Reply to "I lived the happiest childhood a child could possibly know”

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Don't base your life around a book of fiction about the 1890s which was probably written with nostalgia and selective memory after the two world wars.

My grandparents lived then; while in some ways they had an simpler life, in many ways they did not. Kids often didn't graduate from high school and went to work in cities or on farms, there was a lot of death of siblings and parents from childhood diseases and bacterial infections.

I remember reading Caddie Woodlawn at 12 and longing for that life. It was a sweet story but it wasn't mine.[/quote]

As someone who reads a lot of books from the 1890s and earlier — it’s funny how OP’s sentiment is a constant.  Louisa May Alcott’s “good” parents are always worrying about how kids are growing up too fast and how the fast pace of modern life is bad for their nerves.  Someday maybe I’ll do a retelling of Little Women in the media of a parenting forum.[/quote]

Yes, it's a little bit of cosplay, in a way. They see themselves from the outside as fitting in with that mindset, that tradition. It was Dickon's mom in [i]The Secret Garden[/i], too -- the problem with the "crippled boy" Colin was needing fresh air and to be able to play outside.

It's in the Gene Stratton-Porter books, too, like [i]A Girl of the Limberlost[/i]. The healthy young people were the ones who spent time outside in the fresh air, the girls who didn't "paint their faces" and follow the dictates of overly commercial society. The ones who are in Nature!! And the story will unfold to prove they are right, because that's what it is -- a story that someone is telling.

There is a certain type of parenting which fetishizes this. It's important to identify to oneself and others as The Other, as someone with [i]different[/i] values and special insights. It doesn't work if you acknowledge other parents in real life are walking a road with some from this approach, and some from that, tailored to their individual children. You can't even see when people have agreed with you (although rejected the fetishizing of it), because that isn't making you special enough.[/quote]

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