Parenting - 2009

Que sera sera.

That about sums it up. I find parenting to be a guilt filled venture.

In the olden days it was the church and your family telling you how to raise them. Or I guess your religion and culture would be more accurate than "the church". That's just my upbrining. The Church is always well related to The Government. So they told us how to raise our children. How many times to hit them when they did this, instilling the fear of an omnipotent God in them for those we didn't catch, and how long to put them in jail when they grew up and we figured they were killing a few too many of the more useful people in our little group.

Then Democracy hit. With it came free markets. So not only did a man have the freedom to speak, but also to make as much money as he could fit in his big fat gullet. The Corporation began to become a being, with it came funding. With funding came science. Lots of it. Within 100 years democratic countries went from horse and buggy to nuclear, nanotech, microchip and everything else. By opening the markets, the nation grows fat on Corporate tax, but thing is, when people give a lot of money to you, you gotta start listening to them. Suddenly The Church means less.

With the drop in spirituality, so comes the change in the family unit. People are becoming increasingly polygamous, even if we don't see it. We're having children with multiple partners more often. It means for the sake of this essay that the effect of the family on raising children is different.

People are increasingly influenced by the science of child raising. This of course is provided in large part by Universities that get research funding from all sorts of great places. Places with lots of money to spend. So we get breakthroughs in the materials our children are in contact with - Lead and BPA are two of the more prominent breathroughs of this type in the past while. But they spark massive purging and binging sessions as old products are discarded for new. Advancements in child psychology and biology has this mass of information bombarding parents with facts and statistics, some very contradictory (I've seen VERY strong arguments AGAINST c0-sleeping in recent weeks, in sharp contrast to past research I've done). Of course with every new discovery comes a product or a book or a DVD. Because of this potential for money making, there is a lot of shock factor and guilt delivered with their announcements. It shoots up sales. The longer you keep it in the press cycle, the more units you sell.

I'm getting tired of the research and the guilt. I want to find my own path to parenting. Maybe it won't be the right path, but even with all the research and perfect living, well you're condemning yourself to a pretty stressful and boring life. I want to live a little closer to the edge. Emotionally, spiritually and parentally. I want to tickle my child well past the point that you could call it torture. I want to let her scream at the bedroom door for her mom. I don't want to worry about the cup that she drinks from or the food that she eats. I want to be a little negligent, so they can learn to become independent.

And I want ramen noodles for lunch on Saturdays in the winter.