Let the fledglings fly!

I've heard of over-parenting in college, but this is stunning, pathetic, ridiculous, and so many more adjectives I can't think of right now (just had some tequilla).

[ Time ] Overparenting had been around long before Douglas MacArthur's mom Pinky moved with him to West Point in 1899 and took an apartment near the campus, [...] But in the 1990s something dramatic happened, and the needle went way past the red line. From peace and prosperity, there arose fear and anxiety; crime went down, yet parents stopped letting kids out of their sight; [...] By the time the frenzy had reached its peak, colleges were installing "Hi, Mom!" webcams in common areas, and employers like Ernst & Young were creating "parent packs" for recruits to give Mom and Dad, since they were involved in negotiating salary and benefits.

These should be fully-fledged adults, pioneering their way through the first-real-job jungle, machete in hand and and just enough rations in their ruck sack to get them to Wednesday. Instead their parents are acting like their kids are 3-year-olds on the first day of preschool!

And, I must say, what's wrong with the kids-cum-adults?! Isn't this what the teenage years are all about? Isn't that when you distance yourself from your parents, assert your independence and demand to be treated like an adult (...one who still has mom do their laundry and the rents pay for tuition, of course.) How can any self-respecting 21-year-old stand to have this kind of oversight? It's one thing to consult with parents when dealing with such a brand new world as employment contracts, but the extent of the dependency this article suggests is deplorable.

Read the whole thing. I'm generally in favor of the Free Range movement, I have Leonore Skenazy's book and I'm a regular follower of her blog (See just to the right here for the link permanently installed on our links list -->). Our only problem around here is the plethora of bums. When you have a strung-out guy living at the bus stop on your corner, you're a little wary about letting the kids out the front door (especially the 9-year-old girl).

(As a completely non-sequitur aside: I knew the Time magazine had a cover story on over-parenting, so I went to their website to try to find it. It took me a while to do so. You would think that the story that they decided would sell the most magazines this week would be prominently displayed on their website. Instead, it was third on a list on the bottom half of the page, and took me half a minute and a double-check that it wasn't last week's cover story to find it.)

(As a second completely non-sequitur aside, this is a quote from a little later in the same Time article:

"Eleven parents are sitting in a circle in an airy, glass-walled living room in south Austin, Texas, eating organic, gluten-free, nondairy coconut ice cream."

You know, I'm pretty darn sure that all ice cream is gluten-free. At least, I've never seen a recipe that calls for flour!

So, my question is, is it the parents who are dorks for insisting on gluten-free ice cream, or the reporter for writing such stupidity?)