Monday, April 1, 2013

A Question of Convenience

quiz for twenty-first century parents (and parents-to-be):

Your child comes home for the spring break and has left a book at school -- a book that he or she needs to have finished reading by the middle of the week back from said break. You:

     a) call the principal and get him to open up the school so you can retrieve it.
     b) order the book on Amazon and pay for overnight delivery.
     c) download the book onto your wife's (yucky) Kindle.
     d) go and try to find it at the mega bookstore.
     e) let your child learn a hard (and grade-reducing) lesson about responsibility.

Which do you choose? Has parenthood changed in the culture of convenience?




7 comments:

  1. I'm not yet a parent, but I suspect I'd employ some variant of what my own folks would have done, so...

    Option (a), which involves inconveniencing others, is absolutely out of the question.

    Option (e) would not be out of the question.

    However, we'd probably opt for (b), (c), or (d), but accompanied by a guilt trip, the imposition of great mental discomfort, and a Post-It note on the fridge making clear how much money the child owed the parent for the inconvenience.

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    1. Something makes me feel that, say, Andy Griffith would have gone for (e). But who can be as good as a TV dad.

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  2. Our household has two copies of The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. We acquired the second copy when the first was left at school and could not be retrieved; I'm happy to say that we bought it at an independent bookstore not far from here, rather than having to go a mega-store. We the parents did a respectable amount of grousing about the inconvenience. (Not entirely sincerely on my part, for I don't at all mind errands to Politics and Prose.)

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    1. George, I, too added grousing. But, you're right -- it is hard to make it sincere when you are gleefully making the trip to the bookstore...

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  3. (b) But when I was a child, my parents' option would have been (e).

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    1. Steerforth -- as I mentioned to Jeff, above -- that old-fashioned approach looms behind me, making me feel weak; it all makes me feel like I'll never be the perfect TV dad -- which I won't, because we just got back from the mega store. After all, I was really craving some Ursula LeGuin for myself...and number-two-son needed the next book in the Shark Wars saga...

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