SquareParents.com - Cool Stuff For Cool Parents

The Small and the Large

Written by The Square Parent Friday, 20 March 2009 00:00

The smaller and insignificant the issue, the more ferocious and convoluted the fight.

Good Cop Bad Cop

Written by The Square Parent Thursday, 19 March 2009 00:00

The Good Cop/Bad Cop routine is the oldest one in the book, and one of the most effective.  It also requires a high degree of collusion between the parents.  Collusion is secret agreement, often for neafrious or illegal activity.  Think of it as the parents being insider traders, with the kid in the role of the SEC. 

Soccer Parents

Written by The Square Parent Wednesday, 18 March 2009 00:00

Parents, watch your progeny on the pitch, but be careful.  You're only really allowed to secretly wish them success on the field of battle.  Publicly, of course, it's just about playing the game.  But isn't it more fun to actually, you know, win?

Ah, soccer in the spring.  There's a lot of different advice out there about young children and sports, and the advice tends either not to give any firm conclusions, or is contradictory.  A popular theme wrapped in excess verbiage is that young children shouldn't be encouraged to engage in competitive activities, as they're too young to understand winning and losing, and if pushed to win too early will suffer some kind of damage, or worse, disappointment.  

Parents flock to the field with kids in tow, anticipating the cuteness of chaos and pandemonium involved with a bunch of late toddlers kicking a ball around a field, and not quite getting the concept. They may even get it but be quite unwilling to play, easily distracted, diverted, or otherwise simply cannot be bothered.  Indeed, many of the soccer leagues for young children don't keep score.

Don't keep score?  How then, is the kid expected to learn to be either a gloating winner or a sore loser? Most of the time, the kids are just running aimlessly around, which is what the purpose is anyway; get the kids some exercise, and tired enough to nap in the afternoon. 

But for many parents, this is the opportunity they've been waiting for: to be the Soccer Parent. 

For the Soccer Moms, this means sweat pants, and hair up in some manner, beneath a baseball cap or headband or similar apparatus.  No makeup, please.  This is an excuse to be "comfy," although the doubts do mount as to how anyone could be comfortable looking like that in public. (See What a Drag it is Getting Old)

The Soccer Dads get to be one of those bad caricatures, yelling at the kid to get up off of the field, go after the ball, and kick the thing into the goddamn goal already.  And if a goalie, soft goals are absolutely unacceptable.  This is great practice for when there are real games with referees to yell at.

The stakes are high. Many Kodak moments hang in the balance. College athletic scholarships depend on this.  So does local newspaper coverage in high school, a trophy collection, and the kid learning how to gain that competitive edge, how to win, how to close the deal.

Even more important are the more visceral pleasures of sport.  Oh, to watch the progeny victorious on the field of battle!  Oh, to enjoy the spoils of the victors and to vanquish the defeated!  Raise a slice of pepperoni pizza skyward as an offering of thanks to the Gods of the Pitch in hopes that they'll smile favorably on the next contest. 

Oh, to be the Parent of a chosen one of grass, net, and cleat!  

It's always more fun to actually, you know, win.

What A Drag It Is Getting Old

Written by The Square Parent Tuesday, 17 March 2009 00:00

... says it all.  This wasn't something that was supposed to be part of the deal, it was something abstract and far away and curable by a variety of health and beauty products.  At the same time, there's been an inkling of what is coming from all of the ads on TV featuring products with terrible side effects.  Bleeding ears are apparently a small price to pay for eliminating a ferret allergy.

OK, so you get older, and so do the kids, and you gradually become a geezer, or worse, your friends do.  And soon, you're trying to retain some degree of hipness, which then devolves into an attempt at reasonable stylishness, then avoiding frump and slobishness until eventually you just really don't care any more.  And on with the mundane things.

Then there's the direct corollary to this, which is the parents that dress and act like kids.  For some reason it's so difficult to grow older gracefully, and accept the different stages of life.  Apparently, the best antidote against this is to look and act like a kid.  As such, this MO usually produces the worst behaved children, primarily because there's no adult supervision.  Exhibit A is some of the Supernanny episodes, where some of these homes are basically Lord of the Flies type situations.

