My friend Nancy McDermott, is a writer and a moderator for Park Slope Parents. She writes for an British website called, Spiked.
horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against
misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and
irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms. spiked is
endorsed by free-thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, and
hated by the narrow-minded such as Torquemada and Stalin. Or it would
be, if they were lucky enough to be around to read it.
She sent me this excerpt from one of her articles, Parenting: It's Not Scienc, which should be of interest to OTBKB readers. Read the rest here.
neighbourhood unfold a stroller. She balanced her granddaughter, a cute
girl who looked to be about a year old, on one hip, while struggling
wildly with her free arm to open a trendy but stubbornly folded
stroller.
Having only recently escaped the stroller ghetto myself, I knew the secret:
that is, the button or lever or clasp hidden in plain sight on every
stroller manufactured in the past five years. The one that, with a
single touch, miraculously transforms 20lbs of metal and
water-resistant canvas into a chariot robust enough to do several miles
a day on the streets of Brooklyn.
She thanked me with a mixture of relief and embarrassment. ‘That’s
okay’, I told her. ‘Strollers are a lot more complicated than they used
to be. I only know about this one because I have one, too.’ ‘It seems
like everything is more complicated’, she sighed. ‘I sometimes feel
like I need a PhD just to babysit. I don’t know how parents today
manage.’
The idea that parenting is more complicated than ever before is an
observation I hear often from my older relatives, and even mothers with
children born only a decade earlier than my own. And though there’s
always something of a ‘generation gap’ between families as childrearing
fads come and go, I couldn’t help but think the silver-haired lady had
a point.