Laura on Life

No Footsteps to Follow

By Laura Snyder

[December 31, 2007]  Raising children is hard. It always has been. There is no instruction manual. As a result, I don't know what I'm doing any more than my mother did. Although I can take some of my cues from her, my experience raising kids is so different from my mother's.

Because my mother taught me, I know that the standard answer for why a child should not watch two dogs doing the nasty on your front lawn is: "Because I said so!" Tell me you haven't caught yourself saying that once or twice, even when you swore you never would.

However, other than the occasional "Don't make me come back there!" raising children now is different. Disagreements between teens and their parents used to be about wearing makeup, cutting their hair and when to get their ears pierced. Now, it's about cell phone minutes, tattoos and whether to get their -- (insert random body part) -- pierced.

It's no longer viable to send a kid to their room as punishment, because they want to be there. That's where they do all their socializing on My Space. If they are banned from the computer, you'd never know if they were receiving one of hundreds of text messages a day on their cell phone.

Teens are masters of the "the code" for text messages. Once while sitting next to my 16-year-old nephew, who was texting at the time, I read something that looked like: "Bananas, no, chickens, save me!" What exactly does that mean in their language? I'm not sure if the kid was describing an unappetizing lunch buffet and hoping my nephew would not delete it or if it was an SOS call from someone caught in the produce section of a poultry farm.

Whatever it was, it was definitely not something my mother ever had to deal with.

My mom says I have it easy because she never had disposable diapers. That may be true, but no tree-hugging ex-flower-child ever made her feel guilty about soaking cloth diapers in her toilet. Disposables come with the requisite guilt trip for filling up landfills and using trees to cover our babies' behinds. Being a mom who was once in the excrement-filled trenches with five children, I can't imagine a better use for a tree. Ask me again in 20 years when the memory of those trenches fades.

Some things my mother never said while I was growing up:

• "Put your Game Boy down and load the dishwasher!"

• "Did you remember to put that 2-liter bottle in the recycle bin?"

• "Put your seat belt on!"

Some things I've never said to my children:

• "Got a headache? Crush an aspirin in a teaspoon of water."

• "You just wait till your father gets home!"

• "Well, if you don't like ‘I Love Lucy,' try the other two channels."

My point is that things have changed and we can no longer raise our children the same way our parents did. It's not surprising that so many parents wonder about their own competency. Our points of reference have gone the way of the typewriter and eight-track tape player.

We're floundering in a 21st-century sea hoping for a 20th-century life preserver. My dad used to say that the only way to teach a kid to swim is to throw them in the deep end. If we did that now, we'd be imprisoned for child abuse. Our parents believed that if you spared the rod, you would spoil the child. My generation said, "Rods are not necessary for discipline." Today's young parents say, "What's wrong with spoiling them?"

Without that 20th-century life preserver, we seem to take any floating flotsam to come our way.

[By LAURA SNYDER]

You can reach the writer at [e-mail]. Or visit www.lauraonlife.com for more columns and info about her new book.

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