Corollary to Pleasant Teenagers Theory

Maybe this is wishful thinking, but I think I'm tighter with my kids than my parents were with me and they won't hate me as much in a few years. Here's what I'm thinking: we spend more time with them. We do stuff together. I've thought a lot about teenagers 200 years ago and how they don't seem to hate their parents as much, at least in books, and maybe it's because they were all sitting in a little house all winter knitting, singing, and reading to each other and frankly, that's exactly what I do with my kids now, except it's a little apartment.

Now, you might say, what about all those nannies and governesses they used to have? That was a very small percentage of the population, though! Most people slept with their kids in one or two big beds, just like everyone in Brooklyn does now.

People imagine that it's old fashioned to kind of ignore your kids; what I'm arguing is that this thing of not hanging out with your kids, roaming around in giant houses where everyone has his own room and entertainment center, etc, is really more of a post-war phenomenon, and that "attachment parenting," loosely defined, (because I sleep-trained, yes I did, somebody tell that baby who the f--- I is), is the way it's always been done.

Even that mean French Mommy who wrote that book about being mean to your kids probably sits down every night with them for a two-hour meal, which means they're actually talking to each other.

Teenagers who don't hate their parents?

The good news about this is that I've noticed a lot of teenagers these days hanging out with their parents acting like they don't hate them. You may be asking: is this possible? Or just an illusion?

Let me break it down for you. Today's offspring spend their entire childhoods doing things that used to be reserved for kids who were grown up enough to physically intimidate their parents, ie.; back-sassing, sulking, throwing tantrums, and exploring bisexuality. Nowadays, by the time they're thirteen or fourteen they've been doing it for so long all the fun has gone out of it and they're over it. Anyway, what are they going to rebel against? They haven't been able to come up with any music that's more offensive than what we listen to, (totally the reverse), and who among us is going to tell them at this point, “No: don't follow your dream. Do not spend your precious time writing space operas and autobiographical monologues?” So by the time today's teenagers are fifteen or sixteen, they're already pleasant little mini-adults, just like they used to be 200 years ago.

This may sound too optimistic, but I do need to point out that there are a couple of draw-backs to having a society of pleasant teenagers. The first drawback is that this method of child rearing is so exhausting that by the time your kid becomes a pleasant adolescent, you may be too worn down to a fuzzy nubbin of your former self to enjoy it. The second problem is that when teenagers don't hate their parents, they don't hate authority and there's no one left to fight the power or stick it to the Man, and hello? Here we are. The elevator music that teenagers are churning out these days is a symptom of the fact that they're harmonious with their parents, pacified by constant access to entertainment and as addled by corn products as a herd of beef cows. Even black kids can't get angry any more. How wrong is that? Have you heard Jay-Z and Kanye's latest album, where they just go on and on about how awesome their lives are? It's like, that's nice for you, Dawg. 

The truth about boys

Raising a boy is like trying to socialize a raccoon. He'll bite you for no reason or shit in his pants after having been toilet trained for six years, just to show you. It's his way of saying, “Yeah, that's my poop, human slave master bitch, deal with it.” You know that Tiger Mom? She's a little punk; an amateur-- she has girls! When you're raising a boy you're not trying to get him to be a Rhodes Scholar or the next Jascha Heifetz, you're just hoping he stops eating his earwax before he goes to college. You are trying to get him to not light matches in the basement. You're explaining to him about “juvie.” You're putting your last ounce of strength every day into asking him to stop hitting his grandfather in the balls, hoarding food in his bunk bed, trying to murder his little sister by destroying her will to live and continually sticking his finger in people's faces and yelling, “BANG!”

Girls used to be the ones who were repressed and broken from a young age, while little boys lives were made up of physical exertion punctuated by regular whippings, which suited them pretty well. Now we're so busy trying to civilize our under-exercised boys that the occasional hissy fit or display of public masturbation a girl can dish out seems pretty tolerable and we just leave the females alone. Today's liberal minded parent is so tired that she's perfectly fine with her six-year-old daughter going into the bedroom with her best friend, shutting the door, and having sex with her. You think I'm joking?

Corollary: Boyz II Men

Because our little urban and suburban boys are thoroughly beaten down and repressed from an early age they learn to channel their innate limbic drives into things like porn, video games, spectator sports, fatty foods and esoteric hobbies. For men mid-life crisis these days is just more of the same: more porn, more video games, more watching golf and hand-caning antique chairs.

Girls, on the other hand, having been given a free pass throughout childhood, hit middle age and really don't know what to do with themselves. They divorce their spouses and want to have sex with youngings, just like men used to do. 

Seen at Gimme Coffee

Paintings by Lauren M Barnett

laurenmbarnett@gmail.com

Child labour in Vietnam

At a clothing business in HCM City, most child workers have to work 14 hours per day in small, hot, gloomy rooms. Employers openly admit they don’t have work contracts and have to work the whole week.
They explain away their use of child workers by various means, saying it is difficult to hire adult workers or more honestly that they employ children to cut labour costs.
Hoang Van Hanh, who runs a clothing business in Ward 13, Tan Binh district, HCM City, which uses many child workers, said: “We have run this business for eight years. We only earn enough to live on so we don’t have a business licence. Nobody comes here for labour inspections and nobody tells me about how many working hours are set for workers at what age. We work until 12pm here, no problem.”
Read the complete article here:
http://english.vietnamnet.vn/reports/200911/HCM-City-Child-labour-tales-from-clothing-industry-878755/

Child labour in England

"...Many manufacturers employ upwards of 3,000 of these lace-makers, who are chiefly children and young persons of the female sex exclusively... From their fifth year and often earlier, until their tweflth or fifteenth year... during the first year the very young ones work from four to eight hours, and later on, from six in the morning till eight or ten o'clock at night...

'It is not at all uncommon in Nottingham to find 14 to 20 children huddled together in a small room, of, perhaps, not more than 12 feet square, and employed for 15 hours out of the 24, at work that is itself exhausting, from its weariness and monotony, and is besides carried out under every possible unwholesome condition... Even the very youngest children work with a strained attention and a rapidity that is astonishing, hardly ever giving their fingers rest or slowing their motion.'" --Capital, Karl Marx.

From: China Labour Bulletin

A report issued by Human Rights in China (http://www.hrichina.org) in March of this year documented the tragic case of five adolescent girls who appeared to have been poisoned by carbon monoxide smoke from a coal brazier lit in the confines of their cramped factory sleeping quarters. In an attempt to hide culpability for the girl's deaths, the panicked factory manager ordered that the bodies be disposed of immediately; later investigation revealed that two of the girls had likely been buried alive.

http://www.china-labour.org.hk/en/node/15889