A 1980's Parent

I wrote on Facebook earlier this week that I felt that, at heart, I’m a 1980’s type of parent. I wrote  a little bit of context around it, but mostly I thought that people probably wouldn’t even understand what I meant and that it’d be ignored. Then, it got more responses on it than I thought I would, and I said to myself, “Hey, Tacy. Maybe more people really get you than you think.”  That cozy thought lasted all of 30 seconds before I remembered that you can never really tell how people may interpret certain things. For all I know, my friends think that I have a secret desire to wear stirrup pants and use copious amounts of Aqua Net. Who knows, really?

So, to set the record straight, that’s not what I meant. Also, I am fully aware that stirrup pants are not a thing that would look good on my body, and while I’m not sure what to make of this dry, kinky hair that’s growing out of my forty-year old head, I do know that Aqua Net is not something it would survive.  

I just want you to know that I know that. 

I suppose I should start with what prompted me to write that I felt like an 80’s parent yesterday, but the truth is, this feeling that I am parenting in the wrong era is something that I’m been feeling for a long time now. So, I think I want to take the long way around to it. Sit tight.  

Growing up, my parents had a pretty laid back approach to granting us independence.  I started walking to and from school around fourth grade. My sisters, who were even younger, were always with me, and as we walked, we gathered more and more friends until finally, upon reaching school, we were a huge mob of children descending up on the playground. No cell phones, of course, to let my mom know that we had safely arrived. She took it for granted every day that we did. The same assumption applied to when I walked everywhere in my middle school years; to my friend’s homes, to the library, or to the neighborhood market which was up a block and across a very busy, uncontrolled intersection.  

Actually, that last one I used to do much earlier- maybe eight or nine and usually with a younger sister in tow. My mom would send us up with a few dollars to fetch a last-minute ingredient for dinner and we’d stand at the curb for long stretches, waiting for a lull in the flow of traffic so we could scurry across four lanes.  Sometimes we misjudged how fast cars were traveling and would find ourselves dodging traffic in the middle of the street. Most of the time though, the cars stopped for us and we would carry on our way, oblivious to danger the way kids are.

People love to say that you can’t do that anymore, you can’t send your kids out on their own, that it’s not safe….but I don’t know if that’s true.  Certainly maybe today the world online is scarier for kids, but outside, out there in the real world? I’m not convinced that it’s more dangerous than it was in the 80’s. My sister and I were talking about this a few days ago.  We got approached many times by creepers. My friends did too. We were always just lucky enough, just smart enough, to never have anything bad happen. Only once, did an incidence occur that frightened me so badly I ran home crying. (My dad, who was home when I arrived, put a bat in his truck after I told him what happened and tried to find the guy. Thank God he didn’t.)

Most of the time, we never told our parents about these occurrences. We weren’t trying to be sneaky- sometimes it honestly didn’t cross our minds. If we remembered, then maybe we told them and then they would tell us we handled the situation the right way, and off we’d go the next day, walking alone to our friend’s house again. 

I honestly felt that being harassed was par for the course where I grew up (a half mile from North Hollywood). I remember even feeling bad if I went somewhere and didn’t hear at least one wolf whistle from a passing car- but that was when I was living at the height of my teenage mindset. Stupidity personifies in the form of a teenager’s brain. This is truth.

I have a friend who tells stories of her reckless 80’s youth and laughs as she asks, “Where were all the parents in the 80’s?” While it’s true that reading this through the lens of a modern day parent makes parents from thirty years ago seem grossly negligent (I’m sure my parents are probably cringing as they read this), they weren’t. They were great parents who were no different than a lot of other parents from that era. My friends walked places. My friends went without seat belts. My friends sat alone at home or in a car for lengthy periods of time. All the parents back then were just operating in whatever the culture deemed acceptable- and what the culture deemed acceptable behavior by parents was much more flexible then than it is today. 

Today, I feel smothered by it. I’m bothered by the way parents police each other and judge each other. It affects the decisions I make for my kids, makes me feel that I can’t give my own children any more independence than other kids have, because if I did, that would make me a bad parent.

