Quote:
Originally Posted by Munchkin03
Back in graduate school, I had a conversation with one of my friends about this very topic. She had gone to some conference about how parenting shifted somewhere around the early to mid 80s. It used to be that people just had kids. They had them when they were young, without really really trying and if they couldn't have kids, they adopted (back when it was easy to do so) or they just didn't have kids.
Around the early 80s, it was a much bigger deal to have kids, for middle class families at least. For the first time, mainstream folks timed their careers around the best time to start a family. If it wasn't very easy, they spent thousands of dollars on difficult adoptions or reproductive technologies. Even if it was easy to have a kid, the safety of that baby became the center of their lives. This was around the time that "crib death," something that a lot of women experienced before, got the name SIDS. Remember the "Baby on Board" signs? Car seats weren't standard until around that time. In other words, people became so proud of their investment and creation that the kid could do no wrong.
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I was born in '86 and have younger siblings, but we were raised pretty old school. Don't get me wrong, my mom was all about car seats, cute baby outfits, and sterilizing everything (at least until around the time of the last kid), but my parents were never under the impression we can do no wrong. I got away with a few things here and there but not much, and when I got caught I got CAUGHT. I wasn't willing to drink in high school even when my friends started to because I weighed "buzz" with "punishment" and wasn't willing to risk it.
I've got younger friends who have gotten
arrested multiple times with no reaction from their parents. Their parents have helped them get out of these situations with not only no consequences at home but none legally, either. And it still floors me. If it were me and my parents...well my dad told me a long time ago that if I were in jail for a night and thought about calling him...don't bother.