Thanks so much for the inclusion and kind words. I remember seeing a podcast with the author of this book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Respondent-Exposing-Cartel-Family-Law-ebook/dp/B094L76X5Q/ who recounts the nightmarish interference of the CPS in his family and how he was criminalized based only on hearsay. You are right that at the same time they are helicopter parented, they are also being awfully neglected and not getting their needs met by being parented by the screens and devices. My brother does nature talks in UK schools [they are completely ignorant of the natural world - literally don't know the difference between a rabbit and frog], and now he is seeing a phenomen where the younger kids have an american accent because they are hearing american voices on devices much more than they are hearing their parents voices!
24/7 news stories amp up parental fears, for sure. I grew up playing in the woods with my cousins unsupervised. It was fabulous! I made my own children play outside all the time. When we lived in a dodgy area I did stay outside with them (we had drug dealing neighbors and prostitutes at that time), but once we moved to a rural area the supervision ended. It is important to learn how to negotiate real life situation on your own, for sure.
My husband's nephew is almost two and his parents have a camera on him in his bedroom. How weird is that? There's so much more I could say on the subject, but will let it go for now. The nanny state wants and has conditioned two generations of children to be docile, fear/anxiety driven, immature adults - which is what they want because they're easier to control. It's mind boggling.
Great story. If we do not let our children and grandchildren learn the lessons of life, bruises, scrapes, falls, blood, and now and then a broken bone. Rejection, losing, sometimes fights, work, chores, and all the other experiences of the world. It helps them to grow and adjust into being productive adults. Protecting them from everything and everybody does them more harm than good.
In sailing, there are mistakes that can be termed “above water line mistakes” and “below water line mistakes”. An above water line mistake might be coming in too fast to berth at an expensive yacht club, resulting in a bent railing and being the laughing stock of the club for a while. A below water line mistake might be misreading your charts and hitting an offshore reef when no one else is around. Not good at all.
So, feel free to allow your kids to be in positions where they could make “above water line mistakes”, but not the other kind.
Good followup with the pothole, though I also gotta say that because of having been a pilot when I was a kid, before I fire up the engine I do one full walkaround of my vehicle, tapping it a bit to scare off cats, just to check if anyone's pranked me. I also stare at people while I'm doing this to see if anyone wants to make a joke. Well, I do it because of safety, but also cuz of that time when I had parked a three-ton vehicle and came out hours later and drove forward over the concrete curb thingie and bounced into the air inside the cab. I was like: oh, duh.
Yeah I was a professor for a while and I was always being sent to the principle's office for making too many jokes. We called the principal "the dean" but it was the same idea. I loved your story of the entitted, I mean entitled (I could never spell) young'uns freakin' out when faced with the facts of life.
I'll always be thankful for the time spent with Ellen Chute and Eleanor Thomas in the laundry box in Eleanor's basement playing doctor. As an eternal spirit just five years into incarnational embodiment, that was prolly what I came for.
I literally did donuts on someone's lawn with my Dart. I loved that car. It came with safety instructions printed on the outside for pedestrians: Dodge Dart.
Not all of us survived childhood but even with mothers trying to pull our pants down in public and whack us, all of us had a blast. Our obscenely named neighborhood, "Linda's Circle," was set way off in a state forest somewhere in Massachusetts in a past so secure that not even Google Earth can find it. We could usually outrun our mothers, and we only used the houses for pitstops and for sleeping. My dad could never spank me, but had to settle for kicking as I ran past. He was a six-foot-seven Goliath who named his kid David, so he was kind of a risk taker himself. Good times.
