Connected, but not in Obvious Ways

I was 22 when I joined the Peace Corps and went to live in a little town in a different country. When I first went, I was the only volunteer in the town.

It seemed "normal" to me, going off to live way apart from my family and all.

But to the people I interacted with mostly, it seemed sort of crazy. They'd wonder how I could leave my family, how I could live alone, and so forth.

I'd grown up mostly having my own room, in a culture that valued "independence" and expected kids to do their own thing as yound adults, even if that meant moving to a different continent.

Many of the people I interacted with had grown up sharing a room with multiple family members, in cultures that valued family ties. They told me they just felt uncomfortable sleeping alone at night. It was normal to share rooms.

Of course, the way I'd been raised seemed normal, natural even. Kids were supposed to be independent; it was healthy. It's also really handy for making a work force that will move to jobs and think of themselves as independent contractors, of course. It's almost a precondition of the industrial revolution that you have to have lots of workers who think living apart from their families and moving somewhere else makes sense. (There was a long period in London during which the population of London didn't reproduce itself but depended on immigrants from elsewhere in England to sustain it.)

I had a father who was a really good 1960's USian dad. He was kind and caring, and worked hard at his job to support the family. He wasn't around during the days, but we ate dinner together pretty much every evening when he came home. He did his own thing (tennis) on Saturday and Sunday (after church) mornings. My mother was also a good 1960's USian mom. She stayed home with the kids, was involved in school volunteering, and was our primary disciplinarian. She encouraged us to do our studying and learn independence. It was all very middle class and WASPy.

In comparison, my sibling is also a good dad, but with some real differences. He's arranged at various times to work from home part of the day so that he'd be around his kids, or to go to work at 5am so that he'd be home early enough to be with his kids after school. He's changed more diapers in a week than my dad did during his fatherhood. (My dad was the eldest of six; he'd changed plenty of his siblings' diapers.) He's just way more involved in his kids' stuff, shares disciplining more with my sister-in-law. My sister-in-law has been a stay at home mom, like my own mom, but has gone back to school and shared household chores and such with my brother more.

For my dad, kids were mostly what my mom wanted, and he was happy to be a good dad. For my brother, kids were more a shared desire, and he wants to be more involved.

Now, in both cases, these are middle class, WASPy families. But I think there's a real difference in the ways my generation is parenting. At its extreme, we hear lots of complaints about helicopter parenting. But I think we're also seeing a reduced emphasis on being independent for the sake of independence. My students seem to think of their parents as friends as well as parents, and I don't think most kids in my generation did.

***

I got a call yesterday on my cell phone from a number I didn't recognize (and neither did the phone). But the area code was one of the area codes from where I grew up. So I was a little worried. It could be one of my relatives calling, but not one my phone recognizes. Or it could be a hospital calling to tell me that my Mom's had a stroke or something.

There was no message, so I called back, and I got the voice mail of daughter of my Mom's friend, someone I grew up knowing, but haven't talked to in years. It turned out that she was tryingt to get my Mom's cell phone number, and there wasn't an emergency or anything.

But, you know, it's likely that someday I'll get a call from a number in that area code and it will be an emergency, or someone calling to tell me that my Mom has died. That's how I found out my Dad had died; an EMT from the next suburb over called, and then put my Mom on the line after he'd told me.

That's the other side of the independence we've historically valued: my sibling and I are 2000 miles from "home"; we're both reasonably successful in terms our culture cares about. But we're also distant from family in ways that are difficult sometimes.

On the one hand, I really like living alone, being independent, doing my own thing. On the other hand, there's something to be said for being close to family and such, isn't there?

I wonder how this next generation is going to find things; yes, there's still a lot of emphasis in our culture on independence. And this coming generation has been criticized for being self-centered and such. But self-centeredness is nothing new in USian culture, and hasn't served us well. And independence for the sake of independence doesn't always serve us well, either.

Maybe the students coming up, the ones whose fathers have been more involved in their lives (even if that's a class issue), will figure things out a bit better, will manage better balance?