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so why is it?
Warning: Gross overgeneralization follows,....
That alot of the people I know who grew up in areas where they were poor, did bad things like gang activity, and generally had a rough start in life think their moms are the greatest. They would do anything for mom.
Then a lot of the people I know who grew up middle class or doing pretty well, no worries about money and some vacations and activities are the ones pretty critical of mom (dad sometimes too).
Just seeing this lately and wondering
That alot of the people I know who grew up in areas where they were poor, did bad things like gang activity, and generally had a rough start in life think their moms are the greatest. They would do anything for mom.
Then a lot of the people I know who grew up middle class or doing pretty well, no worries about money and some vacations and activities are the ones pretty critical of mom (dad sometimes too).
Just seeing this lately and wondering
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Comments
When you want to fill nothing, well then filling that nothing becomes love.
I know many middle/upper class friends whose parents always act like the kids "owe" them something, or like the kids aren't "good enough" for them because they aren't becoming CEOs or CAs or whatever. I would be pretty critical of my parents if they acted like that towards me. Luckily they don't.
I think that although middle/upper-class families have more material comfort, there's potential for more pressure on the children expectation-wise to succeed, be ambitious, etc etc. I'm not saying that working-class families don't have this, but I think it can be especially true for people with parents who are very successful and expect their children to be the same.
However as a parent now and having been raised and mostly raised my kids solidly middle classs, I just wonder about this. In any income or social level alcoholism or neglect or strict unrealistic expectation are a concern. However the majority of middle class people I have known are really putting kids first. They listen to what they want and then put them on swim team or get the equipment for photo club.
It seems that unless the family has spent some time on the edge of survival in an extreme enough case that the kids know about it, then the basics of providing are pretty much taken for granted. Many parents will go to great lengths to not let the kids know they are struggling. I find myself to have been guilty of being harsh on my parents because of my expectations, and now I wonder about that as my friends who grew up running out of food every other week were not nearly so complaining.
No one would choose to raise their kids while struggling with the basics, yet I see that it has a long lasting value. The grown kids get to a point where they realize how hard it was and the relationship has a chance of being different
edit. Oh, ok, I see your point. Well said. Still, I think some of it boils down to how attentive you are to the kids when they're in the baby and infant stage. The custom in the West used to be that you leave the child in a separate room to cry themselves to sleep. You don't come to the child when it cries, that's spoiling the child. You don't feed on demand, you train the baby to a schedule. Child-raising practices until relatively recently used to be barbaric.
I'm very close to one of my former teachers, and she over-programmed her kids...although I have to admit they turned out wonderfully. But last summer her youngest had no camp to go to. She was panicked. But of course, he was just fine for a change just hanging around the neighborhood all summer.
I see the scurry around, and if you really try not to do it sometimes it feels like fighting an uphill battle. Everyone around you is laying down to help kids to sleep or making special food for dinner, and then being a selfless martyr talking at the playground. No wonder I had few mommy friends. I know my kids learned how to treat me from their dad, and so I am tough with them now to change that (actually the last 7 years). I am seeing the difference but it has not been a pretty sight, I think many middle class parents would have taken the more passive way out and I cannot blame them at all.
So I am not looking at individual parenting, very honestly I have an issue with looking at a child and automatically calling the parents on it. Part of the reason kids were apparently more respectful IMHO is that you could not go tattle on your parents to other adults. So blaming an individual parent for a soceital shift is not a nice thing. Also we may as buddhists scoff at the idea of peer pressure for adults but it does exist. If you feel your child will pay a price for not being in many activities (it is not enough to get grades for college now, you need activities and community service) then of course you will do that if you can at all. Who wants to comfort a kid at 18 for not getting into college because they didn't do activities?
Okay I feel like I am on my soap box so I will step off, just thinking out loud.
So now we have changed our parenting styles within the last 50 years and what I hear is that kids feel comfortable criticizing parents, outsiders realize it used to be bad but are not necessarily supportive of how it is done now, it is even considered selfish to have children or at least something you need to be prepared to answer for, and parents I have talked to feel more anxious and less confident and positive about parenting then my parents and grandparents report.
Where is our middle way in this? Where truly bad parenting has consequences and protection for kids, where all the parents in the 'good enough' range just start to feel good about what they are doing instead of trying to do it just right, and we learn as a society what it is like to be supportive of families.
Parenting styles have now swung to the opposite extreme. Baby boomers tended to be raised by the old, Victorian parenting style, that held that kids should be seen and not heard, you let the baby cry (abandoning the baby, essentially), you bend the baby and infant and child to your will and your schedule. Some baby boomers rebelled against that, and became overly-solicitous of their kids, so they kids became tyrants. make sense?
So parenting was dysfunctional by cultural inheritance, and it set up generations of people disconnected from any natural, instinctive practices, lost people. So they'd swing from one extreme to another, without any moorings in common sense or healthy tradition.
But there were parents who raised their baby-boomer kids according to Dr. Spock, who revolutionized parenting by saying you need to feed the baby when it wants to be fed, not by the adult clock, attend to it when it cries, and so forth. He was accused of advocating "sparing the rod and spoiling the child", and so, the Vietnam War protests and 60's counter-culture movements were blamed on him. Those ungrateful, spoiled children!
Now we have hover-parenting, "helicopter" parenting. I can't say where that came from. Maybe greater competitiveness to raise genius kids, and get them into good colleges? Remember the fad of playing Mozart to kids in utero? I wonder if it's an extension of that.
It almost makes sense, in view of the fact that for decades, Asians have been beating out Caucasians for the best universities in CA, for example. I don't think that's why parents over-schedule their kids for sports and other activities, though. It might explain why parents are over-involved in their kids' studies, though.
Except I'm not seeing any results. I'm not seeing Caucasian North Americans suddenly competitive with Asians on calculus and science. Thanks for your input.
Watching my mother struggle, working two jobs just to pay the bills with no help from my father... has made me feel extremely indebted to my mother. She had nothing, but still gave me everything to allow me to give the appearance of normalcy. I was generally too young to understand these things at the time, although my mother does tell stories of when she would take me to the toy store and tell me I could pick out a toy... but she would find me carefully considering toys, only to come back to her empty handed and tell her I don't need anything.
Anyways, I think my mom is the greatest. But not just because I can directly see how hard she worked to give me even the modest life we had... she really is.
Side note though: I was poor in a rural area, so we didn't really have 'gang violence' and I was actually a really good kid.
I'm not sure when/where it "started" though.
Yeah I wasn't trying to indicate that it actually works, but I do think that lots of parents (at least here in Vancouver and probably other West coast cities) are thinking they have to get their kids' butts in gear to compete.