When my daughter was teaching in a preschool a few years ago, the director of the school brought in an ‘expert’ to discuss generational differences. My darling Millennial assessed it as a means for the director to finally understand how to deal with the teachers and the students’ parents, not necessarily as anything useful for the teachers themselves. She summed up her key learnings as: Baby Boomers are the ‘read a book’ generation – they raise their children by doing research and reading Dr. Spock. If your baby doesn’t sleep through the night, then you should read a book; if your child isn’t doing well in school, the solution is to read a book – you get the picture. They’re also the generation that brought us the helicopter parent – constantly trying to prevent failure. My own experience is that the need to prevent anything from possibly going wrong is that if something does go wrong, it’s seen as a reflection on the parent as a person (i.e. it’s a personal failing of the parent if the child isn’t the best and brightest, most brilliant, most successful child, therefore parents must proactively ensure that their child never fails at anything). If you want to achieve the best outcomes, then you should read the experts and research how to create the outcome that you’re trying to achieve.
My generation (Gen X) was summed up as the ‘what’s the worst that can happen?’ generation. If your kid wants to play in the street, you should let them – then deal with the fallout. If your baby doesn’t sleep through the night, try the family bed – the worst that can happen is that you roll over on the baby or he/she falls out of bed. I read an online article that suggested another term for this type of parenting – the ‘Stealth Parent.’ The idea is that that parents swoop in only when needed instead of hovering like helicopters. I guess that’s another way of putting the concept of only intervening when disaster is about to happen, as opposed to the constant vigilance of the helicopter parent who is watching directly for any potential, itty-bitty little thing to go wrong (and therefore, to prove to the world what a terrible parent they are). Recently, I’ve heard of the ‘snow plow’ parent, one that clears the path of their child of every possible obstacle to success (think ‘Varsity Blues’ and the parents who paid to ensure their kids acceptance at elite universities). I’ve seen this in action, but mostly in the younger end of the Gen X parents, and maybe the older Millennials themselves. This style of parenting wasn’t on my radar when I was raising my kids, so I may be too old to fall victim to this idea.
So, what does this ‘Stealth Parent’ look like? This blog is about how I think I demonstrated this type of parenting. Of course, I’ll caveat this by saying that my upbringing was unique even for my generation, and probably had more direct impact on my parenting style then the generation that I fall into. While my father was born in 1919, served in World War II and died when I was 21 (during my third year of college); my mother was born in 1931 and was only 13 years old during the war. She was an only child and spent much of her childhood around race horses. Unlike many women of her generation, she breastfed us (most women were forced to bottle feed, because, at the time, it was pushed on them that modern science is always better than nature), and she held to many of the most popular feminist ideals while teaching us things like how to cook, knitting & sewing, cleaning and how to hold our liquor. My sisters and I were the epitome of the latch-key kids, and were generally on our own after school. She had some very different ideas about raising children that influenced my own parenting style, so some of what I did with my kids is more influenced by having an unconventional mother than by my generation. An unconventional mother, plus being INTJ (Myers Briggs) probably equates to me being pretty unique in my generation, but such is life – we’re not just influenced by one factor in our overall life experience.
Natural childbirth – as I mentioned in other blogs, I did natural childbirth with both my kids. What this means is that you’re very focused on healthy eating (including a high protein diet) and exercise, as well as viewing childbirth as a natural thing (not a medical event) – the idea is that you’re effectively training for a marathon for 9 months and you need to get yourself into shape. If you weren’t comfortable with a home birth (we weren’t), then you did everything possible to ensure that the hospital let you get on with having your baby, and that there were as few interventions as possible. For us, this took the shape of a very detailed birth-plan that was supplied to both the CNM (Certified Nurse Midwife) and the hospital. You were also encouraged to learn everything you could about why things were done – for example, the eyedrops routinely put in the baby’s eyes right after birth are actually to prevent blindness resulting from the mother having chlamydia. Now, if you were already tested for STIs during your routine prenatal care, and you/your husband were faithful, then there’s no chance you’d actually enter the hospital with chlamydia. Ergo, no reason at all for the eyedrops. I won’t go into everything here, but you get the idea – we did our homework, and we effectively had a home-birth in the hospital. Note that we weren’t necessarily popular with the hospital staff, as they like the ‘one size fits all’ approach where everyone does everything the same, but I ended up giving birth to two very healthy children and no medical interventions in either case.
Family bed – we couldn’t afford for me to stay home with the kids, so after my son was born, I took as much time off as possible, which turned out to be only 12 weeks. I knew that eventually I’d be going back to work, so we’d have to figure out how to make that adjustment. My son was a big baby at birth – all 9 pounds 13 ounces of him. As a result, he was a big eater. For about the first four or five months of life, he ate every 2 hours around the clock. During the overnight eating sessions, I’d take him out on the couch in the living room and doze on and off as he ate. As the imminent return to work arrived, I told my husband that there was no way I was going to be able to function at work when I was up every 2 hours around the clock, or having to sleep on the couch. So, we decided to do the family bed. That way, I didn’t have to get up, go in the baby’s room, lay on an uncomfortable couch, etc. Rather, I could just roll over and not really wake up fully. It worked a dream, and even though going back to work at 12 weeks was difficult, we had a solution that worked for us. We didn’t do any research on this, or even read any books – my son was up every 2 hours, I needed to sleep and voila – the family bed.