Now, this brings up the subject of the French.  They sort of act like adults, they certainly dress well enough, drink a lot of decent wine, eat well, and in recent years have been easy enough to find as tourists in any major American city, buying up trinkets and baubles like camcorders and iPods to take home as souvenirs.

The central point is that the French, even with kids in tow, do not do frumpy.  The kids play way more soccer, but try going to some Parisian soccer field and seeing a mom wearing sweats with the words "Hot Momma" printed on the ass in gangsta script.  This is not to say that they're in any way more "sophisticated" than Americans or any similar nonsense.  But it is to say that as adults, they do have a sense of self, and are comfortable with it.     

It would be easy to opine endlessly about the finer points of French culture, the tragic history, the more salient aspects of the nanny state, a long-established tradition of urban living without significant suburbanization, or any other abstract ideas, like the superimposition of nice clothes against all of the dogshit in the streets. 

The thing is, they dress and act like adults around their kids, and have a very well developed sense of adulthood, too, at least on some levels.  They do not try to dress young, and in fact, the opposite holds true - the kids in France are often better dressed than many American frumpsters.  The French kids also tend to be better behaved.

It can't be simply a matter of money, because they actually have less per capita than many Americans, Canadians, or the Japanese.  The more likely explanation is that they're doing it intentionally.   It's something that they think is important, care about, pay attention to, and invest effort into.  This simply can't be that taxing, after all, the French can do it.

All it takes is prioritization, some focus, a little attention, and the will to actually care about what one looks like in public.  It doesn't even take that much money, really, just an easily developed sense of style, or more importantly, of self.

There are enough makeover programs out there.  Watch What Not To Wear or other similar Bravo programs, and follow the cues.  Don't go for literal translations of the people they're using as examples, but rather follow their lines of reasoning, and think about the explanations very carefully.  It's not what to think about specific pieces of clothes, it's how to think about the whole.

But above all, don't do frumpy and don't do kid.  Frump isn't the opposite of dressing and behaving like the kids, it's a different side of the same coin.  

Be stylish, but grown-up stylish.  Look and act like an adult.

What a drag it is getting old.

Keyboards Nefariously Purposed

Written by The Square Parent Monday, 16 March 2009 00:00

Some parents exhibit the very worst behavior, probably don't realize it, and wouldn't particularly care if they did.  Interestingly, this is very similar to the way kids often behave, particularly in the early stages of socialization, which explains quite a lot.

Enough examples of both abound on the playgrounds, shopping malls, local supermarkets, or wherever else you find parents and kids.  Everyone has known or currently knows some parent living in some kind of Oprah alt-reality world, featuring a heavy dash of modern-day schoolmarm likely to instantly and vocally express disapproval of the seemingly most petty, innocuous things. 

Regrettably, this often comes with the pretense of class elevation, and is as old as the hills.

The times and technology change, but the behavior remains universal, which means we're treated to this not only in person, but also electronically.  Just vist you local neighborhood general-purpose parenting blog.  

What's the point about complaining about the birthday party policy at some children's museum?  Isn't it enough not to have another party at the children's museum and let it go?  No, the letter of complaint to the museum in it's entirety also needs to be published, just to show that museum a thing or two.  And then there are the enablers from the peanut gallery, chirping in words of encourtagement and sharing the outrage.  It seems as though there's a cottage industry of former attorneys or marketing types who need to create some excitement or stimulation on the behalf of the poor kid, and a keyboard with no handy filters available is carte blanche.  

These are excellent examples of how parents completely use the kid, some kid-related activity, or other kid-oriented thing to inject themselves and make themselves the center of attention but in a different format. 

For everyone's sake, and especially the kid's sake, avoid being one of these parents.

This sort of thing is just one among many examples of parents behaving badly, and even worse, parents behaving like children.  At least it's obvious where it comes from.