My son, 14, wants a cell phone. Preferably with a big shiny touch screen and lots of apps. Like an iPhone or something that runs Google Android. He has awesome taste — gets his appreciation for tech-geekiness from my side of the family.

Cell phone was at the top of his Christmas list, even above “new bed,” which would be a bed long enough for his 6-foot-and-growing frame so that his feet don’t hang over the edge. But he didn’t tell anyone about his list but me, and “cell phone for a kid who NEVER CALLS ANYONE” wasn’t in my budget this year. Plus, he doesn’t live with me. A mere technicality.

Since it’s now been a couple of years since I lived full time with anyone from whom I’d be likely to hear, “But Mooooooom, everybody has one!” I thought I’d do some Extremely Scientific Research about the percentage of 14-year olds who own cell phones. Do kids need cell phones?
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The days of overparenting are over. Not only does Time Magazine say so, but we’ve all been seeing this coming from miles away, haven’t we? Helicopter parents, please move over. You’re blocking the view.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’ve helicoptered with the best of them. Who wouldn’t want to protect little Aidan or Ava from getting a boo-boo? We don’t want our kids to suffer the same horrible childhood fates that we did — like being left to our own devices. Our parents didn’t play with/entertain us 24/7? How awful! We would never, never, never allow our own kids to suffer that way. Nope, better to suffocate them with yards of bubble wrap love and keep them safe. From everything. Oh, and make them perfect. Yeah, that’s it.

But the tide is turning. Have you heard? There’s a recession out there! Cello lessons and travel soccer teams and French-speaking au pairs and real miniature backyard play mansions cost real hard cash. Cash that we’re seeing less of these days. Suddenly, some things seem a little, well, unnecessary. Never mind cello lessons — go play outside. And if you’re lucky, this year Santa will bring you a rock.

Oh, but it’s not easy to quell your inner overparenter*, is it? The voice that screams NOWHERE IS IT SAFE! DARK-WINDOWED MINIVANS! CODE ADAM! ZERO TOLERANCE! It’s hard to silence that voice. We still can’t even bear to let our kids walk to school and the urge to protect our kids from all possible ills is high.

But kids thrive on benign neglect. Without Mommy and Daddy to wipe their noses for them constantly, Aidan and Ava will learn to do it themselves. My parents NEVER played with my brother and me except for a couple of games of family Whiffle Ball (I kid you not) in the front yard. So we played with each other. Or with other kids. Most of us grew up not being played with. And we didn’t have cell lessons or a French-speaking au pair either. We turned out fine. Me, I couldn’t wait to relive my kidhood through my own kids and play Legos and Tinker Toys again. Eventually that got out of hand and I was entertaining the troops on a nightly basis. (The costume budget alone was killing me, not to mention the lighting, but hey, you do what you have to do, right? If your kids can’t sleep without seeing you perform showstopping torch songs in the living room, you have to go with it.)

Cough.

It’s far too easy to go from rolling a ball back and forth with your toddler to doing their 4th grade homework. Overparenting is a slippery slope. But like I said, the tide is turning. Some of this is from necessity — if you’re working 2 jobs to keep the family afloat, something’s got to give and it’s probably you. You make compensations. You set new priorities. So your 12-year old is home alone after school instead of attending ballet lessons. Fine. It’s too bad about ballet, but she can fix herself a snack. She can do her homework. She knows how to dial 9-1-1. You just have to let it go. She’ll be fine.

There are a zillion ways to parent. A zillion RIGHT ways. We’ve been looking for a magic formula in parenting, the one thing we should do to make our kids turn out PERFECT, but there is no one right thing. The best thing we can do for our kids is to trust them. And then to trust ourselves as well.

How has this trend away from overparenting affected you? Do you see change in the other parents you know? How have you toned down your own inner helicopter parent?

*It’s a word if I say it is.

photo: cieleke, Stock.xchng

In an ideal world, Mommy and Daddy would love one another forever and together provide a warm, loving home for the children. But the real world is just that — real. Lives changes, relationships go awry, and the best of intentions sometimes fall through the floor. Mommy and Daddy split up. But who gets the kids?

In the past, this wouldn’t have been a question. Once upon a time, men owned everything, including the children. *Cough.* (I think we’ve moved past that, for the most part.) In our more recent past, the “tender years” doctrine held and kids went with their mothers, who were presumed to be the more nurturing parent. Now, things are flipping once again and more and more, fathers are getting custody of the kids, especially when Mom is a working mom and Dad has been taking care of the kids. Are working moms working themselves out of a relationship with their children?
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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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