Thank you. I could not be around kids 24/7. I would be tearing my hair out -- yes, I would long to stock shelves, or shelve books, or to be alone. It's bad enough with three cats in the house... supposedly they should be entertaining each other but I often feel like a referee.
Back in the day, we had a whole network of neighbors and people who lived in town who weren't even family but who acted as side-parents. I knew every family on my block except for the psycho couple at the end of the block who shot at various animals with a pellet gun. I used to pick tiny bouquets of wildflowers and bring them to each neighbor. I think I was seven. By the late 80s, pretty much everyone had moved away and two little girls who picked flowers actually picked the cultivated flowers out of one neighbor's yard and attempted to sell them to other neighbors. They were hellions with (understandable) behavioral problems whose parents were in the midst of a terrible divorce. I feel bad for those girls: it's obvious they witnessed parents argued about money, because otherwise they would not have bothered trying to profit from selling flowers from questionable sources. And kudos to them for trying to take matters into their own hands from a young age. It's just so terribly tragic that parenting and the neighborhood network itself had so obviously disintegrated by the mid-80s. Nowadays, it's mostly helicoptered kids and lots of divorced or divorcing parents. There are a lucky few whose parents stay together for the long haul. Though in the old days, you had lots of couples who stayed together who would have been better off apart. Like you say, everything is a tradeoff!
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2023-06-21 03:24 pm (UTC)Back in the day, we had a whole network of neighbors and people who lived in town who weren't even family but who acted as side-parents. I knew every family on my block except for the psycho couple at the end of the block who shot at various animals with a pellet gun. I used to pick tiny bouquets of wildflowers and bring them to each neighbor. I think I was seven. By the late 80s, pretty much everyone had moved away and two little girls who picked flowers actually picked the cultivated flowers out of one neighbor's yard and attempted to sell them to other neighbors. They were hellions with (understandable) behavioral problems whose parents were in the midst of a terrible divorce. I feel bad for those girls: it's obvious they witnessed parents argued about money, because otherwise they would not have bothered trying to profit from selling flowers from questionable sources. And kudos to them for trying to take matters into their own hands from a young age. It's just so terribly tragic that parenting and the neighborhood network itself had so obviously disintegrated by the mid-80s. Nowadays, it's mostly helicoptered kids and lots of divorced or divorcing parents. There are a lucky few whose parents stay together for the long haul. Though in the old days, you had lots of couples who stayed together who would have been better off apart. Like you say, everything is a tradeoff!