God knows why, but Ma and me between us, when she died in Tennessee of covid (or as I called it, old age), had over a century of accident-free driving. She drove for 85 years and I got the rest. I keep thinking a cop's going to pull me over and give me and (posthumously) Ma a medal for keeping everyone's insurance down for a century. It's weird cuz Ma was a leadfoot, famous for keeping Dad's E150 Econoline at ninety on the Tennessee interstates. Funny thing is, when I took my driver's test at sixteen in Massachusetts, I put it in neutral instead of reverse during a three-point, then with the revs high I rammed it into reverse and lurched up onto the sidewalk, somehow not hitting adjacent cars or pedestrians and--here's the point--I still passed. Massachusetts didn't care. That winter Ma was off in Boston in hospital and my brother and Dad were out west and I was alone with a soft-steering '67 Chevy pickup with no seatbelts and a steel dashboard. I remember the feeling of not knowing how to keep the thing on the road. I went to the library, got a stack of books on safe driving, wore my brother's and my hang-gliding helmet, set up cones in an icy parking lot, and taught myself skids. I learned to drive sideways and backwards that February of 1974 before I learned to drive forwards. I used to go up into New Hampshire at night and do high-speed drift-cornering on icy mountain roads because you could flick your car black in those days (not like now where cars fuss at you if you try to make the car go dark) for a half second to see if anyone was coming the other way. Your story about initial incompetence leading to far better competence really hit a nerve for me. I settled down in my twenties to being an extremely courteous driver, often with my window open to add extra hand signals to turn signals and also because I would wave a thanks to oncoming drivers as I was the only driver in Massachusetts to drive with my headlights on in daytime and people were kind enough to care in those days. So I had to kind of wave my way down the road like the pope. Well, thank-you for your stories here. --David
That's a great article, many thanks. I see Wisconsin is quite Germanic. That might explain the nosy neighbours. I have friends who lived in Germany for a time and the wife found it rather oppressive as she was from Gibraltar. There is definitely a Ger-manic mania!
I was brought up with fields behind and I was not 'supervised' as such. My sister and I could play out the back in the garden anyway.
That failed driving test scenario would make me livid to think one had failed because of something not one's fault. The worst of it is the covering up of the accident.
Still, it has given you a story to tell and a lesson to learn; don't try to take a driving test in a bitter cold winter with hidden potholes and parked between two cars!
Thanks so much for the inclusion and kind words. I remember seeing a podcast with the author of this book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Respondent-Exposing-Cartel-Family-Law-ebook/dp/B094L76X5Q/ who recounts the nightmarish interference of the CPS in his family and how he was criminalized based only on hearsay. You are right that at the same time they are helicopter parented, they are also being awfully neglected and not getting their needs met by being parented by the screens and devices. My brother does nature talks in UK schools [they are completely ignorant of the natural world - literally don't know the difference between a rabbit and frog], and now he is seeing a phenomen where the younger kids have an american accent because they are hearing american voices on devices much more than they are hearing their parents voices!
24/7 news stories amp up parental fears, for sure. I grew up playing in the woods with my cousins unsupervised. It was fabulous! I made my own children play outside all the time. When we lived in a dodgy area I did stay outside with them (we had drug dealing neighbors and prostitutes at that time), but once we moved to a rural area the supervision ended. It is important to learn how to negotiate real life situation on your own, for sure.
My husband's nephew is almost two and his parents have a camera on him in his bedroom. How weird is that? There's so much more I could say on the subject, but will let it go for now. The nanny state wants and has conditioned two generations of children to be docile, fear/anxiety driven, immature adults - which is what they want because they're easier to control. It's mind boggling.
I do feel sorry for the kids today missing out on a normal life and they end up in therapy & on meds 😿
Great story. If we do not let our children and grandchildren learn the lessons of life, bruises, scrapes, falls, blood, and now and then a broken bone. Rejection, losing, sometimes fights, work, chores, and all the other experiences of the world. It helps them to grow and adjust into being productive adults. Protecting them from everything and everybody does them more harm than good.
In sailing, there are mistakes that can be termed “above water line mistakes” and “below water line mistakes”. An above water line mistake might be coming in too fast to berth at an expensive yacht club, resulting in a bent railing and being the laughing stock of the club for a while. A below water line mistake might be misreading your charts and hitting an offshore reef when no one else is around. Not good at all.
So, feel free to allow your kids to be in positions where they could make “above water line mistakes”, but not the other kind.
