Parenting 102

When Ms. Plaza was asked if she would correct her child immediately when her child does something wrong, she said that it "depends; if it is in danger." Ms. Plaza called her child an it; does Ms. Plaza feel superior to her child? Does she think that her child is just a little animal that cries and crawls? Maybe people do have children to have meaningful lives, like Snyder says; parents are like Gods to them, their creator. Cindy, like many other kids including myself, have been taught to call our parents, with a pronoun rather than their name. She says that only her peers can call her by her first name, her children cannot; and maybe this is because she was brought up to call her superiors mom, dad.

I thought it was weird for Mr. Marks to compare the experience of having children to a science fair. He makes it sound like children are our experimenting objects and we all try to get the better outcome so it makes the experimenter look good. Marks also said that the middle class coaches their kids while the lower class tells their kids what to do and "the natural approach does not prepare kids for the economy." He also said that the middle class bothers to do research for their kids while the lower class waits for things to happen to their kids. This reflects the economy; because of capitalism, many parents use the normal approach to prepare their kids for the economy. While the economy allows the middle class to be more educated to coach their kids, the lower class does not know enough so they were told what to do and so will their kids. The middle class works hard for the outcome so they do research on parenting while most of the lower class are tired of trying to become rich so they just wait for things to happen and do the same for their kids.

I do not feel like I have learned much from this short parenting mini unit; I still do not know how kids should be parented, whether it should be an authoritative, authoritarian, or permissive style. There were not specific things that stood out to me; the research and interviews just reinforced the obvious. Marks did say that he took his daughter to various places like the music class to broaden her choices in the future. He also said that when you have kids, there is absolutely no time for yourself so the kid must be the center of attention. The websites said that babies should sleep with the parents and that they should be breast fed rather than formulas. What I did find out is that parenting might just be something that comes to you when you are in the situation.

However, there were some small stuff that I learned. Babies do not get spoiled when you attend their needs very often, it is a method of communication. Marks said that having kids will make you a slave, and I totally agree; you would have to keep your eye on the kid 24 hours a day and "look like a moron" to make them happy. In the future if I ever have kids, I should probably take them to classes at the early years to give them a head start. Then again, maybe not having kids will save me that extra trip to depression.