My best friend from high school has teenage children and, along with her husband, is an awesome parent. I'm always interested to hear stories about her children, their adventures and near-misadventures and how she and her husband are guiding them through the good and the bad.
On our last visit the big discussion was, "Should I let my 16-year-old have her own cell phone?" My friend recalled the 10 p.m. rule of the Mapgirl childhood home: no telephone conversations after 10 p.m. That means conversations could not begin nor continue after 10 p.m. And in the days of yore, a parent could get on the telephone and embarrass you or, heaven forbid, truncate the call.
A cell phone certainly would have thwarted the 10 p.m. rule. This was one of a number of painful mandates under which I lived.
I told my friend I really can't imagine raising kids in this day and age -- it was hard enough in the mid-1980s, when Madonna was the embodiment of all you wanted to keep away from your teenage daughter. "Our folks had MTV to contend with -- now you have to cope with the Internet!" I said.
In a great post today, BusyMom addresses the conundrum of modern parenting. The frontier these days is MySpace.com, but the fundamental questions are the same: How do you protect your kids without seeming overprotective? How do you teach them there are more important things than being cool, when you want to be seen as cool yourself?
My parents would never have been nominated as "the cool ones," unless the rule stating we had to be up, dressed with bed made by 8 a.m. was viewed as extremely hip.
Yet for all their rules, veritable manifestos of parenting, they earned our respect and our love and yes, our friendship.
Today I was very blue and, as I've mentioned before, there is typically one person I call in those circumstances to cheer me up and encourage me: my dad. Works every time. Pretty cool.
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