Dave Barry: Grown-ups used to have fun

I think kids should see that their parents are still actual people.

 

MC, I'll tell you ... I've been at this parenthood thing awhile (my oldest just turned 21). My kids are what I love most in life, but being with them isn't the only thing in life I love to do. Trouble is, if you don't watch out that's all you wind up doing. And unless you're rolling in cash, that's all you'll wind up being able to afford.

My youngest will leave for college in a little more than 5 years. I don't want to look around at that point and wonder what I'd like to do with the rest of my life.

 

Agreed. And, too, kids want and need parents not to be around at certain times.

 

So ... what? Take up smoking and drink more booze? And, do drugs?

In essence, choose those things over your kids, but only sometimes?

Also, we'd be remiss in not debunking the "our generation went through REAL hardship" bullshit.

 

Drink more booze is good. Not so much to debilitate you, but if "drink more booze" is synonymous with "get out of the house and relate to the world as an adult," then yes.

 

That's a universal idea, not one that needs to be conveyed in the "we had fun, and you're a bunch of overly worrying pussies" way Barry did.

 

I don't think I've ever seen anyone get visibly angry about a Dave Barry column before.

 

Sorry. One of my biggest pet peeves is this game of generational superiority a lot of people like to play.

I'll bet my generation is way more concerned about pedophile priests than Barry's was, too. And, maybe, just maybe, pedophile priests wouldn't be such a problem now if Barry's generation had put down the smokes and acid long enough to pay a little attention to it.

 

Don't you think he acknowledges stuff like that, though? Like the line about not drinking and driving. He's addressing the extreme ridiculousness, like the car seat arms race.

 

And the helmets. Always the helmets.

 

A gross misrepresentation:

They didn’t have car seats, so they didn’t worry that the car seat they just paid $249 for might lack some feature that the car seat their friends just paid $312 for does have.

And let's not even start on everything that's wrong with the preceding sentence:

They didn’t go to prenatal classes, so they didn’t find out all the things that can go wrong when a person has a baby, so they didn’t spend months worrying about those things. They just had their babies, and usually it worked out, the way it has for millions of years.

 

Right. I'm not a huge fan of that last paragraph, which definitely veers into, "My mom drank vodka from the bottle while she was pregnant, and I turned out fine!"

One of the biggest differences between then and now is something he doesn't address - moms typically did not work back then, and had much more time to spend with Junior and his sister.