Baby #2 and ‘where’s my mommy?’ – When my daughter was born, we continued with the natural childbirth, but still had the niggling fear of a home-birth. She came much earlier than we expected, about 10 days before her due date (and she’s been ahead of things ever since. . .). Given that she was much smaller than my son (a mere 7 pounds, 9 ounces), she came extremely fast – making us realize that if we’d known, then going to the hospital was a waste of time, effort and the insurance company’s money. Anyway, at that stage, my son was still nursing, and I had never been away from home overnight before. He and Dad could probably handle being bachelors one night – go to Grandmas and have things he wasn’t allowed at home, enjoy some daddy-son time, and so on. The idea of being gone for several nights was concerning, and I wasn’t at all sure how he would handle it. Therefore, I insisted on leaving the hospital the day after my daughter was born. She was technically 10 days early, so the CNM told me that I could go, as long as the Pediatrician agreed. The Pediatrician came by to check her out and told me that I could leave, but that I needed to bring her in to the office in 10 days to ensure that she was growing, and the breastfeeding was ‘taking’ (whatever that means). I laughed and said that if she didn’t eat, she’d die; but I agreed that I’d bring her in for a weigh-in. Now, if you think that I’d take a newborn baby out into Minnesota weather in January, then you’d be wrong. There was no way that I was taking her to the doctor’s office just to be weighed. As my second child, I knew very well how to count wet diapers (oh, we used cloth diaper service) and could certainly tell whether she was getting enough to eat. And, she did eat, and she did live, and I’d make the same decision again. Or, maybe I’d decide to do a home birth and skip all the hospital protocols and what not.
Family vacation ala Boundary Waters Canoe Area – after my son was born, and I returned to work, we decided to take a family camping vacation. Somehow, we decided that going to the BWCA and doing wilderness tent camping was a good idea. So, when he was 4 months old, we packed up the car and headed to northern Minnesota for a grand tour of the BWCA with baby in tow. The trip we planned involved portaging a canoe from lake to lake and tent camping for a week. Since we didn’t own the proper equipment for this, we rented everything that we needed. The clerk at the rental store cautioned us to boil the water for the baby’s formula. We just laughed and said that we’d make sure my water was purified, since boiling the milk wouldn’t be entirely comfortable for me. I may write later about that trip, but suffice it to say that I don’t know of any baby book that would encourage a young couple to take a 4-month-old tent camping.
I’m not doing your homework for you – when my son entered Kindergarten, there was an on-going assignment for the kids to create projects for each letter of the alphabet. They were ‘studying’ the letters and were to produce something that represented the letter of the week. The Baby-Boomer, over achieving parents who wanted to ensure that their child had the absolute best letter project each week spent hours doing the project for their child. Of course, the child had to stand by to watch mommy or daddy slaving away on the letter project, or maybe they could hold the glue gun and put a spot ‘here.’ My poor son was forced to do his own projects. Sure, I’d help him with things that were visually difficult for him to do (due to the vision impact of his albinism), but I wasn’t going to do the project for him. His projects turned out exactly how you’d expect a 5-year old’s project to turn out. It was a difficult line to hold, and it made me angry with his teacher for enabling these other parents to present their own work as their child’s, but I thought it better that my son learn to do his own work and not rely on me to complete class assignments for him.
I want sugared cereal! – my daughter and I had a little battle at one point over whether or not sugared cereals were allowed in our house. My position was that when we went on vacation, or she visited someone else’s house, then she could have whatever she wanted for breakfast. In our house, we ate healthy foods – no sugared cereals, no soda pop. One day when she was about 2 or 3 years old, as we were going through our local grocery store, she had a knock-down, drag-out temper tantrum in the cereal aisle. The fact that everyone was looking at us made very little difference to me. I simply told her that I was done with this behavior, and I was leaving. I took my purse out of the shopping cart, and started to walk out of the store. I don’t know whether the idea that I was leaving her there (wailing on the floor) or that I left a full cart of groceries was more traumatic, but she came running after me and begged me not to go. We never had another discussion about whether we could buy sugared cereals. An elderly couple came up to me later and the woman was effusive about what a good job I had done refusing to give into her tantrum. I didn’t actually know that parents routinely did that, until a friend talked about bribing her child with candy so that she’d allow herself to be strapped into a car seat. Sorry, I didn’t ‘do’ bribes with my kids, if they didn’t do as I asked, they suffered the logical consequences (as demonstrated at the grocery store and below in the case of wine story).
