Dave Barry: Grown-ups used to have fun

I think there's also a little bit/good bit/shitpile of entitlement when it comes to many parents. The entitlement centers on what I've heard referred to as the "designer baby" syndrome: My child is going to live up to my every dream and, indeed, is going to be a reflection of just what a wonderful person I am. Regarding this, as Ron Washington said in Moneyball, I seen some shit.

The most egregious example of this was a few years ago, at the lunch held after my wife's younger nephew (younger son of my wife's younger sister) was baptized. My wife's younger sister always was very, very good-looking, and her career has spanned vocations (high-end banking, big-time non-profit fundraising) for which looks aren't trivial. Now she's very smart, don't get me wrong, but when I've met her co-workers, male and female alike, it's like I'm looking at some Madison Ave. version of whatever entity she's at.

So, anyway, at this lunch were lots and lots of her friends/co-workers from over the years. A husband and wife of her acquaintance -- the wife was a co-worker -- were sitting at our table, along with my wife's brother and his wife. All of us were about the same age, but the friends/co-workers had a relatively young set of twins (maybe 2 or so) with them. They'd adopted the twins -- I don't recall whether it was past the time for the wife, who had a young adult daughter from a previous marriage -- and engaged in a lively conversation about the adoption process with my wife's brother/sis-in-law, who adopted their one child.

Anyway, these friends/co-workers began talking about the expectations they had for the birth mother. There were the garden-variety (I would assume) concerns about drugs, mental illness, etc. These didn't shock me. But it turns out that they also expected the birth mother to be physically attractive. I'm not kidding. They made it very clear that they considered it a certainty that, were they to conceive, of course any of their children would be attractive. Therefore, so as to keep things on the up-and-up, only pregnant women who were lookers would be considered (and, ideally, they'd get a sense of what the father looked like, too).

About 10 minutes into this -- a period of time during which both my wife and I were decidedly not participating in the conversation -- I took a peak at my wife. The look on her face! It was all she could do to keep her trap shut. And had I looked at her much, I'd have broken down into absolute howls. I have to tell you, there was some serious, serious trashing of a couple going on in our minivan on the ride home.

 

Fuck Dave Barry. Maybe my generation (Gen X) is more nervous (or attentive, to be more accurate) because our Boomer parents were so unbelievably immature and self-absorbed that they forgot to be, you know, parents. God knows mine had me about a decade before they were ready and their marriage lasted a quarter that long. And they each fucked up the aftermath in their own special, unique 1970s style way.

 

This is kind of what I'm talking about.

The Gen X generation is, IMO, more nervous and attentive, and more self-conscious about the latter. (Do you see me paying attention?) And I don't think there's any question it's a reaction to Baby Boomers who went about their lives just about however they damn pleased, and figured their kids would get along. Which many did. But that didn't shut down the resentment or confusion of that era. Gen Xers are pissed the fuck off that Baby Boomers didn't pull their gaze from their own pursuits to pay a little attention to them.

It plays out in journalism, frankly. You have old columnists, Boomers, holding on, waxing nonsense about the greatness of baseball in the 70s, the NBA in the 80s and college football in the early 90s, ignoring metrics and often any kind of critical analysis to string together well-worn cliches into a pleasing narrative. They've been at it 30 years, in these jobs others used to covet, and by the looks of things, they'll be at it about 10-15 more.

And though we've always presumed the backlash against this stuff is rooted in a desire for more knowledge, for more accuracy, I think it's at least much about: If you're not going to move over, we'll underline just how irrelevant and out of touch you are. Deadspin, IMO, is built on the construct of screw you, Baby Boomer. The hell do you know? The whole argument about snark vs. smarm is rooted in that basic emotion. It's moralism -- to which Boomer feel like their experiences and history and entitle them -- vs. relativism.

 

Reading that column was a lot more enjoyable than reading the four-plus pages of commentary on it.

 

To be fair, as many horror stories Ive seen about moms getting arrested for leaving their kids unattended in the car for two minutes, I'd think of have a fucking complex about having fun and livingy life as well.

I don't and probably won't have kids in my life but the landscape has changed in such a way that doesn't allow parents to have the kind of fun Barry describes.

Big huge parties, those get the cops called and CPS involved. That's just a fact. Or at least a legitimate fear.

 

This thread reminded me of one of the first Mad Men episodes, which featured a kids' birthday party attended by the neighborhood adults. Most of them (including one of Betty's pregnant friends) were smoking and drinking, and weren't hesitant to discipline children who weren't their own. I recall being shocked by that episode at first, then realized it wasn't much different than the occasional parties my parents had during my youth in the '60s and early '70s.

 

I'm glad I grew up when I did. Times were seemingly more "innocent" and we could traipse around major cities without much fear of abduction or molestation, or whatever the crime of the day might be. But then again, I wasn't Catholic and I never ran into Jimmy Savile...

 

1. It's a Dave Barry column. He's not a sociologist, he just writes to entertain you for a few minutes. And he was successful in that goal (at least for me).

2. The gatherings of this generation of adults/parents ARE different. Anybody here go to any card-playing parties lately? How about neighborhood block parties? (actually, our block has one every summer, organized by a retired couple Barry's age or slightly older. This 43-year-old father of two highly recommends them). Most of the gatherings among adults these days — if not centered around a kiddie birthday party — involve showing off your big-screen TV.

To summarize: if today's parents actually get a night off from their children to spend with another couple, they will go out to a restaurant and/or club rather than host a dinner party at their home.

Not saying one way is better than the other, but it's certainly different than 50 years ago.

 

This is mostly a caricature, not reality.

I and a lot of parents like me go to "poker nights." The cul de sac I live on has parties all the time when the weather is good. Where we lived before this has block parties every Sunday.

I've never once been invited to a "show off my TV" party, nor would anyone I know even think to throw one.

We can debate differences in generations without applying the worst stereotypes to one and the best stereotypes to the other. Because, at the end of the day, neither of them are really true.

 

Fixed. They weren't. You just did not have every facebook friend share every news item about harm coming to a child. So nobody obsessed about these 1-in-a-million occurrences the way they do now.

You were no safer walking home from school or soccer practice then as you are now. But nothing likely happened to you. Because you were part of the 999,999-out-of-a-million to which nothing happened.

 

I wish for the good, old days when all we had to worry about were Indian attacks, smallpox, bear maulings and lack of food and water.

No one had the time or patience for helicopter parenting baseball leagues and pederast priests then.

 

I stubbed my toe on one of my son's toys this morning. You have no idea what REAL hardship is.