Feeling pessimistic about the culture I'm raising my kid in... - Page 2

[Tigerchild]

One thing that has helped me immensely is to severely cut my media consumption. That means ALL media. I've never been a big TV watcher (and we've not had cable in...jeez, like 7 years), I cut back on my talk radio consumption a little bit ago, and now I'm even almost eliminating things like Air America, ect.

I find that when I am not bombarded with in your face messages about how we're going to hell in a handbasket, I find it easier to cut others slack and not assume the worst of people. It's not that I'm not politically active (I get factual, brief legislative summaries almost weekly for my state, for example)--but I've decided just to not listen to commentary right now while I'm sensitive.

It was getting too overwhelming and overshadowing the fact that I have nice neighbors and I meet kind people every day. So I've just taken a step back to give myself a breather.

Sometimes I think that those of us who are troubled by the 'culture' and 'culture wars' sometimes can wallow too much in it, which is about as healthy as pretending that everything's fine and wonderful.

We are in the process of moving overseas, but realistically we know that it's not a paradise (no place is) and we're not looking (nor expecting) it to be everything that America's not. I'm sure there will be many positive things, but I expect there to be some negative things too. That's just the way life is, I've lived in a lot of places and several countries in my life, and if there's one thing I've learned is that regardless of 'culture', PEOPLE are remarkably the same whereever you go. You can't escape the jerks and racists and classists and sexists by moving to Europe (or America). And you'll find kind people even here of all places.

But seriously, if you are a newshound or have NPR in the background all the time, or listen to a lot of Air America or subscribe to a ton of political/social newsletters or zines (guilty of all counts, in the past!)...then you might want to consider taking a break for awhile. I know that's helped me immensely, which is good--because I don't want to leave with a huge cloud of negativity hanging over me. And it makes me better able to pay attention to the present moment with my kids, instead of staying up sleepless nights with all the future possibilities of all the horrible things that our country's policies are going to cause in the future dancing in my head. I'm sure some people thrive on that, but I sure don't. So I've decided to just take a break for the next 6 months, and then reevaluate.

HTH.

[Lizzo]

Originally Posted by mommytolittlelilly

The foremost issue in my mind right now is why do so many little American children we've encountered seem so aloof or scared or alienated or WHAT? My daughter is 2.5 years old, and keeps trying to approach other kids up to maybe 6-7 years old to just talk or play, in settings such as our public library, the playground, just around the neighborhood, or at the mall. The other day we walked by a little girl about 4-5 years old on a bike with training wheels, and my daughter said hello to her and complimented her on her bike in a friendly sweet voice, and this girl totally ignored her. She could talk, because I heard her talking to her dad. At the library the other day, my daughter approached a couple of girls who were playing with a puzzle, introduced herself, and asked if she could sit down and play with them. They were probably 5-6 years old. They said NOTHING. NOTHING at all. Just looked at my girl like she landed from outer space. Then, she tried talking to a couple of other kids, must've been a brother and sister, who were just standing around. What did they do when she started talking to them? Looked nervously at her, didn't say anything in response, and quickly walked away....

Is this normal? Is this stranger-danger BS to the nth degree? I sure don't remember being totally IGNORED as a kid when I approached other kids...

We experience this ^ type of scenario often
I take my 10 month old DS to the library often and he LOVES it so much. He is so outgoing and sweet and loves when kids are near him. But the othe rkids, most of them are SO aloof,cold, and unfriendly....almost anti social, No personality. I can't believe it! I mean these are 3,4,5 year old children and they act....well like you described. I feel bad for my DS who tries to play and interact. it scares me!
I graduated highschool in August and I know some of the kids were like that there too. Aloof, but...no personality. Especially the boys. They are just so dry.
It's really sad
Oh I agree! wiht all of this in the PPs, DP and I discuss this frequently and try to come up with alternatives to fleeing the country (although we'd like to for these reasons and others). We think that if continue to raise Ds and future DC like we do and emersing them with all different kinds of people, keeping up with the AP plagroups, No TV, and taking DS to interesting places, plus alternative schooling(we've picked Waldorf), he wont be another no personality, aloof kid or adult.

