Week Five - Chapter 7

I found a lot of this weeks readings especially horrifying.  Particularly the article Parenting: A Lost Art.  With most of the examples in the article there was a reversal of roles, where the children were taking on the adult role of the decision maker (minus the experience) and the parents were acting like children - not wanting to take any responsibility.  I can't imagine the disconnect that has to occur to arrive at a position like that.  Being a pal to your child is great - but how can a parent lost touch with the essential point of parenting - which I interpret as helping to guide your child to grow up to be a responsible and caring adult.  How does being a yes-man get your child there?

Another point that grabbed my attention was in the text and discussed achieving a level of understanding of what others think and that not everyone thinks the same thing.  I have wondered about this because I have a relative who often finds it impossible to understand why people do not think the same as she does.  I don't think she would actually agree with my assessment of her in this (in fact she would likely be hurt that I thought this way) but I have found many times in conversation that she can't accept another viewpoint - she displays such incredulity that I (or someone else) doesn't think her way and even accuses me of playing devil's advocate.  I have wondered about this - she is from a different generation, is that part of it?  Or is it an aging thing, where she is becoming more and more set in her ways and more rigid in her views to the point where she is unable to allow for other views?  Or has she always been this way and just never quite achieved the stage of understanding that people can have different views.

The final thing I wanted to touch on here was in the article in the instructor's notes - the one called Children & Advertising.  In literature and films etc I have often seen examples of how children have been treated in days gone by - or at least how they might have been treated, since these were fictional accounts, though supposedly based on historical data.  The article mentions that up until the mid 19th century children were seen and not heard - they were often considered "uninteresting, merely tolerated, frequently ignored" which led me to the (thoughtless?) question "well why were people having them??"  Of course there was less choice in the matter in the past.  No birth control to speak of, this was the major role of women, who had no choice really. Which then led me to ask why the article and various media and history were trying to say there was less attachment formed between parents and their children than there is today, and it kind of boggled my mind that it came down to child mortality.  Parents wouldn't want to be attached to their kids when there was such a high possibility of the child dying.  Scary thought.  A while ago I was reading the Game of Thrones series, and even in this example of fantasy literature the characters did not name their children for the first two years of life because it was deemed bad luck - so many children died before reaching their 2nd birthday that it wasn't worth it to name them.  Yikes.  With the amount of energy and emotion that goes in to being pregnant and giving birth I can't imagine being in the situation where it was more than likely that you would lose so many of your children to disease or injury or whatever.  Makes me feel tired just thinking about it..