Dave Barry on Parenting

When all the bad news in the world gets to be too much, I like to escape by reading Dave Barry.  Last week I was doing just that when I discovered that even with Barry, I can't escape from thinking about our work.  Here is some of what Barry had to say about his parents in his book, Live Right and Find Happiness:

"Above all, they did not worry about providing a perfect risk-free environment for their children.  They loved us, sure.  But they didn't feel obligated to spend every waking minute running interference between us and the world.  They were parents, but they were not engaged 24/7 in what we have created, featuring many crucial child-rearing requirements that my parents' generation was blissfully unaware of.

"They didn't go to prenatal classes, so they didn't find out all the things that can go wrong when a person has a baby, so they didn't spend months worrying about those things....  They didn't form 'play groups' where they sat around worrying that their drooling baby was behind some other drooling baby in reaching whatever critical childhood development stage they read about in their 37 parenting handbooks written by experts, each listing hundreds, if not thousands of things they should worry about....

"They didn't worry that their children would get bored, so they didn't schedule endless after-school activities and drive their kids to the activities and stand around with other parents watching their children engage in the activities.  Instead, they sent their children out to play."

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