CSotD: How to save your hedges
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Today's Zits comes on the heels of an NPR article about how parenting styles affect drinking. The connection is a bit vague, except that the report says teens with parents who are too uncritical and teens with parents who are too controlling are both more apt to abuse alcohol. That sent me on a whole reverie about parenting styles.
The extremes are pretty easy to spot. In the Sixties, Catholics and Jews — that is, products of fairly strict values systems — were way over-represented among hippies and freaks, and, when I got out to Colorado, I met a lot of Mormons and military brats on the street as well. In fact, when the Green Beret murder case first came to light, Jeff MacDonald's description of the hippies he claimed had invaded his home was totally ridiculous, except that we gave a small bit of credibility to the idea that, if there was a gang of freaks on a military base, they might well say things like "Acid is groovy" for lack of proper counterculture role models.
At the other end of the scale was a fellow I knew freshman year in college whose father was a doctor in suburban LA. He wrote to his dad and said, "I smoked grass" and the dad wrote back and said, "Well, studies show that marijuana is not as harmful as thought." So he wrote and said, "Dad, I took bennies," and his dad wrote back and said, "You know, during the war, long-range bomber pilots took benzadrine and dexadrine to stay alert." So he wrote and said, "I dropped acid," and his dad wrote back, "Lysergic acid was originally seen as a treatment for menopause …"
Finally, the kid dropped out of school and about a year later, somebody ran into him when they were flying through Dallas. He had become a Hare Krishna and was selling flowers at the airport. No word on how understanding his father was about that, but I'm sure he was.
It's that spot in the middle that is hard to define. I don't think there are a lot of parents who say to themselves, "We try to be extreme in our parenting." Everybody thinks they're hitting the right balance until it really starts to fly out of control, and, even then, most of them have explanations for why Johnny and Susie aren't functioning properly, and those explanations tend to be external.
Which brings us to laundry. I like that Jeremy is doing his own laundry, and I like that his mother, Connie, is kibitzing but not directing. And I especially like that he has his own method and is satisfied with it.
Recently, Zits had a story arc in which Jeremy's friend Pierce had a party while his folks were out of town and, of course, it spiralled completely out of control. Walt and Connie were the grown-ups who wandered by and found teenagers ralphing in the hedges and who were able to step in and restore some order.
Thing is, if Connie made Jeremy separate his clothes by color and fabric, choose the right water temperatures for each, add the softener at the right point in the cycle, and then fold them just so, the party would have been at their house.
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