When PG was 7, I took her to a new dentist. They called her back and the assistant asked if I wanted to join her. I said, “No, I think she’ll be okay.” Then for the next half hour I watched as every parent in there went back with their kid and I felt guilty. I thought, “Shoot. Maybe I should have gone back with her.” So now I do. I go back with the kids and I sit there, the same way I sit in the front waiting room, just now, I’m two feet away from them. 

I stay at birthday parties because that’s what parents do nowadays. I don’t understand it, but I do it because it’s expected. Last year, one of my kids was invited to a five hour birthday party and the parents had to stay. What in the world, parents? Has the world gone insane? Are other parents happy to spend their weekends sitting in plastic folding chairs, balancing a styrofoam cake plate on their knees with a fake smile plastered on their faces? Remember when you were a kid and going to a birthday party meant that your parent left you there for the next few hours? Why don’t we do that anymore? 

I listened to someone say how terrible it is that parents don’t walk their child into our school when using the back entrance.  The back entrance, you should know, is all of 200 feet long. It’s a wide sidewalk that leads from the back parking lot, along the perimeter of the school’s fence, and there’s a crossing guard stationed 75 feet into the kids’s “journey”. I almost lost my eyeballs to the back of my skull from rolling them so hard. 

Last year, I left the kids in the car with the air on, doors locked from the inside, while I ran up to the ATM, 15 feet away.  As I waited in line at the ATM, a guy stood next to my car and called out to me that what I was doing was illegal.  I was irritated, with right to be, because actually CA law states that children can be left unattended in a vehicle at age 6, (but truthfully, I didn’t know that until I went home and looked it up in a huff). I’m sure that guy felt that he was being a responsible citizen, but I felt slighted at getting to use my own judgement about my kid’s safety. It felt terrible, being judged that way. And scary.

I’m not saying that I want my kids to go walking everywhere and run into bad guys the way I did. Of course I don’t. In fact, I think if my parents knew how many times my sisters and I were approached by gross men, they probably wouldn’t have let us go out on our own. But like I said, I rarely told them. I had enough confidence, mixed with luck, and took care of it myself. At the very least, I developed a strong instinct for stranger danger. 

Nowadays, I feel like my kids have no freedom. I wonder how they are even going to learn how to deal with the world themselves, when I am always right there, by their side, helping them, all in the name of What If. Parents nowadays hate What If, but What if has always been there, for all parents, throughout time. I think our parents, and the ones before them, dealt better with the fact that there is always a possibility of something bad happening, but that most of the time, they knew, everything was okay. There’s been a shift with our generation where people are no longer wanting to believe that it’ll all be okay- it’s better, we think, to err on the side of safety all the time, and we should never drop the ball. We don’t trust the world, we don’t trust our kids in the world, and we don’t trust each other. 

I don’t know how people live with this constant fear.  It’s not that I don’t worry about my kid’s safety. I do. I have horrible, paralyzing thoughts about all the What Ifs. Sometimes the What Ifs are valid reasons to worry. Often, however, they don’t stack up against the benefits of giving my kids some experiences in independence. And feeling that way makes me feel like an anomaly in today’s parenting culture, but I can’t do it. Uber protectiveness is not for me.    

Last week, PG had to be at sixth grade orientation at eight in the morning. This was bad news for us since we had come home from Legoland a mere nine hours before. I got her up to dress and let the little ones sleep in until the last minute, when I piled them into the car in their jammies to drive her to school. In the parking lot, I saw that not one car was ahead of us in the drop-off line. Every single parent was walking their child in. Immediately the guilt hit me.  I turned to her.

“Sorry. I didn’t know parents were going to be walking their kids in. Will you be ok?”

She shrugged. “Yeah, I’ll just do what everyone else does.”

I nodded. “Okay. Call me if something comes up. See you at 1.”

Then I left and wrote my dumb little Facebook status about feeling like an 80’s parent for dropping her off curbside. 

When I picked her up, I asked how it went going in by herself. She said, “Fine. It was confusing at first. I followed these people into the MPR but then someone tapped me and said I needed a name tag, so I had to go back. I figured it out though.”

So, she did have problems, just like I was worried about. Then she figured them out.  Without me. All by herself.  

There’s something to this 80’s parenting guys.