Hi All,
Now, as many of you know, I don't generally post articles that have any relationship to religious background but, I found this article on "Hipster Parents" quite interesting.
The article doesn't seem to have a religious twist so I can't really tell why it was posted to the site it was. It is actually an interesting view on the often elusive "Hipster Parent":
The Hipster Curse: The Parents Who Don't Want to Be Adults
The Hipster Curse: The Parents Who Don't Want to Be Adults
I guess it all boils down to the fact that no one cares about your aviator glasses, v-neck t-shirt, skinny jeans, rainbow coloured hair, and your photos of your child dressed as Morrissey... But, how you actually parent children and not how cool you or your children look when doing it.
More on hipster parents and the realization our society is making about them:
I Hate My Hipster Parents and Halloween! Why Can?t I Just Be Elmo? I've never even heard of Andy Warhol! on LOL Wall, by Magda Lena
Dumbest Things Hipster Parents Do Photo Gallery - Too Cool For School - Dumb as a Blog on truTV.com
Hipster parent alert: The Longboardstroller | News.com.au
TIME: Hipster-parents are pretty much douche bags | The Poop | an SFGate.com blog
The latest hipster parenting trend: Diaper-free babies - The Globe and Mail
David Brooks takes on hipster parents - Salon.com
Good Luck!
Tayken
Now, as many of you know, I don't generally post articles that have any relationship to religious background but, I found this article on "Hipster Parents" quite interesting.
The article doesn't seem to have a religious twist so I can't really tell why it was posted to the site it was. It is actually an interesting view on the often elusive "Hipster Parent":
The Hipster Curse: The Parents Who Don't Want to Be Adults
The Hipster Curse: The Parents Who Don't Want to Be Adults
Much has been written about the hovering, smothering ways of the helicopter parent. These are the men and women (usually high achievers themselves) who are so intent on their children's success that they overschedule and overanalyze every moment, completing homework and storming in to do battle with teachers over every A-minus. They are the powerful, micromanaging force behind schools' draconian hand-sanitizer and no-peanut policies. As one private-school administrator in Washington, D.C. recently told me, "We don't call them helicopter parents anymore. We call them Black Hawks," as in the combat-ready helicopters used for military operations.
So-called hipster parents, by contrast, embrace a different philosophy. They believe becoming a parent should not require one to relinquish creative control over one's life, move to the suburbs, and purchase a minivan. As Ariel Gore, the author of a book entitled The Hip Mama Survival Guide, told MSNBC: "If I'm a punk rocker or I'm really into Hungarian folk dancing ... and that's who I am, why should I have to leave that behind and raise my kid in some generic middle class American reality that doesn't feel authentic to me?"
For those who fall into these archetypal categories, having children is no longer something people simply do. It is a conscious lifestyle choice, one among many ushered in by access to birth control, delayed marriage, and greater opportunities for women in the workplace. In this sense, the stakes are much higher. If parenthood is a choice, then people risk compromising their sense of identity as well as their much-cherished freedom by making it. And as economists who study choice theory have demonstrated, the more choices you have, the more likely you are to experience anxiety and remorse about the one you ultimately make, even if that choice results in the birth of a beloved child.
...
For this generation of hip parents, children are no longer little people who are seen but not heard. They are celebrated but also resented, in print and online. They are offered up instrumentally as a way of making connections to readers, with only an occasional glimmer of self-awareness about the possible impact on the child (as Armstrong writes, "OH MY GOD what my kid is going to say about me on her website"). For a growing number of parents, the demands of parental expression trump the needs of children for privacy -- a need that children themselves won't understand or be able to articulate until they are much older.
It is possible to write about one's children without violating their privacy. Writers such as Jean Kenin the 1950s, whose best-selling essay collection of 1957, Please Don't Eat the Daisies, employed a mordant sense of humor to describe the everyday antics of her four sons (she later had two more children). Kerr was attuned to the perversities of life with small children, but she remained a grown-up: arch but never instrumental, using satire rather than self-pity to charm her readers. Women like Kerr and Shirley Jackson, whose books Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957) adopted a comparably light tone, wrote about their families in order to make broader observations about the culture and their place in it. Today's parent-memoirists use their children as an excuse to talk about themselves. They reveal the intimate and gory details of their childrearing for the same reason politicians hug babies: they believe it humanizes them. But their work is less an exploration of human attachment than a literary version of Munchausen by Proxy syndrome.
