said “no,” she meant it… no matter how big the audience.
In between the two examples…
My parenting style was a mix of the two examples outlined within the meme.
I never gave my kid something to cry about — but I didn’t buy him anything for not crying either. I did carry over Mom’s “oh, you’re bored?” trick. You know… the one where if that phrase comes out of your mouth, you’re assigned a job to do.
I may be old — my only granddaughter is now in high school — but I still remember that parenting is hard work. The balance between love and discipline is a rocky slope and there’s not one right way to navigate it. Most parents just do their very best and pray/hope that in 20 years they end up with a well-adjusted young adult ready to conquer the world.
Indoctrination VS education and a disrupted world…
There’s currently so much talk about schools (from elementary to collegiate institutions) pushing an agenda other than reading, writing, and arithmetic — raising kids in today’s world has to be much more difficult. When the majority of US citizens get their news and base their viewpoints on digital sources (59% overall according to Pew & Reuters — up to 78% of those 18-29) — surely I’m not the only one concerned about how THAT is going to work for future generations.
Being old has its perks — like not being responsible for raising a tiny human to adulthood in these turbulent times.
Now you know: Mary Shelley was only 18 when she started writing the Frankenstein novel, published when she was 20, which has since become one of the best-known works of English literature.