[EnviroBecca]

I've never been to SF, but have always heard about its WEATHER... so wonderful.

I've been there once. In August, it was 60 degrees and drizzling most of the time!

[wildmonkeys]

Kitty - Your suggestion is right on I do let myself wallow in it sometimes with too much NPR/Utne/pundit material.

I hope my post didn't seem too negative to anybody - I am having a pretty gray day and seem to be unable to control myself today

As an aside, I have to say, my older son is one who might just walk away if somebody tried to engage him My younger son will pretty much always walk right up and start interacting with new people, but my big kid is really shy with kids his own age and often seems to be very much inside his own head. That is not to say that he doesn't ever start playing with kids that he meets out and about and he has made friends school, but I have seen him be pretty oblivious that other kids are trying to be friendly.

BJ
Barney & Ben

[Tigerchild]

Originally Posted by wildmonkeys

I hope my post didn't seem too negative to anybody - I am having a pretty gray day and seem to be unable to control myself today

It didn't. I'm sorry you're having a grey day--I certainly understand those. You know, it used to be that listening to (or reading) sites where almost everyone agreed with me used to pump me up when I was having one of those days, KWIM? But lately all it does is make me feel more hopeless/paranoid/oppressed, and I think my body is strung out on the stressing-out reaction. I think that it is NOT unreasonable or bad to be concerned--but it's also okay to want to take a break for awhile too. You are not bad or negligent if you do..most people experience burnout of some kind or another eventually.

It's kind of funny--once I was bored and decided to monitor my heart rate and blood pressure at various times while listening to my favorite talk radio shows, and I was amazed at how often it made my both go through the ceiling! So I think that even if you have it on as background noise, there is something to the feeling that it wears you out and wears you down--even if you happen to agree with the commentator. Or it could be that I just have a really strong temper! ;>

Anyway, I hope that you get a little sunbreak of mood today. I don't think you were too negative at all.

[newmainer]

Nice weather in SF? hmmmm if you like fog and don't mind that it rarely ever gets truly hot, even in the summer.

but i digress...

i deal with this issue a lot too, and living in a place that has a lot of alternative culture is really important to me. We gave up the (cultural) diversity of where we lived in california for the pace of life, emphasis on land/conservation, small town and lack of big consumerism of where we live in Maine. You don't find the "latest fashions" here, and while sometimes it can seem boring i *never* leave my house feeling like a dork for how i'm dressed, regardless of what i'm wearing. we have active local groups in tons of areas, from organic farming to dance and art to political and media groups. While its a small, rural area, it's also progressive and i love it for that. At the same time, we have Walmart and Home Depot its easily avoidable and we do our best to shop local as much as possible.

i know we'll have to work on exposing our dc's to cultural diversity, but to me that's minor to live in a place where i feel like i am not parenting upstream. i think if i lived in a more mainstream suburban type environment, i would go crazy.

[sunnmama]

I worry very much about the culture. I feel that we are living fairly "differently" from the "average american", and that is protecting dd from a lot at this age. And we have a lot of like-minded friends, so it all seems "normal" to our kids for now. But, I do worry about what will happen when she is older. Will she resent my "different-ness"? Will she swing 180 degrees in the opposite direction?

I wish that "normal" for me was a bit closer to "normal" for the culture, so that it wouldn't be so much of an issue. But, at least in my town, I am pretty far from normal!

[fuller2]

Before you all go moving to SF, know that it is one of the most expensive places to live in the country, and that even half a million bucks will not get you much in terms of housing (say, a 2-bed apartment). People with kids are moving away from SF, Boston, all the places that cost so bloody much.

