Parenting

Did you ever notice that today's babyboomer parents tend to keep their children in stroller until they hit puberty? I see children fully capable of walking, let alone reading (and probably even smoking cigarettes) strapped into strollers as their parents push them along. To make matters worse, the parents are usually completely ignoring their kids--yapping on cell phones or talking to some other adult.

I suspect that's the reason these kids are strapped into the strollers to begin with. The parents just don't want to deal with their kids. In fact they often don't know how to. They aren't used to dealing with their children on any regular basis, and they are often pretty stressed out to boot. The nanny, daycare, and gymboree play dates...they all combine so that when the parents actually do have to actually hang out with the kids, they aren't quite sure what to do with them.

Strapping the kids into strollers and keeping them from dawdling, zig zagging down the street, or stopping to pet the neighborhood dog (or whatever kids these days want to do), seems to be the best solution for many stressed out parents. An easy short term solution to taking care of your kids, but not so great a long term one. It's not the parents' fault as much as it seems to be society's, but everytime I see some oversized kid being pushed down the street and I see the comatose look on the kid's face, I get just a pang of sadness.