Family-Oriented or Kid-Centric?

by John Ettorre

As recently as the late Middle Ages, historians have found, kids weren’t seen so much as kids but rather as miniature adults. Those who have studied the period’s literature, correspondence and artwork all point to one observation: childhood and adolescence weren’t recognized as a distinct stage of life until relatively recently.

You may have noticed that things have changed a bit in our contemporary culture.

These days, entire books are devoted to so-called "tween" culture. Think tank economists issue reports about how much influence over the family budget these pre-adults command, and experts flock to endless symposia, where they consider what it all means. Youth culture has pretty well overwhelmed the larger culture. The notion of family, meanwhile, sometimes seems to increasingly revolve solely around one subset thereof: the kids.

Sure, we try our best to stake out a different message when we’re in our lecturing-to-our-kids mode. Who among us hasn’t heard ourselves on automatic nagging pilot, tartly proclaiming some variation of this message: "The family doesn’t revolve around you!"

But then we promptly send a different message by doing a thousand small (and sometimes large) things that give the lie to that suggestion. We give Joey or Janey a ride to a friend’s house when it would have taken them just a moment to walk there in clear weather. Or perhaps we try to squeeze a precious family vacation around a host of more trivial events on the all-important kids’ schedules.

Baby Boomer parents don’t really need experts to tell them that things sometimes seem a little out of kilter with the modern American family. All they have to do is reflect on how it was when they were growing up. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, the average parent rarely, if ever, attended their child’s sporting events, which in any case were far more informal affairs. Today, on the other hand, you may feel as though the folks at county family services are going to arrest you for child neglect if you miss a single game while undergoing emergency heart surgery. Somewhere between those two extremes we should be able to find a little balance.

When you delve into this topic in any serious way, you run up against a classic problem—call it middle-age fogeyism. It’s best captured in the familiar intergenerational joke about the clueless, grumpy older person who chides a young whippersnapper about how spoiled they are compared to how it was in their day: Why, I used to walk 20 miles in the snow each way to school every day, uphill in both directions. Cue the rolled eyes and disgusted looks.

But the notion that we’ve gone too far in being kid-centric is actually an easy case to make. My wife, for instance, often recalls how independent she was as an adolescent, biking to all her activities alone. She recounts it without a hint of regret or a trace of suggestion that her parents should have done otherwise. After all, it helped shape her into a sturdy and resourceful adult. Still, I can’t help noticing how she’ll sometimes bring this issue up only hours after chauffeuring our boys through an entire day of intricately planned events in far-flung places.

In her defense—and in defense of an entire generation of American parents—we parent so very differently today largely because the world has changed so much in a single generation. Suburban sprawl and the decline of the neighborhood school have combined to yield longer distances for our kids to attend events. And the issue of safety, the possibility that a stranger could snatch our kids, is never far from the mind. That’s true even though, statistically speaking, it’s not a whole lot more likely to occur today than it was then. But statistics tend to wither in the face of a media culture that bombards parents and guardians with the frightening specter of flocks of missing and abused kids.

And so we schlep (to use the priceless Yiddish term for "pulling something too big").

The sad truth is this: while we like to think that we’re family-centered people, it’s more often the case that we’re really kid-centric. Whatever the reason, results are the same. Families that don’t work like they should. And kids who grow up internalizing the message that the world revolves around them, setting them up for a rude surprise when they get into the workplace.

Does that mean that I long to return to the Middle Ages (not a chance—no air conditioning and bad evening reception of NBA games) or even to the way it was when I was growing up (not really)? Like most parents, I love being an integral part of my kids’ lives, and wouldn’t have it any other way. Most of it seems completely natural. Plus, I really didn’t have it so bad as a kid. Heck, I only walked 18 miles each way to school.

John Ettorre is a Cleveland-based writer and editor who has also worked in Washington, D.C. and Chicago. Over a 20-year career, his writing has appeared in more than 70 publications, including the New York Times. His online weblog, Working With Words, can be found at www.workingwithwords.blogspot.com. To reach John, send e-mail to: jettorre@voyager.net or leave a message at (440) 708-2994.