Just posting to say that getting rid of the media helps tremendously--like ALL media. I used to be a journalist, I used to work in public radio--and I have to say, I like the world a lot more now that I hardly pay attention to mass media of any sort. There's something to be said for not being continually distracted by someone else's take on whatever situation. For me it's been worth it just to get all those other people's voices out of my head. I suggest listening to college courses on tape from the Teaching Company instead (you can get them on Ebay used too since they can be a bit pricey)...www.teachco.com

[velochic]

Originally Posted by newmainer

Nice weather in SF? hmmmm if you like fog and don't mind that it rarely ever gets truly hot, even in the summer.

i know we'll have to work on exposing our dc's to cultural diversity, but to me that's minor to live in a place where i feel like i am not parenting upstream.

That is, indeed, my favorite kind of weather. Dh has spent some time in SF and he loved it, too.

About your cultural diversity comment... depending on where you go, some places in Europe offer both the diversity ans some of what you are talking about not parenting upstream. No place is perfect. For example, living in Germany, they have an extremely high rate of breastfeeding. EVERYONE breastfeeds... but it's expected that you'll wean at 6 months. Spanking is illegal. There are recycling laws and urban sprawl laws (they will build up to the moon before they take more land to build). Whole foods are the norm as is organic farming. I could go on. But, OTOH, Turks have been getting discriminated against, publicly and legally, since very recently. So, yeah, you take some bad with the good, but the good far outweighs the bad, IMHO, living in Europe.

Cultural diversity is VERY important to us because we're a multi-lingual family with multiple citizenships. Dd has already spent a good portion of her life living abroad, will do so again before she's off to college, and if anything happens to us she will be raised by family abroad. So the cultural aspect, and teaching tolerance in particular, is very important to us... enough so that we drive her an hour away to an international school to get away from a very uniform white, christian, middle-class culture where we live. We're that dedicated to multi-culturalism and we hope and pray that this will be the key for her.

[RedWine]

I guess I'm lucky -- I live near Boston, in a multi-cultural, friendly neighborhood. Yes, there are mainstream folks, but my friends are all alternative types. I just joined a homeschool coop, and I am slowly becoming friends with other like-minded mamas.

Moving to another country is not the answer, in my opinion. The United States is a good country in many ways. Perfect? No. Is the current political atmosphere ideal? Um, NO (IMO). But other countries have their problems too, and I personally feel that to be a responsible citizen, you stay and try to fix the country you're a citizen of. Can you fix the whole culture? Of course not. But you can influence those you know and meet by quietly, gracefully sticking to your own ideals.

I've influenced some of my more mainstream friends by quietly (not preachily) doing things the AP way. We also don't watch TV, and one of my former TV-addict mama friends has noticed how my kid doesn't continually ask to watch a DVD, or play "Dora," etc. -- she likes this, and is now cutting way back on the TV consumption. Others have tried slings when they've noticed my heavy use of them. Etc.

As far as our children, we will homeschool. If we couldn't homeschool, we would find a multi-cultural private school, or put them in Montessori. There are ways to keep your children from the things you don't like in this country. That being said, I will readily admit that if both parents need to work and the money is very tight the homeschooling/private school may not be an option.

Anyway, we travel all the time and I would love to live in Italy. I LOVE Italy. However, I know that if I moved there, I would miss things about the US -- and I'd also feel guilty about not trying to do my part in changing it somehow.

[aprilushka]

