cool yet disturbing article

[permetaform]

via tochira

A Nation of Wimps

By: Hara Estroff Marano
Summary: Parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children. However, parental hyperconcern has the net effect of making kids more fragile; that may be why they're breaking down in record numbers.


...Causes me to both bless and curse my parents on the same breath. They're not as bad as some of those mentioned, but, god. (ask lierdumoa sometime for the story sometime when my mother called her to hunt me down. she found her number via my phone bill. ::headdesk::)

On the one hand, I wonder how I survived. On the other, I take an honest look at myself, and wonder if I truly did.

Also:
"In an era of rampant grade inflation, some college students find it shocking to discover there are 26 letters in the alphabet"

le sigh.

Comments

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

Hmmmmm.

I don't think my parents ever babied me like that. I still ended up a little spoiled because I learned early on to get my sister to take blame for me.

I had a conversation Saturday in my film lab where we were supposed to outline our audio storytelling project and the idea of a guy going into an elevator followed by a mother and her obnoxious kid who hits all the buttons. I mentioned the mother smacking her kid on the wrist to make him stop and my lab instructor responded, "That was beating your kid in my family."

At time I simply chalked it up to not being raised by suburban white parents. While I don't think corporal punishment is by any means necessary to raising children, I don't think it's going to traumatize them either (unless you actually are *beating* them). If I were to name all the ways I think my parents traumatized me, smacking me on the bum would not be on the list.

And, because every discussion in the world my brain eventually links back to fandom, I wonder how this relates to newbies in fandom. There was that post you linked to a while back about not eating our young, and while I still whole heartedly agree with the post, I wonder about the culture it grew out of. If I don't criticize a newbie's work without finding something nice to say about it, it's not because I want to nurture them so much as because I don't want to be an asshole. I make the automatic assumption that I'm addressing an adult, and adults don't need nurturing.

If when I had started vidding someone had told me my work sucked so bad I should just give up, I would have ignored them. I do remember a few times sharing my vid ideas and having people tell me that either they didn't think it would work or it would be really hard to make work, with the implication that I couldn't do it. I may or may not have been able to prove them wrong, but at the very least I proved I had a spine.

And you certainly *did* survive. From what I know of you, you never expect anyone to handle your problems for you, you generally like yourself, and you're in a good (if mildly stressed) mood the majority of the time. You know how to deal with stress constructively.

I'd say for two crazy people the both of us are really quite well adjusted.