Parenting Without a Manual
with Talyaa Liera
I'm Talyaa, the poster child for the concept that there's no one right way to be a parent. I went from stay-at-home attachment-parenting mom of four to being the non-custodial parent, working as a professional writer and channel-psychic. Let's talk about throwing away the parenting manual and exploding the myths and mystique of motherhood!
Check out my personal blog at Juxtapositioning.
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The only question is — will it be a long slow death or a quick merciful one?
Remember School Picture Day? I remember wearing a horrid plaid dress with my hair tied up in thick yarn bows thicker than my finger, filing in line with a jittery class, sitting in front of some strange camera-dude on the school’s stage, and being asked to Smile! and Relax! while posed in front of a fake leafy background. Suuure.
Snap. There goes another year, documented in Package B containing one 8×12, 4 5×7’s, 8 3×4’s, and a fistful of wallet-sized chips of me, suitable for giving away to classmates or to the relatives we don’t like very much.
When I was about 12 I visited another kid’s home and there in full public view were all the kid’s school photos, displayed like growing stairsteps along the wall, each year’s photo another snapshot in time of a changing incarnation. I wished mine were displayed like that instead of stuck away in some drawer somewhere where mine undoubtedly were, maybe. Not that I wanted anyone to actually see my awkwardness. But those 8×10’s of zitty detail have to live on in some fashion, right?
Well, wrong. I think that school pictures are going the way of the dodo, and soon. After all, 97%* of us own digital photo devices of one sort or another. Phones, portable video, flash drives, and even actual cameras are being used on a regular basis to document our daily lives. While one could conjecture over the eventual destination of the 1.2 million* digital photos we snap EACH DAY as well as what all this will mean to future anthropologists following a YouTube and Twitter trail of goodness to try to figure out who we were as people, the fact is that the annual School Photo has become unnecessary. Obsolete. A Total Waste of Time. Buzz Bishop at Dad Camp agrees with me.
Do kids even like Picture Day? Other than the fact that it got us out of ordinary class and was something different for the day, I loathed mine. My own kids seem pretty blase about it.
The only thing school pictures are good for is for dragging out to show them to your kid’s dates and future mates 20 years later.
Do you love school pictures of your kids or do they seem unnecessary?
*an actual, made-up statistic
[And, I have to say, this photo is a bowl of awesome. I'd hate to think of a world without it. Photo credit anissat, stock.xchng]
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Yeah, so why did they have 3 or 4 different “picture days” within my kids’ first year of preschool? I didn’t sign up for any of them, but they took my kids’ pictures anyway.
My sister still takes her kid to a professional to get baby pictures. Whatever floats your boat. I never did and never plan to.
SKL | October 27th, 2010 at 6:48 pm
I hope they never do away with whole class photos. Those are priceless! I still treasure mine from elementary school; some people in the photos remain among my closest friends and others I have no idea what happened to. Most are somewhere in the middle: I haven’t seen them in a long time but hear about their lives through the grapevine and it’s nice to remember that shared foundation. And there are the beloved teachers in the background. It’s funny now to see how they weren’t actually that old after all.
Jesse | October 29th, 2010 at 8:16 am
Isn’t picture day a fund-raising opportunity for the school? I mean, I think ours gets a cut. Maybe. At least the photographers make money and probably bully the school into doing it. And then once those little packets come home, you can’t be the one bad parent who doesn’t even love your children enough to buy them. And really, without school pictures, I might not have any photo documentation of the younger ones…
Alissa | November 3rd, 2010 at 12:46 pm