Do you have a tween at home? A kid grown tired with your pre-packaged, PG rated stuff, yet who’s still too young to be allowed to choose products and entertainment for themselves? Well, guess what – they’re making their own choices and you’re not the only...
Compared to the countries we increasingly compete with in this globalized world, American educational test scores stink. Everybody knows it and everybody is getting busy looking for culprits and solutions. Which can only result in one thing: nobody can agree to what the cause is. We don’t challenge our kids enough! We challenge them too much! Teachers aren't held accountable enough! Teachers spend too much time with accountability standards, so student time suffers. We get frightfully wooed by ruthless Asian tiger mothers and we begrudgingly confess our kids are turning into lazy slobs because we don’t drill enough violin practice at an early age. And then we let out sighs of relief as soon as Finland becomes the country in vogue. Laid-back Finland, with their school kids loafing around their classrooms in slippers after entering school at the advance age of 7, all while making top PISA scores. And without even undergoing the rigor of standardized testings!
"Kids nowadays! Hmpf!" Whether you're 5 or 85, at some point you might unwittingly have been dragged into a generational comparison in which your age cohort is made out to look ruder, lazier or more spoiled than the bygone youth of the spokesperson. The statement is often followed up with a sentence that starts with "In my days.." Usually we attribute this type of sentiment to the occasional hissy fits endured by otherwise beloved older relatives whenever the need to blow off some steam escalates to intolerable proportions. And often it is better respond with an approving nod than to go into a drawn-out and probably futile explanation about "how things have changed" and how the old ways of doing things simply won't work anymore. Or we reason that the curmudgeon is probably right anyway, that we're all degenerating under moral standards in free fall.
Social change is often extremely slow, especially when deep seated norms are involved. Gender roles have demonstrated their staying power even in sociospheres where gender equality has long been the official mantra. Haven’t we all met the guy who speaks passionately about women’s rights all while parking the kids in front of the TV and leaving the dirty dishes in the sink? Or the “career mom” who laments (or brags) about her overwhelming domestic chores and how she does it all? It may not be so surprising after all that women, according to a recent study, probably will have to wait until 2050 before men are doing an equal share of the household chores and childcare. In other words, it will take our youngest generation and two generations more before equality between the sexes has been fully achieved. But where? The study seems to focus primarily on the US and UK and claims the upward trend in male domestic participation has leveled off in some (which?) countries.
Embedded video from CNN Video A blog post at Gen X Files ponders if parents today are ditching their tendency to over-parent. A short CNN clip and a sudden tide of blogs and books of the "bad-mom-confession" type suggest that the helicopter parents are beginning to slow down...
Source: http://www.allvoices.com/cartoons/c/71772450-tiger-mother[/caption]
‘Tiger mother’ Amy Chua refuses to let her children go to play dates and sleepovers. She protects them from the evils of TV and computer games. She protects them from a whole world outside of violin practice and top grades. Are these types of parents really the opposites of indulgent Helicopter parents or are they rather the extreme version of them?
Amy Chua is hardly the first remarkable Tiger mother. As she proclaims herself, Chinese parents and parents who are first generation immigrants, are often much more authoritarian than ’Western’ parents. So why is she getting so much attention in the media? Good timing is probably the answer.
The Millennials are becoming parents - or at least they are preparing for it. And the children they give birth to are the New Silents. A Pew Research cohort study measured attitudes towards marriage and parenting comparing Generation X and the Millennials in 1997 and 2008 respectively....