Let’s learn a healthy respect for alcohol – when the kids were young, we decided that they’d get a very small glass of wine at major holiday dinners. I had been raised this way, and felt that it helped to demystify alcohol and make it ‘not a big deal.’ I had a collection of liqueur glasses from my uncle, that looked like miniature wine glasses. To allay any shock and horror from my audience, they only held about an ounce, if that. . . So, on holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, we would poor a small glass of wine for the kids to have during the dinner. They were given one glass each. On one infamous Thanksgiving when my daughter was about 6 years old, we had followed our usual practice, and like all our dinners were chatting away as a family, and not really paying attention to what they were doing as we talked (our dinners were never rushed). At the end of the meal, my daughter got up from the table and literally stumbled away, nearly falling over. My husband started laughing and asked her how many glasses of wine she had drunk – 8! Oh dear! That one backfired – we didn’t stop the practice, but we did put the wine bottle out of reach at the next holiday dinner. Sorry, honey, no refills for you!
These are some early examples, let’s now turn to the later years.
How dare you drink my wine! – when my son was 16, we were living in a Boston suburb. I had started to buy wine by the case, including ‘putting it down’ in the basement so that it could mature. One day, I was going through the wine and noticed that a box that was supposed to be a full case of wine was entirely filled with empty bottles. I knew exactly what had happened. My son had his bedroom in the basement, and had been entertaining his buddies in his room. The wine had simply evaporated – ha! I pulled him aside and told him sternly that he was going to replace that case of wine. He had just started his first real job at Staples, so was earning ‘some’ money. He exclaimed, ‘but Mom, I can’t buy a case of wine, I’m not legal!’ I told him that he was going to join me at the wine store, and I would select the case and bring it to the counter. Then, at the time I went to pay for the case, he would give me his bank card. He never drank another case of my wine with his friends at my house again. When you’re only making a little above minimum wage, and working about 10 to 15 hours a week, cases of good quality wine are quite un-affordable.
You can always move home – at 18, my son decided to follow his heart and move to upstate New York. He rather abruptly quit his job and moved away. There was a slight glitch – my agreement with him was that as long as he was living at home, I’d pay for things like food and lodging. If he moved away to go to school, I would continue to support him as far as food and lodging. However, moving for ‘a girl,’ meant that he was all grown up and on his own. Unfortunately, it took longer than he’d planned to land a job. He called me to say that he’d fallen behind on bills, the girl’s parents wanted him to contribute to rent, and so on. I said,’ sorry to hear that, but you have a room in my house still and I’m sure your old company would take you back’ – this can be translated as ‘not my issue, you’ve made your bed and you can sleep in it.’ I suggested that he call the bank to find out what to do about his credit cards and that if he didn’t have a job by Christmas, he could simply move home again. He did eventually land a job (getting an offer just before Christmas), and everything worked out. The interesting thing was all the comments I received (mostly from my Baby Boomer friends) who said that they could never do that to their child. I told them that he needed to learn from his mistakes and take responsibility for himself. If I bailed him out, how long would I end up supporting him? A few years later, during one of our weekly catch-ups, he told me that his car was making squeaky sounds and he thought that the brakes might be going. He didn’t have the money to replace them, so he was just ignoring it. I immediately sent him a check for the brakes. He told me he was confused – why did I cut him off when he first moved away, but then I’d just send a check to pay for car brakes. I told him that your brakes going, besides a potential for dying if you crashed, was an unexpected expense that he couldn’t have anticipated. Part of being a family is that when you’re in real financial trouble, the family helps you. Moving away without going to school or having a job wasn’t an emergency, but your brakes failing is . . .
My mom is on her way – both my kids were very active in the Children of the American Revolution (an organization for descendants of patriots who fought in the American Revolution) when they were in their early pre-teen and teen years. When my daughter was 16, she held a national office in the organization and was therefore encouraged to go on summer tour. The summer tour was a series of conferences held all over the US to encourage members to participate in the program for that year and generally have a good time learning about the country, and socializing with a bunch of high school and college aged friends. The tour involved her flying to different US cities and checking into the conference hotel for the two or three days of the conference. Since I was working, it wasn’t like I would be traveling with her. So, we devised a process where a 16-year-old could check into a hotel room without an adult. The way it worked was that she would go to the reception desk and tell them she was checking into my room early. She’d explain that she was there for the conference, but I was still at work (or on a later flight or something equally probable), and therefore, she’d like to get into the room early. Only a small number of the hotel reception staff questioned this, and I had maybe two calls to confirm that it was ok to let her in my room early. Naturally, I’d tell the hotel that it was perfectly fine to do so, and that I was so appreciative of them letting her check in before I arrived. Interestingly, they never followed up to find out why I didn’t show up.
There are so many more examples, but I’m afraid this has run on too long. While my parenting style may not be conventional, I’m happy to say that both my kids survived it and are now fully launched (married, working, contributing members of society with no apparent or obvious damage). I’m looking forward to seeing how my unique parenting style is translated (or not) into the future generations, if or when there are grandchildren. Of course, that will also lead to another blog topic ‘Being a Gen X Grandma’ – now that will be fun!
