Wednesday, February 3, 2016

The World a Stage; Our Kids the Clowns?

Boy, do we put pressure on our kids. We do it in a million ways, in terms of serious stuff, but we also do it "for fun." I just saw a video of numerous people announcing to thier kids that the mother was pregnant again. The results were kids getting upset -- crying, slamming things down, etc. Ha. Ha.

Why do we feel the need to come up with clever ways to do everything? Why do we "announce" things to our kids and record them on video? Why, most importantly, do we put our kids in the position of feeling pressured to act a certain way, under the scrutiny of a camera and/or of a huge group of family? Why are we surprised when this "overloads" them? More frighteningly, why are we amused by it?

And I don't see it as cute or funny. I never have seen embarrassing kids or putting them in an unfair position as entertaining. Not once did I ever laugh at my sons when a crowd of loving relatives thought it was appropriate to break in to hysterics when one of them said something "cute" in complete seriousness.

Everything is a show. Everything from asking a girl to the prom to "graduating" fifth grade has become an event of grandiose proportions. It's stupid.

I don't even remember how we told our older son that he was going to have a brother or sister. That's cool with me.

4 comments:

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  3. I'll try again and keep a more watchful eye on my phone's autocorrect.

    Anyway, the point I made was about the other extreme - the emotionally repressed attitude that used to be dominant in England. For example, when my dad was four, his father took him into town and bought him a toy car. This was an unusual event. On the way home, my grandfather turned to my dad and said "Oh and by the way, when we get home, you'll have a little brother." Nothing more was said.

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    1. You comment had me thinking about how we see what we think we wantbut can't imagine how it would really affect us. I have always been something of an Anglophile; when I was a teenager my dream was to live in England. In grad school, British Romanticism was my focus... But I wonder how I would have fared in the "emotionally repressed" environment you describe... Somewhere in the middle makes much more sense, that's for sure.

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