Big Mother

8/29/06

It’s quickly becoming apparent to me that parenting is a real hit ‘n miss situation. I suppose, like all children, I thought my generation would do a better job at parenting than the previous model, but now I see that every generation is remarkably clueless at the task. Not that I can blame them; I’m not a parent but when thinking about it I’m struck terrified at the prospect of finding my teenage daughter has been knocked-up by the Kwik-E-Mart clerk, or that my son has decided to join the Republican party. How would I be an effective parental role model and disciplinarian? I haven’t the foggiest. But I bet it wouldn’t be like this:

Where the Boomer generation thought they could best parent by hoarding material goods as if they could take it with them in death, and instilling a simultaneously stringent and vapid moral code in their children, Generation X has decided to go one of two ways. Either we befriend our children in a sort of sick “partnership” devoid of any clear authoritarianism, or we step directly off the deep end and micro-manage every single aspect of our offspring’s life. Companies like Alltrack USA are right on board with that idea, brother! Better living through psychotic technological spying has produced the DriveRight Car Chip, a GPS “black box” that goes into your kid’s car which records every second or so of the trip, letting you know exactly where the car has been and at what speed it was traveling while getting there by email, like some kind of parental LoJack.

One such frighteningly obsessive parent, Mark Pawlick, was on NPR today expounding on the miracle that is constant omnipresent lording over your children. Without getting into the fact that somehow his now teenage daughter was drinking and smoking at the age of 10, Pawlick says that when she got her driver’s license "There was no way I was gonna let her in the car without some way to track where she was and where she was going."

I understand, Mark. I mean, parenting is just so hard. You have to like, pay attention to your children and shit, almost the whole time they’re growing up! Fuck that! Who has the time? It’s much easier to give the illusion of parental guidance by constant Orwellian control over every aspect of your teenager’s life. I mean, hey, we can’t be releasing one inch of those taught reins of dictatorship when her upbringing has been so terminally incompetent up to this point.

If hunching over your glowing computer screen in a dark room, rubbing your calloused hands together in murderous glee at the upcoming punishment you’ll be meting out upon your little DNA copy of yourself because they stopped by Jimmy’s house instead of coming straight home isn’t enough for you, don’t despair! We can do more! No, we can’t implant a chip into Junior’s brain which will control his actions (not yet! Look for that around Christmas!) but the DriveRight chip can be programmed to remotely flash the car’s lights or honk the horn when your little precious darling goes over the speed limit. Yeah! There you go, you freakish goblins! It’s kinda like having a shock collar attached to them all the time, only totally legal in the most ass-way possible.

Hell, never you mind the fact that teenagers are by nature going to test boundaries in a search for their identity, or that the tighter that leash gets on their throat the more they will yank and kind of want to stab you in your sleep. Never mind that certain experts such as Massachusetts General Hospital child psychiatrist Steve Shlozman says as a father, he understands parents' temptation. But, he says keeping too close an eye on kids, often backfires.

"When kids feel crowded, they tend to do things that they otherwise would not do," Shlozman says. "They take even greater risk because they have a desire to prove their independence and their individuality. There is something they need to get away with."

And hey! Let’s just forget the fact that if they see their cars, a long-standing symbol of teenage freedom, as weapons of the oppressor, they’ll act out in other ways such as, oh, I dunno, banging someone in a dumpster behind the school or playing around with drugs to get back at possessive mommy and daddy. There’s a time and a place for those things, and it’s called college.

Just fuck all that; as long as you have the illusion of control everything should turn out fine.

“DriveRight; allowing you to pretend to be a parent now and on into the future!”


Sources: NPR
Alltrack USA