For a guy writing on something with Gen X in the title I hardly ever reference it. I like to leave that to implication. That's it.

But I read Ian's bit this morning about parenting and the generations and I thought...that's a theme I can conveniently latch on to with little real effort...and because he is right-ish:

...us kids born in the sixties and seventies grew up with a presently-unacceptable amount of danger: no bike helmet laws, lots of eating food off the floor, sitting three inches from the TV, and popping Thalidomide like aspirin. Or, in the case of my family, it was long stretches of untethered drifting followed by periodic bursts of hellish micromanagement. Your mileage might have varied. Enter the Boomers having kids in the 80s and 90s. I haven't done the comparative research, so don't hold me to this, but the Boomers' kids are the most protected, coddled, mollified, drugged, organized, litigated and structured children in the history of the planet. The Simpsons, as usual, say it best with the omnipresent woman at every school event who wails "my God, what about the children?!?" And now, as is evidenced by my blog entry of last Friday, it is our turn to have kids. Back when we were working on the generational books, I gave a lot of thought to how I would raise future children, even though it was to be another decade before Lucy showed up. I kept coming to the same conclusion: a monitored freedom. Take the barefoot learn-for-themselves quality of the 70s that I had, and mix it with the digital know-how and research of the present day.

If I were about to think of my parenting as something based on a theme other than abstract arbitrary convenience (hereinafter "AAC"), it would be the carving out of time and lending resources to have slack fun as much as edjification. The sad thing is I know that they will never have that jump on the bicycle at dawn, see you at supper youth I had in small town Nova Scotia but I don't know if that exists anywhere anymore. The best you can do is create it within a framework which shapes them for their future, not yours.