Parental fragments

My recent priority of media digestion means that I skim, as fast as I can, any articles that (1) seem culturally aware and (2) mention my media triumvirate: debates on belief, parenting narratives, and independent music. Today, the Internet chefs produced a feast of parenting morsels including bad parents, boyhood studies, and the praises of being bored. Here are my parenting fragments for the day:

Time's most recent cover story, "The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting," is here.

I am reminded of a college-student acquaintance of mine who was recently expelled from his dorm for behavior un-befitting of a freshman in a drug-free zone. Now he was having to move all of his belongings back to his parents' house. Someone else close by said "That's not too bad. Maybe there really aren't any consequences for you!" He shot her a look. "Yes there are! I don't want to be there through all of both breaks! That's like torture." (I paraphrase; freshman men do not speak like this). Is it overparenting when you take your nearly-grown kids back after a mistake?

"The Puzzle of Boys," an academic review of gender-anxious psyche books in The Chronicle of Higher Education is here.

Yesterday on the phone my son was talking about how great the next couple of days would be. "I can be on the computer all day for, like, two days!" I was shocked. "Really? Doing what?" I asked.  He rattled of the names of the couple of games he was looking forward to playing. I thought: I give these guys, an hour of "screen time" on a weekend day, and we don't have a television feed. How does he think he is going to play on the computer all day? I realized how much time we spend playing cards, building Legos, drawing, and reading together, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Then, I inoculated myself for the free-time debates that might arise in the next five days.

My guide and commiserator in the adventure and tragedy of (half) single-parenthood, Sandra Tsing Loh's newest article in The Atlantic, "On Being a Bad Mother" is here. I adore her honest self-exposure and the portrait she draws of her girls.

A friend-of-a-friend and a parent of a 9 year-old regularly watches The Family Guy with her daughter along with some other adult-themed programs. She purchased a book for her daughter attempting to introduce her to sex education, maybe something like this. Her daughter handed the book back to her, saying "Mom, this is inappropriate." Where have the permissive part and the authoritarian part of culture caught each other in the neck to produce this result?