Perhaps the current economic crisis will prove to be a force strong enough to dislodge some of the more extreme fears and pretensions of this parenting class. The hip rebelliousness of this generation required a degree of solvency (and lines of credit) that no longer exists. Old-fashioned moderation and values such as thrift, reticence, and self-sacrifice might eventually reemerge. Parents might focus less on cultivating cool than on building character. Unless and until this generation of parents stops viewing its children as obstacles to personal fulfillment, these attempts to describe the experience of being mothers and fathers will remain mired in narcissism, little more than dreary catalogues of the everyday indignities of life with their children.
The dominant characteristic of the hipster is knowingness. But parenthood teaches you that there is little you can be knowing about; everything is new and your life caters to fickle little creatures. It is an odd cultural moment that takes extreme measures to protect the physical safety of children, but is unconcerned about Mommy blogging all about Jasper's bed-wetting...
So-called hipster parents, by contrast, embrace a different philosophy. They believe becoming a parent should not require one to relinquish creative control over one's life, move to the suburbs, and purchase a minivan. As Ariel Gore, the author of a book entitled The Hip Mama Survival Guide, told MSNBC: "If I'm a punk rocker or I'm really into Hungarian folk dancing ... and that's who I am, why should I have to leave that behind and raise my kid in some generic middle class American reality that doesn't feel authentic to me?"
For those who fall into these archetypal categories, having children is no longer something people simply do. It is a conscious lifestyle choice, one among many ushered in by access to birth control, delayed marriage, and greater opportunities for women in the workplace. In this sense, the stakes are much higher. If parenthood is a choice, then people risk compromising their sense of identity as well as their much-cherished freedom by making it. And as economists who study choice theory have demonstrated, the more choices you have, the more likely you are to experience anxiety and remorse about the one you ultimately make, even if that choice results in the birth of a beloved child.
...
For this generation of hip parents, children are no longer little people who are seen but not heard. They are celebrated but also resented, in print and online. They are offered up instrumentally as a way of making connections to readers, with only an occasional glimmer of self-awareness about the possible impact on the child (as Armstrong writes, "OH MY GOD what my kid is going to say about me on her website"). For a growing number of parents, the demands of parental expression trump the needs of children for privacy -- a need that children themselves won't understand or be able to articulate until they are much older.
It is possible to write about one's children without violating their privacy. Writers such as Jean Kenin the 1950s, whose best-selling essay collection of 1957, Please Don't Eat the Daisies, employed a mordant sense of humor to describe the everyday antics of her four sons (she later had two more children). Kerr was attuned to the perversities of life with small children, but she remained a grown-up: arch but never instrumental, using satire rather than self-pity to charm her readers. Women like Kerr and Shirley Jackson, whose books Life Among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957) adopted a comparably light tone, wrote about their families in order to make broader observations about the culture and their place in it. Today's parent-memoirists use their children as an excuse to talk about themselves. They reveal the intimate and gory details of their childrearing for the same reason politicians hug babies: they believe it humanizes them. But their work is less an exploration of human attachment than a literary version of Munchausen by Proxy syndrome.
Perhaps the current economic crisis will prove to be a force strong enough to dislodge some of the more extreme fears and pretensions of this parenting class. The hip rebelliousness of this generation required a degree of solvency (and lines of credit) that no longer exists. Old-fashioned moderation and values such as thrift, reticence, and self-sacrifice might eventually reemerge. Parents might focus less on cultivating cool than on building character. Unless and until this generation of parents stops viewing its children as obstacles to personal fulfillment, these attempts to describe the experience of being mothers and fathers will remain mired in narcissism, little more than dreary catalogues of the everyday indignities of life with their children.
The dominant characteristic of the hipster is knowingness. But parenthood teaches you that there is little you can be knowing about; everything is new and your life caters to fickle little creatures. It is an odd cultural moment that takes extreme measures to protect the physical safety of children, but is unconcerned about Mommy blogging all about Jasper's bed-wetting...
More on hipster parents and the realization our society is making about them:
I Hate My Hipster Parents and Halloween! Why Can?t I Just Be Elmo? I've never even heard of Andy Warhol! on LOL Wall, by Magda Lena
Dumbest Things Hipster Parents Do Photo Gallery - Too Cool For School - Dumb as a Blog on truTV.com
Hipster parent alert: The Longboardstroller | News.com.au
TIME: Hipster-parents are pretty much douche bags | The Poop | an SFGate.com blog
The latest hipster parenting trend: Diaper-free babies - The Globe and Mail
David Brooks takes on hipster parents - Salon.com
Good Luck!
Tayken
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