I come from a small town in rural California from a very typical lower middle-class, conservative, Christian family. I went to pretty bad, typical rural American schools (albeit rather diverse, since the Latino and Laotian populations were significant and now the Latino population is actually the largest single group there-- but still, it was essentially a combination of two rural, insular small-town cultures-- white rural and Latino rural). Yet I always wanted to travel, was very interested in Europe, made friends with the exchange students, etc. I got into a very good university and was able to realize those things-- I spent three consecutive summers (plus a fall semester) in the UK in college and lived in Russia for a year after college. Until I went to Russia, I was determined to live in the UK permanently. However, as it turned out, I married a Russian, came back to the States and went to law school and even though I could have gone abroad to live after that, it would have involved continuing a lifestyle I did not like (ie, working in a large firm) so I opted not to do that. However, I've since figured out that while place is important, one can, especially in areas with lots of resources, avoid most of the things one doesn't like, although anywhere some compromise is necessary, and commercialism altogether is almost inescapable anywhere in the world. I spent a lot of time in early adulthood detesting the town and culture I grew up in, detesting America to a certain extent and feeling smug about my (self-supposed) state of enlightenment. I'm a bit more humble now, I hope, and although I would not be comfortable in the type of environment I grew up in, and like the fact my children will be exposed to more resources living in the metro area we now live in, I can recognize that there are different lifestyle choices and not everyone has to like or be interested in the same things as me to be leading a full life. In other words, it's as okay to be a middle American as it is to be a cosmopolitan European.

Having spent a lot of time around Europeans and in particular, Russians from large cities such as St Petersburg (who still are the bulk of my out-of-work social life), I have increasingly seen fewer differences if anything in "culture" taken as a whole, and more in individuals. In other words, for most aspects of life, unless choices are imposed, they are peculiar to an individual and one can find like-minded individuals anywhere, and sometimes like-mindedness is not how you originally perceived it. Of the people I like best at work, most are very typical American and are easy to talk to because of their intelligence and good sense and the couple who try to exude "internationality" and Euro style cosmopolitan sophistication actually irritate the crap out of me because of their personalities and frequent obtuseness (whereas without knowing them personally, only what their interests and backgrounds were, I would have guessed I would have the most in common with them).

If we were all a function of the culture that surrounds us, I would most certainly not be who I am today. As parents, it is our prerogative to structure the home culture the way we see fit, but children will ultimately choose to become who they want. So in the end I think it's good to try to encourage those ideas and values we hold dear and restrict entrance into the home of those influences we do not, but to build solid walls around ourselves is not possible, nor desirable, because you do not know what good you may be keeping out with the bad

[IdentityCrisisMama]

I want to admit something, which is that the "you can find what you want" message isn't something that I'm receptive to at this time. It's not that I don't appreciate the ideas, it's just that I don't quite get it. One of my biggest issues, for instance, is driving and that I just don't feel safe here.

We have one car (by choice) and DC and I get around by bike and it's SCARY! Like minded friends and multiculturalism isn't going to help with this problem, yk? Neither will it help with the price of food. Or that fact that people look at DC and I like we're freaks when we're out because I'm not hovering over her like she's some kind of fragile, destructive, klutzy china-doll-monster.

I am reading Consuming Kids about marketing to children, which is definitely getting me riled up. I'm not sure if I can afford to have my head further in the sand (cuz I'm already kinda out of it). I do know what you mean though.

I'm also getting involved in my community, which IS helping. I'm meeting some cool people and learning about local politics (albeit frustrating at times) is largely encouraging to me. If only because you get the feeling like you could do something rather easily. I'm more of an urban type so getting out to rural Maine or something, while tempting for a little while, isn't something that would make me happy. Isolating myself in my garden doesn't sound half bad...

As far as my immediate community, that's part of it as well. I really want to just meet my neighbors and be friends, yk? I've decided that there is a unique beauty about a friendship that grows within close geographic proximity. It just can't be duplicated and it's hard to find here. It's difficult because we tend to migrate to like minded people (which limits us) and because we're so willing to drive for our friends and people are so busy...driving around, I guess.

I guess, I'm still pessimistic. I realize that there are a small few areas in the US where you're likely to just fall "naturally" into a cool community. I have friends in San Francisco, Berkeley and NYC that have this. But other areas, you're more creating it for yourself. For instance, my parents have a good life in an "average" US city but part of that life involves driving 20-40 minutes (without traffic!) to live it.

So, Wildmonkeys, you aren't being too negative Maybe I am...but the thread title says that I am being pessimistic

[IdentityCrisisMama]

So you don't think I'm just complaining without doing something, I want to tell you something. We just moved to this city (which I know isn't helping), found a cute house within walking or biking distance to downtown and a cute neighborhood Main Street AND I found my friends a house less than 1 mile from us!

