Parenting Advice from Ellen Pober Rittberg

Sure, my kids thought I was warm and fuzzy. But underlying it all was a stealth agenda of sorts. I knew there were certain values I wanted to emphasize: I wanted my kids to be independent but I didn’t want to raise a family of slugs (which on bad days, seemed like a definite possibility.)  I wanted them to be kind and considerate. But by the same time, I encouraged healthy self-deprecation, and without encouraging it, all of us could poke fun at each other within bounds.

Some of my extreme notions which worked for me was: I seriously restricted television when they were pre-K, and didn’t let them watch cartoons. I wanted them to experience life and to make decisions for themself in an age-appropriate way (appropriate to both them and me).

I rarely went to shopping malls, preferring to take them to arboretums, parks, and other places where they could learn and experience the world.

I refused to buy them certain brands of jeans which seemed ridiculously frivolous ans wasteful.

I didn’t check homework ever unless things reached crisis proportions (which I don’t think it ever did.) And when my middle son found out he needed to complete a whole raft of earth science labs pronto or else flunk the course, he got them all done.

I didn’t want to be their clean up squad but I tried to create an environment where, if they got into a situation they ought not to get into, they wouldn’t be too afraid to come to me.

There’s more, but this is a blog. And besides, there’s my book! (335 Things Your Teen Won’t Tell You, So I Will” (Turner Publishing, 2010)

Before blogs and twitter and other forms of social media, people’s social selves unless part of the literati were considered to be how they spoke, appeared, emoted, face to face up close and personal. A person who could be charming, useful to others, kind and cheerful (or arch and subtextual) and perhaps knowledgeable would likely be deemed socially skilled by enough people to be termed popular. But today all of that has changed. Now it’s all about mixing it up. Is anyone sure other than Malcolm Gladwell why things go viral? Is it as some would say our voyeuristic impulse? Else why the popularity of reality shows. Or is it that we are all collectively experiencing as a culture virtual replacement therapy. But replacement for what? In a time of economic and social dislocation people want to access and be accessible to others. Taking a sanguine view:  it the altruistic impulse gone madly and happily obsessive, it being the media-ization of life, the face to face contact largely replaced by the ipersonal/impersonal communication (i.e. social media or second-hand experience.) People want to pass on information, to share.They describe the diurnal but it’s really knowledge and acceptance we’re all after, the virtual embrace writ large. Or a market share. And hey, I’m in. I won’t fold. I’m just starting to get it. I nudge my young adult children to twitter. And why? Perhaps in the absence of what I needed to teach them, they will learn it here, here being social media. The Wife of Bath said that experience though not authority, was something worth having. The question is, am I experiencing? Have I experienced enough? Am I frittering away my life chasing the actual experience? Am I now foregoing experience in this desire to join the bandwagon. Lots of people via FourSquare telling where they’ve been, these virtual Hansel and Gretels leaving the binary bread trail. I’m not sure it’s good [my verbal equivalence of ”it is what it is”] but it’s all fascinating to me. Has even a telephone conversation become a form of abrupt demand for time, and therefore a social infelicity, a rudeness, as one young person told me. Better to text, she said. What does one have to do or not do to become socially stunted? I would stay tuned, but that dates me awfully. Cheers. Happy Mother’s Day all.