Well said, Sharine. As you can prolly tell from my comments, I had a lot of fun reading about your life. --david
Good followup with the pothole, though I also gotta say that because of having been a pilot when I was a kid, before I fire up the engine I do one full walkaround of my vehicle, tapping it a bit to scare off cats, just to check if anyone's pranked me. I also stare at people while I'm doing this to see if anyone wants to make a joke. Well, I do it because of safety, but also cuz of that time when I had parked a three-ton vehicle and came out hours later and drove forward over the concrete curb thingie and bounced into the air inside the cab. I was like: oh, duh.
Yeah I was a professor for a while and I was always being sent to the principle's office for making too many jokes. We called the principal "the dean" but it was the same idea. I loved your story of the entitted, I mean entitled (I could never spell) young'uns freakin' out when faced with the facts of life.
I got my sense of humor the old-fashioned way, from listening to bullies while they shoved me around.
I'll always be thankful for the time spent with Ellen Chute and Eleanor Thomas in the laundry box in Eleanor's basement playing doctor. As an eternal spirit just five years into incarnational embodiment, that was prolly what I came for.
I did co-sleeping with my kids but when I was actually a kid most of the kids in my neighborhood did co-slapping with their parents.
I literally did donuts on someone's lawn with my Dart. I loved that car. It came with safety instructions printed on the outside for pedestrians: Dodge Dart.
Not all of us survived childhood but even with mothers trying to pull our pants down in public and whack us, all of us had a blast. Our obscenely named neighborhood, "Linda's Circle," was set way off in a state forest somewhere in Massachusetts in a past so secure that not even Google Earth can find it. We could usually outrun our mothers, and we only used the houses for pitstops and for sleeping. My dad could never spank me, but had to settle for kicking as I ran past. He was a six-foot-seven Goliath who named his kid David, so he was kind of a risk taker himself. Good times.
God knows why, but Ma and me between us, when she died in Tennessee of covid (or as I called it, old age), had over a century of accident-free driving. She drove for 85 years and I got the rest. I keep thinking a cop's going to pull me over and give me and (posthumously) Ma a medal for keeping everyone's insurance down for a century. It's weird cuz Ma was a leadfoot, famous for keeping Dad's E150 Econoline at ninety on the Tennessee interstates. Funny thing is, when I took my driver's test at sixteen in Massachusetts, I put it in neutral instead of reverse during a three-point, then with the revs high I rammed it into reverse and lurched up onto the sidewalk, somehow not hitting adjacent cars or pedestrians and--here's the point--I still passed. Massachusetts didn't care. That winter Ma was off in Boston in hospital and my brother and Dad were out west and I was alone with a soft-steering '67 Chevy pickup with no seatbelts and a steel dashboard. I remember the feeling of not knowing how to keep the thing on the road. I went to the library, got a stack of books on safe driving, wore my brother's and my hang-gliding helmet, set up cones in an icy parking lot, and taught myself skids. I learned to drive sideways and backwards that February of 1974 before I learned to drive forwards. I used to go up into New Hampshire at night and do high-speed drift-cornering on icy mountain roads because you could flick your car black in those days (not like now where cars fuss at you if you try to make the car go dark) for a half second to see if anyone was coming the other way. Your story about initial incompetence leading to far better competence really hit a nerve for me. I settled down in my twenties to being an extremely courteous driver, often with my window open to add extra hand signals to turn signals and also because I would wave a thanks to oncoming drivers as I was the only driver in Massachusetts to drive with my headlights on in daytime and people were kind enough to care in those days. So I had to kind of wave my way down the road like the pope. Well, thank-you for your stories here. --David
That's a great article, many thanks. I see Wisconsin is quite Germanic. That might explain the nosy neighbours. I have friends who lived in Germany for a time and the wife found it rather oppressive as she was from Gibraltar. There is definitely a Ger-manic mania!
I was brought up with fields behind and I was not 'supervised' as such. My sister and I could play out the back in the garden anyway.
That failed driving test scenario would make me livid to think one had failed because of something not one's fault. The worst of it is the covering up of the accident.
Still, it has given you a story to tell and a lesson to learn; don't try to take a driving test in a bitter cold winter with hidden potholes and parked between two cars!
Ah, CPS... The long story of how I lost my daughter to My sister... I try not to think of that. Good article!