Is your kid "manufactured"?

momofthreeboys
Sat, 01 Aug 2015 14:05:30 +0000

Whatever happened to the great immigrant experience of America?

I found this an interesting sentence. The great immigrant experience was that the “kids” of these immigrants got dropped off a the nearest public school speaking barely one word of English with no ESL and no other safety nets. Sink or swim. At least that was my father’s experience and dozens of his childhood neighbors and friends. I’m all about cultural traditions but I’m also not about enabling kids to NOT assimilate. I also think that generation of the great immigrant migration wanted their kids to assimilate as fast as possible and they, themselves, had very few “public” safety nets, fewer possibly than their off-spring.

I can’t speak to “manufactured” kids as that is not the experience of our friends and their children looking back as we dip our toes into our sixties, but I do see it more with “younger” parents whose lives seems much more consumed with their children and their children’s activities. Anecdotal but even if you follow some of these younger parents on FB every single post is about their kids…very few about them or what they and their spouse are up to. Makes you wonder if they do anything besides go to work, their once a year big family vaca, competitions, sports league games, dance recitals, and other kid things. Where are the little unstructured moments?