[annakiss]

Originally Posted by IdentityCrisisMama

But other areas, you're more creating it for yourself. For instance, my parents have a good life in an "average" US city but part of that life involves driving 20-40 minutes (without traffic!) to live it.

My community here in this fairly large city involves this sort of commitment on the road too, unfortunately. I really hope to move at some point though to a smaller city. The city I grew up in was medium-sized and we always had family friends around whether they lived precisely close by or not. It was really essential, I think.

As I've become an adult, I have gotten quite pessimistic about the culture too, but I think that my kids probably won't see it that way until they have to worry about other people too (like children of their own).

We were reading The Lorax last night at bedtime and it was really quite depressing to me. I remember reading the same exact story as a kid and it was inspiring. Sad, but hopeful. I'm sure my kids don't get the same story as I do. Their worlds have not grown so large as to encompass the possibility of bad things happening to them. I don't suspect they will for some time. Even during all my teenage angsty depressive years, I never felt the sense of - I guess I'll call it impending doom- that I do now.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's not all doom and gloom in their worlds. They'll grow up. They may be excessively exposed to things you don't want them exposed to, but I doubt they'll resent it. It's their lives, it's simply what they will know. And they won't feel destroyed by it. Their brains won't feel less full or less able. They will be able to be creative, amazing people despite the culture. It's the spark of humanity. That amazing urge to create. You can't stamp that out with a thousand tyranic regimes, all the logos and marketing in the world memorized and spouted from out the mouths of babes will be but fodder for contemplation, much in the way of Andy Warhol. Collage is the art form of the 21st century, after all. I mean, sure, you don't want them to grow up not knowing what happens in a meadow at sunset (everything), but though the landscape of their world is mostly billboards and asphalt, it is their context, their time, their history. All you can do is make choices. You are not responsible for the outcome of human history.

I hope any of that made any sense.

[sunnmama]

Originally Posted by IdentityCrisisMama

As far as my immediate community, that's part of it as well. I really want to just meet my neighbors and be friends, yk? I've decided that there is a unique beauty about a friendship that grows within close geographic proximity. It just can't be duplicated and it's hard to find here. It's difficult because we tend to migrate to like minded people (which limits us) and because we're so willing to drive for our friends and people are so busy...driving around, I guess.

Yes, I struggle with this as well. *None* of our friends live within biking/walking distance. I do know some nice people in our neighborhood, but no kids.

So we bike most places (plenty of sidewalks on the major roads, so relatively safe), and walk many others, and bus a couple more....but we simply *have* to drive to see some of our friends.

When I was a kid, I never drove to see friends! Most were right in my neighborhood, and some a bike-ride away.

[marybethorama]

Originally Posted by IdentityCrisisMama

I
Right now, what's really getting to me is the price of food (compared to other less necessary goods) and the lack of respect for my safety when I'm on my bike. Also the pricey kids activities and the fact that the playgrounds are empty. The TV and commercialism gets to me as well.

I'm with you although I do have a different view of TV. We had the opportunity to live in Canada for 4 months in 2004. The quality of life was so much better. Party I'm sure because we were living in a more populated area but also because there were different priorities.

I get depressed about living in the US too.

[marybethorama]

Originally Posted by IdentityCrisisMama

I
I am reading Consuming Kids about marketing to children, which is definitely getting me riled up. I'm not sure if I can afford to have my head further in the sand (cuz I'm already kinda out of it). I do know what you mean though.

)

You know, I've spent a lot of my life studying cultural issues (okay mostly in other centuries ) but I've read that book and I have some issues with it.

I really do not agree with all that they write. I don't think the author's are really seeing how we relate to culture.

Sorry, to go off on a rant but it's one of my biggest pet peeves.

Not that I'm saying it's wrong to not participate in commercial culture, no problem if you choose not to, but I think the issue is more complex than that.