That’s awful, and I will concede that people can be terrible in private and different in public. But I think that controlling parents are probably generally controlling parents all along.
Letting your 13 y.o. daughter smoke cigarettes freely around the house. This was a few years ago, maybe 2005-ish.
Bad parent? If so, yes.
Now that I think about it, back in my mid-late twenties, when I was smoking a lot of weed, I had a few couples friends that made no effort to hide their pot use from their kids. As far as I knew they never let their kids smoke pot but I remember hitting the bong a few times when there were little kids running around. Is that bad parenting?
The woman left her multiple children in her shopping carriage (unrestrained, which as a former cashier drives me bananas because carts are super unsafe) and went out of view. She didn’t just dash over to grab like… one wayward child who wandered off or something. She just rolled her carriage into the lobby, then turned around and wandered away. She didn’t quite fully abandon them but she didn’t keep an eye on them or leave them in a safe place and condition. They were fine ultimately, but not because she insured their well-being.
I remembered I lost all respect for one friend because of a bad parent. Years ago another mother we know called her pre-schooler fat. (She was not large for age). I never would have anything to do with that mother again and her kid is now weird and awful. Shocking that someone who would call her 3-year old fat to an almost-stranger would not be kind to that child for the following 10 years and making that kid grow up to be awful. Anyway, my friend’s child became friends with the “fat” girl and when my friend would tell me stories about them, I’d be like “But… you know my story and you’re seeing for yourself their dynamic is unhealthy.” And she stays friends with them. And complains about them to me. So I had to cut ties there. If you don’t want to base your decisions based on something that happened to me, that’s fine, but if you are so insistent on proving me wrong that you let someone bully your child, you’re pretty wrong too.
She already does, at school. Which means if I can lessen that exposure outside it, I will.
I’m not concerned with when I’m around. I’m more talking about the behaviour when it’s just the two of them in a room.
And yes, I can sit there and control behaviour and use it as a teaching moment. But I shouldn’t have to do more of that than I already do.
Meh, wouldn’t bother me if it was just for a couple minutes.
Is this like Americans who freak out when Europeans leave the baby carriage outside the shops for all of 30 seconds?
this. pressuring people who don’t want or are ambivalent about kids into being parents is not fair to them nor the kids.
having kids is something you should think about, and not just do because society says it’s what you’re “supposed” to do.
Not to make too much light of your past misfortune, but is Leonard Hofstadter your brother?
Link? (If you don’t want to post it here, message it to me.)
Or better yet, bring their meat over to Mom’s house for her to cut, since they never learned to do it themselves.
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So then you’re left with even less basis to judge it.
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There would always be particular stories that attracted a high level of ‘I know it when I see it and that’s it’ responses but in general I think it’s highly fraught to try make such judgments again besides actual abuse, official findings, or obviously good/bad end results and even all three of those are subject to debate.
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This statement looms large in my mind.
I guess the basic answer for me is I try not to make judgments like that about other people and their kids, though again I am not talking about turning a blind eye to things which might be criminal.
Kicking out kids who are 20 is 2 yrs too late according to some people . Though it’s usually older (even than me) people who feel that way it seems and also partly ethnic/cultural, not so common in my wife’s or my ethnicity traditionally. The story seems pretty extreme if the SO’s age was the only factor, but by 20 you’re not exactly ‘parenting’ your kids anymore IMO. Our kids did/have depended partly on us well past that age and it doesn’t bother me. I just view it more as a relationship I have with some young adults whom I really like, ‘parenting’ is over. If they had developed bad habits when young (when, according to them, I tended to be somewhat of a hardass) it wouldn’t help to be a hardass now. And I don’t think it hurts to be more indulgent now.
Your average 20-year-old is still emotionally dependent on their parents, at the very least. Your average 20-year-old is not 100% self-sufficient, and those who are are almost always precariously perched. So I would disagree with you that there is no parenting going on with that age group.
Kicking out a 20-something is sometimes warranted. Finances are tight, the kid isn’t being responsible, etc. But kicking them out as punishment for such a petty offense is pretty shitty, IMHO, and I am OK making this judgment call because I pride myself on not being a hand-wringing moral relativist. I’m not going to say I’d never spank my hypothetical kid or never allow them to smoke in the house or use profanity, because these kinds of parenting decisions don’t rise to the level of “shitty” for me. But I can say I would never kick my responsible, well-intentioned, financially struggling 20-year-old out of the house just because they are dating someone who is three years older than they are. And if I were to do this and the kid denied me access to their lives going forward, I would not be surprised.
I don’t think there’s something magical about parenting that makes it immune to the kind of judgment all over behaviors and choices are subjected to. At the very least, it seems to me anyone who has experienced instances of shitty parenting has some insight into the topic and can thus be trusted with sniffing out shittiness when it is in their vicinity. But obviously YMMV. You seem to think non-judgement is the safest way to evaluate other people’s parenting. I actually think if there was more judginess (within reason) and people felt more comfortable expressing their judginess (within reason), there might be fewer kids experiencing shittiness in their lives.
But obviously YMMV.
“18-and-out-'em” really seems to be a uniquely American Boomer thing.
There was one family we sometimes did things with because she was friends with my wife. They had a son who when he was little, well our house wasnt kid proof but they still expected me to put away my things when they would come over. When we would go out to a restaurant they would let the kid run around and not watch him. Now it frustrates me as the son is now about 23 and has never held a job or gone to college or anything yet the parents dont seem to want to push him.
None of this is bad per se but still.
Not anymore. With the high cost of rent I’m seeing lots of young people living with parents till their mid 20’s.
I used to be super judgy about how other people dressed kids for the weather until I had the daily experience of getting sort of step daughter dressed. From her refusing to put on what I suggested to me guessing wrong about the days weather (I’m in England, it’s hard, OK.) to her mum not having sent appropriate clothing with her. It was bloody hard and I don’t judge parents any more, well, nearly as much
Thank you!
uh, yeah, I know. my point was that many other cultures have multi-generational families living together. The whole “get out of here once you’re 18” thing was only enabled by the fact that we came out of WWII almost unharmed, and you could get an unskilled job capable of supporting a family just by waltzing down to Ford’s and building cars.
Boomers don’t understand that the environment they grew up in was an anomaly. It was unusual, it’s certainly not “The Way Things Ought To Be.”
Even the idea that 18 is “grown” is pretty recent. Age of majority was 21, and society has rarely really expected teenagers to be fully formed adults. You might have to work on the farm or in the mine or whatever to help the family, you might be married and have children, but you were rarely actually running a household in your teens–and even if you were, it was likely very similar to the household you grew up in, and your parents are still telling you what to do and when to do it.
When my students say “It makes no sense that you can drive and have a job at 16, join the army at 18, but you can’t drink until you are 21!” I agree with them and say “It’s true. I’d move all those to 21!”