June 2012
10 posts
Spoiled Rotten - Why are American kids so spoiled →
newyorker.com
With the exception of the imperial offspring of the Ming dynasty and the dauphins of pre-Revolutionary France, contemporary American kids may represent the most indulged young people in the history of the world. It’s not just that they’ve been given unprecedented amounts of stuff—clothes, toys, cameras, skis, computers, televisions, cell phones, PlayStations, iPods. (The market for Burberry Baby and other forms of kiddie “couture” has reportedly been growing by ten per cent a year.) They’ve also been granted unprecedented authority. “Parents want their kids’ approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents’ approval,” Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, both professors of psychology, have written. In many middle-class families, children have one, two, sometimes three adults at their beck and call. This is a social experiment on a grand scale, and a growing number of adults fear that it isn’t working out so well: according to one poll, commissioned by Time and CNN, two-thirds of American parents think that their children are spoiled.
Really enjoyed this article my husband sent me, although I think it applies equally well to british children. It made me think of a film called Babies, which chronicled the first year of life for kids in four different countries, and how the ones with the least amount of money thrown at them were the most self-sufficient after twelve months.
Honey, I'm home.
Everyone in America thinks ‘disorientated’ is a made up word.
Everyone in England thinks the same thing about ‘disoriented’.
Sometimes, I can’t remember which is which and then I avoid using the word entirely in conversation forever. I do things like this a lot.
“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”
—Henry James (via kari-shma)
Mary Oliver, Red Bird
Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given. Brush her hair, help her
into her little coat, hold her hand,
especially when crossing a street. For, think,
what if you should lose her? Then you would be
sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
would be yours. Take care, touch
her forehead that she feel herself not so
utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
altogether forget the world before the lesson.
Have patience in abundance. And do not
ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment
by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
And amazing things can happen. And you may see,
as the two of you go
walking together in the morning light, how
little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
she begins to grow.
Gamblers all
Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think,
I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside
remembering all the times you’ve felt that way, and
you walk to the bathroom, do your toilet, see that face
in the mirror, oh my oh my oh my, but you comb your hair anyway,
get into your street clothes, feed the cats, fetch the
newspaper of horror, place it on the coffee table, kiss your
wife goodbye, and then you are backing the car out into life itself,
like millions of others you enter the arena once more.
you are on the freeway threading through traffic now,
moving both towards something and towards nothing at all as you punch
the radio on and get Mozart, which is something, and you will somehow
get through the slow days and the busy days and the dull
days and the hateful days and the rare days, all both so delightful
and so disappointing because
we are all so alike and so different.
you find the turn-off, drive through the most dangerous
part of town, feel momentarily wonderful as Mozart works
his way into your brain and slides down along your bones and
out through your shoes.
it’s been a tough fight worth fighting
as we all drive along
betting on another day.
- Charles Bukowski
“So you look at your life, and the two countries that hold it, and realize that you are now two distinct people. As much as your countries represent and fulfill different parts of you and what you enjoy about life, as much as you have formed unbreakable bonds with people you love in both places, as much as you feel truly at home in either one, so you are divided in two. For the rest of your life, or at least it feels this way, you will spend your time in one naggingly longing for the other, and waiting until you can get back for at least a few weeks and dive back into the person you were back there. It takes so much to carve out a new life for yourself somewhere new, and it can’t die simply because you’ve moved over a few time zones. The people that took you into their country and became your new family, they aren’t going to mean any less to you when you’re far away.”
—
What Happens When You Live Abroad (via sistacrumpet)
Amen, Sista, amen.
Play
Last night, I went to a graduation for 8th graders. (14 year olds.) At one point, two photomoms behind me managed to interfere with one another’s frames, and a fight started. I missed the beginning, but the middle went like this:
Photomom 1: you look like a big, fat idiot!
Photomom 2: YOU look like a big, fat bitch!
Photomom 1: yeah, well, you’re a cunt!
And you know, this is the America I find whenever I come here. It’s not that nobody in England ever gets annoying or angrily insults someone - they do. I once saw a lady call another lady a ‘silly cow’ on Bonfire night because she had hit her in the head accidentally with her wet umbrella. That was amusing. But the difference usually is that Brits will tut and tsk tsk and ignore the idiot, then go home and moan and gossip about it in privacy. In America, we have to up the freakin’ ante. We must rise to the insult. And Americans wonder why the rest of the world chooses words like ‘reactionary’ to refer to their temperament.
Also, the utter and complete lack of recycling here in my hometown killllllllllllls me. Whenever someone put a glass bottle or a can into the trash, I cry a little.
I’m holding up ok otherwise, despite all that’s happened and despite being rather homesick for The North. I miss my baby kitties, my spoiled dog and Mr. Tea. I plan to spoil the bejeezus (is bejeezus an Americanism? It’s a great word.) out of my new niece until I leave at the end of this month. So far, so good. It’s hard to see how much my family misses my sister. I miss her, too, but I think for me, when I moved overseas, I had to learn how to function even when I miss people, and I’m a little more used to it than my family, who have all been living in the same homes since childhood and don’t go far enough away ever to miss anything. For me, I think the hardest parts will be when I get home and there’s no way to Skype her to see how she is, because that’s our space and the thing we do, and quite honestly, I’m usually so frustrated with everyone else by the time I get back to England that my sister is the only one I DO miss.
It was her birthday yesterday. She would have been 31.
