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New York, 4:25 PM
Tue Nov 24
71 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/21/09
As an aside, I actually didn't have sex with any (Italian) men while I was in Italy, but I always suspected they would be really bad in bed because the vast majority of their sexual experiences occured either in cars, hotel rooms or their parents' house when mom and dad were out at the pizzeria. #overprotectiveparents
10/21/09
10/21/09
(I say this, of course, as a former free-range child who went to class in college precisely because no one had made me go in high school and so I knew how. So maybe I do lack some comprehension of the dimensions of the "helicopter parent" idea.) #overprotectiveparents
10/21/09
10/21/09
It has been suggested to me that my 3 yo son needed Occupational Therapy because he didn't eat yoghurt. No, sadly, I'm not making that up. #overprotectiveparents
10/21/09
10/21/09
hahaha! yup that's the way to balance things out huh;) #overprotectiveparents
10/21/09
And yes, to not do so is a form of child abuse. Every parent can have a different way of doing it. Ultimately, however, your job as a parent is about making a functional adult.
10/21/09
10/21/09
I'm not sure why a 12 year old boy can't tell his parents/grandparents to stop, especially if he realizes that he's "different" from everyone else in his class. Because I definitely would. And I come from a culture where it's expected that one lives at home until marriage. #overprotectiveparents
10/21/09
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10/21/09
Helicopters around here (Orlando) are pretty evenly divided amongst parents of boys and girls, but I would say a greater percentage of girls I see *have* helicopters.
I remember one girl at my son's tae kwon do class. She wouldn't try any of the moves and at one point started screaming and having a tantrum on the mat. The instructor asked her if she was OK. The mother hugged the girl, fixed the instructor with an accusing eye, and said, "Well, YOU told her 'NO.'"
Yeah, in a nice way, 'cause she was doing something wrong.
Thank Pete she never came back. #overprotectiveparents
10/21/09
"The majority of the kids I saw were carefree with normal parents."
This is the part that always gets missed on these threads. Yes, there are the neurotics, the mammones, the helicopters, but people need to stop assuming they are the norm. They are just the most interesting to talk about. #overprotectiveparents
10/22/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
I thank God my parents expected me to do my own shit. My mom was actually confused that they wanted her to meet with my profs on parents' weekend. She was like, aren't you way past the age of parent-teacher conferences? How you're doing here is YOUR problem. #overprotectiveparents
10/21/09
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10/21/09
The case above, however, is purely abusive. I'm fairly certain that most of the Italian women I know would be horrified that a child was left so underdeveloped. I mean, bite size pieces? No friends? Motor-skills of a three-year-old? No. For all my criticisms, I will always defend Italian society for the beneficial interest in children. Unfortunately, they just keep on treating them like children as they grow older...
Also, I would like to chime in that yes, blanket statements suck but I was getting told I should marry a nice Italian boy and have kids when I was twelve. And then they tried to set me up with one. At twelve-years-old. My Auntie wasn't allowed to open up a bank account without her husband until the 80's, or so I've been told, despite the fact she worked as an English teacher and earned her own income. Many Catholic countries are more liberal now but mammone is a cultural phenomenon that has gone on well before the present adult generation and it's a long time before misogyny gets flushed out.
10/21/09
10/21/09
But even that's a weak generalization-- it's everywhere, especially among boys my age. Clearly, our cultural constructs make it much more okay to be an overgrown man-child than an overgrown woman-child, and we're told things like "girls just mature faster" in order to justify it. (Which is true, biologically/psychologically, but the definition of biological/psychological maturity does not encompass shit like "knows how to use a washing machine.")
However, it's not just mothers who feed the system. Example: my noisy, divorced, Irish Catholic family. My younger brother is the Golden Child who Can Do No Wrong, as elected by my father, and only my father. My mother thinks he's an inattentive fuck-up. But there's not much she can do about it-- yes, she refuses to do my brother's laundry, but he just brings his dirty clothes to my dad's with him the next week to have them done. She won't pack his lunch, so my dad gives him money for the weeks he's at her house to buy school lunches, because God forbid he should make his own damn peanut butter sandwich. Meanwhile, I've been doing my own laundry since I turned 12, and have packed my own lunches since first grade. #overprotectiveparents
10/21/09
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10/21/09
See also: my cousin who canceled her wedding to a WASPy mama's boy two days before the ceremony was due to take place, because in a scuffle over wedding details he declared to her that he would always be loyal to his mother over his future wife. He found himself promptly ditched and the huge wedding canceled. I still respect her decision.
I now make it a policy never to date any man who shows signs of expecting women to cater to him just like his mama used to do. My now-boyfriend is fabulously self-reliant, having been raised by a single mom who took no shit from anyone and expected her sons to learn how to take care of themselves).
10/21/09
10/21/09
Eloping FTW! #overprotectiveparents
10/21/09
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10/21/09