Thursday, June 16, 2011

J.D. Mullane: Parenting Expert

You have two choices as a parent. You can be a “child-centered parent” who hounds your child’s every move, driving them into an adulthood of inactivity in your basement. The other choice … you can be a good parent. That’s the best I can do With J. D. Mullane’s argument in his “Center of the Universe” commentary. I think he gets to this parenting dichotomy by discussing why he was opposed to closing schools due to heat. He says he is responding to criticism he received for another article on that subject. I’m not sure, though, because he quotes a teacher talking about how kids want to escape air conditioned schools because of the heat in order to play outside, and the closure was only of schools that didn’t have air conditioning. I’m also not sure how he gets from not wanting to have your children be in a non-air conditioned building during record heat to the caricature of a parent who follows their children around from one activity to another and smothering them. I’m never sure how he gets to his over-simplified black and white mischaracterizations of the world, nor why the world is always divided into right and silly, emasculated, and stupid wrong. That is part of the problem. Maybe it’s the whole problem. Mullane goes out of his way to simplify the world, and describe one half in a nasty and snarky manner. He eliminates nuance (not every parent who disagreed with him on the school closure issue follows their kids to every event, and not every parent who wants to be there for their children makes them go to fifteen sporting events a day). He plays fast and loose with the facts (he mentions a comment from someone whose 45 year old is in their basemen, someone who was a child long before the caricature Mullane attacks could even have been constructed). He brings in any number of other issues rather than focusing on the original one (adults lining in their parents’ basement, soccer moms, etc.). He throws around more insults than facts (like saying a critic of his is smothering their child who probably has a name like Landon or Logan). He eliminates the possibility that you can disagree with him and be anything but stupid. “We see things differently. While my kid is hustling around the house for allowance cash, yours might be aiming to take top honors in the Little Miss Center of the Universe contest. Good luck with that.” What J.D. Mullane does here is what he always does, attack people with sarcasm and insults and lots of bluster. It’s what a lot of folks do these days. I’m not Mullane, I don’t have the skill to distill the response options down to an easy choice. Some folks do, however, buy into this. So, I do think that we need to respond. I think I’ll respond by picking apart Mullane’s offerings for a few weeks. That’s my choice as a parent who wants to protect my children from more than hot schools.

You can find Mullane's article here : http://www.phillyburbs.com/blogs/news_columnists/jd_mullane/

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