I’m tired of all the ways we guilt ourselves as parents. Kids misbehave? Our fault. Bad grades? Our fault. We don’t spend enough time with our kids. Guilt! We don’t protect our kids well enough. Guilt! I, for one, am done with the guilt.

The latest thing? Yelling. The New York Times has over 300 comments on a post about the horrors of yelling at our kids, how guilty we feel about it, and how to make it all go away.

Don’t worry, I’m as guilty of yelling as anyone else. I have done it and no, I’m not proud of it either. I’ve gotten frustrated and angry and I’ve raised my voice. More than once. News flash — parents are human. We get frustrated. We yell sometimes.
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Show of hands if any of this sounds familiar:

• You walk on the sidewalk, not on people’s lawns, unless it’s someone you know well and you’re spending the afternoon there.
• You let people cut in front of you in the 10-or-less grocery line, but you try to burn holes in the back of their head the whole time they’re in front of you.
• Soup is lukewarm at the restaurant? Steak cooked a little more than the medium-rare you asked for? You eat it but you refuse to enjoy it.
• You won’t call anyone after 9 pm if you don’t know them well enough.
• You have an entire conversation with someone who stopped you on the street to ask directions, even though they creep you out a little, because you’re too nice to look the other way, keep walking, and ignore them.

Did your mother raise you to be nice? Mine did. In my mom’s world, nice trumped everything. if you couldn’t be smart, at least you could be nice. Good girls were seen and not heard, and if you were a teeny bit dramatic (aren’t all nine-year olds?) you got called “Sarah Bernhardt” and were shushed a lot.

That didn’t work for me, and I’m unlearning the niceness thing. And I’m teaching my daughter to speak out about what she wants and feels. I am so breaking this chain, the one that I can trace back to before my mom’s mom.
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I’ll bet you a cup of delicious Pacific Northwest coffee (tall no-fat vanilla latte, thanks) that at least half of you have said, at one time or another, “I’ll never hit my child!” And I’ll bet you the maraschino cherry on my hot fudge sundae (no nuts, thanks) that a sizable chunk of you, whether or not you vowed not to hit, have spanked your kids anyway.

Yeah, you. I’m talking to you. The Dreaded Spank. It happens. Toddler on the loose, darting for that busy street for the 3000th time? Permanent marker decorating the walls and carpet? Poop anywhere where poop just shouldn’t be? Swats happen. It happens. One quick reaction before rational thought sets in. Besides, some of us were raised with spanking. It seems … familiar. And don’t diapers provide padding?

But listen to this: a new study suggests that early spanking — and we’re talking the prime of toddlerhood here, kids who are between one and two — has some detrimental effects. Kids who were spanked at the age of one were more aggressive at the age of two and performed worse on cognitive tests at the age of three. Whoa.
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I get most of my news from social media.  I’m sure this says something shallow about me, but yeah.  Twitter and Facebook are my sources for What’s Going On In The World (yes, I subscribe to 20,000 feeds in Google Reader but honestly, that’s a LOT of daily pressure that the “mark all as read” button does a lot to relieve).

I do more than just read the 75,000 tweets and the 60 Facebook updates — that’s PER HOUR, folks — that come my way.  Nope, like the good little hunter-gatherer that I am, I also think about what I read.  Put together connections.  Notice trends.  It makes me feel I don’t actually need to step outside my door, because, HELLO, all this action going on via the shiny bright rectangle of a Macbook I stare at 16 hours a day, that’s real life.

[Please insert a huge dose of "this is irony or something" right here.]

So what’s this week’s trend?  I’m so glad you asked.  Bad parenting.
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My nine year old daughter wet the bed the other night because she forgot to put on a Pull-Up.  She has turned down sleepover invitations at unfamiliar houses because of the Pull-Up sitch. Her older brother had pee-OCD for years and peed every three minutes because he was deathly afraid of accidentally peeing his bed after (also at age nine) he chose to give up his own Pull-Ups.  Don’t even get me started on chromosomally-enhanced younger brother, he of the Down syndrome, who at 5.5 still laughs in the face of daytime dryness. Why should he use a potty when he has a perfectly good diaper (or underwear, or floor, or … )?

I have a family of pee-ers.
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There’s only one game I remember.  We called it “Mixer.”  We’d run in circles on our parents’ bed while our mom turned on and off the vacuum cleaner, making the sound that we thought was similar to the Kitchenaid stand mixer that we were pretending to be inside as we ran in circles. Thinking back, this was incredibly forbidden. Not only were we in our parents’ room, but we were on the bed. Standing. Running!  The impeccably-made bed with the blue-green bedspread.  With our bare feet.

That was the only game.

My kids have had it different.  Until I started working from home and my Macbook became permanently attached to my lap, we played.  Every day.  Different games.  Many games.  I prided myself on being a different parent than mine, who were strict and unemotional.  A better parent.

But is it really better?
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I always had visions of providing the perfect holiday experience for my kids: perfect presents, perfect cookies (four kinds, including intricate sugar cookies decorated with icing and colored sugar), the perfect tree, the perfect background music, the perfect bordering-on-anal-hysteria touches to show that SANTA STILL EXISTS DESPITE YOUR ADMITTEDLY WELL-THOUGHT-OUT QUESTIONS, and, well, perfect perfection.

It was exhausting.
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Is anybody else a little freaked out about headlines like, “How to Stop the Looming Depression”? Somehow I don’t think that’s just me. And when I read stuff like this I’m caught between the denial of my own financial situation—I’m doing okay and I have this Pollyanna belief that somehow I’ll always be okay—and fear mixed with hope for all the people who aren’t doing okay and who won’t be doing okay. And I think about how much my kids should know about their world, their neighbors, and their family. What do your kids know about your family’s money situation?
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This year, I don’t want you to buy anything. So stop shopping right now. Screeeee! (that’s the sound of the Holiday Gift Machine coming to a screeching halt. Oh, the power!) This thing has got way out of hand. It’s time to put a stop to it.

That’s right, make this a no-gift holiday. None. Nada. Zed. Zero.

Why?
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Last night, watching the U.S. election returns, it was hard not to let a few tears slip as I tapped into the incredible emotions playing out all over the country. My mind went back to when I was a kid, in a similar situation, and it hit me that I never saw my parents cry.

Is that weird? Unusual? I’m betting it isn’t. Sure, my parents grew up, as many did, as part of the Stoic Generation, but I think there’s something bigger going on: parents are afraid to look vulnerable in front of their kids. Is this you?
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