Viva la Resistance

Sorry to be late. Again.

The portrait of the modern, upper-middle class American family described in The New Yorker's article, "The Child Trap," has never been seen by my eyes. The idea that a parent has enough time in a day to monitor every aspect of a child's time is farce in my experience. That being said, I can find at least three of the traits described as "helicopter parenting" in so many of the people I know from high school. One prime example is a good friend of mine. Ever since he and I were in middle school, his breaks from school were all booked by his mother. The two of them went just about anywhere you could think. He spent summers in Greece, went to a french camp in Quebec, and when he was not globe trotting, every day at home had hours devoted to piano practice. The upside, from my point of view, and the perspective of the rest of our friends, was that he could play just about any song on the piano, including all of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, perfectly. The downside is that, even over his first winter break in college, he will be in Taiwan, and unable to share in experiences that the rest of us will.

The downside to all the pressure his mother places on him is that when there are bursts from the pressure, it is considerable. The article's assertion that it's impossible to smoke pot at lacrosse practice is probably true, but that does not mean that sending your kid to french camp won't introduce him, inadvertently, to cigarettes.

Hanoud4 makes a similar argument in her post, focusing on a friend of hers, who's friends are scrutinized for their worthiness to be associated with their precious. The mark of an ideal parent, according to Hanoud4 is engaging with other people on a social basis and, for all intents and purposes, relaxing. I've heard of a number of students who are pushed and pressured by their parents much in the same way as Hanoud4's friend, and once being accepted to a university that their parents wanted them at, in a major also chosen by their parents, it's like a bullet hitting a brick wall. The prodigies from high school all seem to fall prey to the sheer explosion of options available to them in college. For the first time, these teenagers have the option of choosing for themselves, and without the brackets of their parents, it's usually the wrong ones.

Children hand-reared by their parents are going to be in the hole when the get to college, unless they subvert their parent's grasp on their lives. Hanoud4's friend seems to be doing just that, and it's one thing to lie to your parents, but under the circumstances I find no fault with her, only the parents. In fact, I'm happy for this young girl, because she recognized that what her parents wanted for her and what she wanted were different, and acted on it. If she hadn't, things would have most certainly been different, and her parent's careful manipulation of her life may have ended only when they died.