Good Parenting

[Chris James]

In a week of terrible news about parents torturing their kids to death I had to find something else to focus on, something good, and here it is:

 

 

[Chris James]

But then we have this: Does this mother deserve credit for understanding her son? I mean really...mountain lions?

https://www.thecut.com/2017/10/why-i-let-my-10-year-old-go-camping-unchaperoned.html

[Merkin]

Wow.  I was all set to use this space to applaud your first example, then your second view of parenting went up and I broke out in a cold sweat. 

Ten year-old boys give full meaning to the adage ‘Their reach exceeds their grasp’.  I always believed I was more mature than my age and abilities when I was a kid—what kid doesn’t ?—and usually it was the good sense of my parents that saved me from jumping off the barn with a bedsheet cape on.  This story is a much more serious example of that foolhardiness, abetted by a parent reliving her own childhood fantasies which apparently were blocked by her own safety-conscious parents, whatever their religious bigotries. Now that she has “grown up” and thinks of herself as a supermom who has learned to swear, she believes that she must prove over and over again that she is no helicopter parent and that her child is really only a miniature adult.  We pay the price every day for our half-baked notions of what personal freedom to do asshole things means in our wrecked culture, and this is an outstanding example of how to enable children to grow up just as ego-bizarre as this parent is.