Priorities? What's That?

Kevin Drum points out a depressing article about parents and their cellphones, and then he writes about the pressures of "proper" schooling (as in, getting kids into the right schools and first-graders spending four hours each night doing homework and the like). Both of these articles put me in mind of George Carlin.

In the cellphone article, in which parents clearly think their phone conversations are of greater importance than their kids, I recall Carlin saying, "It's a baby. Touch the little prick once in a while; he'll thank you for it someday." That's exactly right. I'm as guilty as any parent, really, of not always being attentive to what my kid's up to. It's really hard not to be. It's really hard not to simply say "That's nice", without turning my head, when she wants to show me that her kitty is sitting on her lap for the thousandth day in a row. But that doesn't make it right. There is a fundamental difference between occasionally having to say, "Sweetie, I'm doing something important right now, so can you play by yourself for a while?" and treating your child as a feature in the wallpaper of one's life.

And in the second case, a recent Carlin album has a lengthy segment on how out-of-whack our society's fixation on children has become. He says, "You have a child fetish, you've turned them into little cult objects, and it's not healthy." This goes hand-in-hand with the cellphone article, because we're in increasing danger of not seeing children as people but as things to be paraded about so that our peers can see how wonderful we are. Children have become one more way of "Keeping up with the Joneses", and it's really depressing. I resent being made to feel that if my daughter isn't quite reading yet (much less at a fourth grade level or whatever), or if she's only starting preschool yet (actually, she is), or if she's not already taking violin or dance lessons, that I'm somehow crippling her future. I resent it because (a) it's completely false (late-bloomers and early-flameouts are a dime-a-dozen), and (b) it's none of anyone's damn business but ours, anyway.