Option C
Read Jessica McCrory Calarco’s essay “‘Free-Range’ Parenting’s Unfair Double Standard” and support or refute her claim. See Washington Post and Reason’s “The Fragile Generation.”
Option D
Read the online essay "It's been hot before" and write an argumentative essay about the role logical fallacies in the dangerous denial of global warming and global drought. For another source, you can use Netflix Explained, "The World's Water Crisis."
Read Jessica McCrory Calarco’s essay “‘Free-Range’ Parenting’s Unfair Double Standard” and support or refute her claim. See Washington Post and Reason’s “The Fragile Generation.”
We had different child raising standards in one or two generations ago: Kids were on their own.
As a kid in the 60s and 70s, I'd ride my bike from sunup to sundown, eating lunch at a friend's house and not seeing my parents for 12 hours a day.
I'd eat sugary cereals, whole boxes, for breakfast, stacks of pancakes washed down with several gallons of orange juice, rendering enough sugar to afflict a stable of horses with diabetes.
I had no bicycle helmet, no smartphone, no iPad with Raz-Kids, no GPS microchip implanted in my neck.
No one had peanut allergies, which may be on the increase due to the hygiene hypothesis.
Summary of McCrory's Article
Helicopter parenting became the rage in the 1990s. It is a phenomenon of the middle or privileged class.
Helicopter parenting is the unhealthy compulsion for parents to micromanage, over control, over pamper, and suffocate their children to their children't detriment.
Helicopter parenting is the equivalent of surgically removing a cat's claws to make it an "indoor cat," so that the cat won't tear up the furniture. The problem is that if this "indoor cat" ventures outdoors, it will be devastated and destroyed by the challenges of the outside world.
My wife teaches sixth graders, and she tells me the children of helicopter parents are narcissistic, spoiled, rude, lazy, dishonest, and egregiously unprepared for the challenges of the real world.
Apparently, a lot of parents got the memo because many privileged parents have abandoned helicopter parenting for what is supposed to be its opposite: free-range , or laissez-faire (hands off), parenting.
Some might question the motives of parents who embrace free-range parenting as parents searching for a fancy smokescreen to hide the fact that they're lazy self-involved adults who are looking for an excuse not to put any effort in raising their children.
Others might argue that while helicopter parenting is stupid, its opposite extreme, free-range parenting, is just as stupid.
Others might observe that rich parents have the luxury of experimenting with extreme fads because they have a safety net to collect the rubbish of their stupid ideas. Poor people don't have such a safety net, so poor people don't engage in extreme fads like helicopter or free-range parenting.
In other words, whether we are talking about helicopter parenting or free-range parenting, we are talking about rich people having the luxury to do stupid things.
Or we can put it this way: Free-range parenting, which gives selfish parents an excuse to stare at their navels all day, is the re-packaged narcissism of helicopter parenting in which parents try too hard to live vicariously through their children's accomplishments.
We can infer many of these observations in McCrory's essay:
McCrory is making the claim that "free-range" parenting is a luxury and a privilege of the wealthy class, that the whole notion of "free-range" parenting is framed differently, and unfairly, for poor parents.
The author points out the case of a poor single mother, Debra Harrell of South Carolina, whose 9-year-old daughter played in a nearby park while mother worked at McDonald's. The mother spent the night in jail and daughter was in foster care for 17 days. No such arrest would be made in the case of privileged parents letting their children play in a park.
Furthermore, poor parents don't have the luxury of choosing "free-range" parenting. Poor parents often have to work several jobs to make ends meet.
I had a student who at the age of 3 was kept in the bathroom while his mother worked as a maid all day long. He saw the four corners of a bathroom for over 8 hours a day. He was in my class in 2000 as a skinny little runt. I saw him two years ago as a muscular businessman and former United States Marine with a look of fearlessness and toughness in his eyes that I have rarely seen in any human being.
My neighbor's daughter is a lifeguard at Ted Watkins swimming pool in Los Angeles. Every day in the summer parents drop off their kids at 10 in the morning and don't pick their children up until after six p.m.
My neighbor buys snacks at Costco for his lifeguard daughter to share with about a dozen kids everyday in the summer. Without those snacks, those children would go without food all day.
Such "free-range" parenting cannot compare to rich kids who hang out at the mall and Starbuck's all day shopping with unlimited credit from their parents' credit cards.
Narcissism, Privilege, and Power
Narcissism informs helicopter parenting:
Privileged parents micromanage their children's lives, forcing them to study for SAT starting in the fourth grade, doing their children's homework, forcing their children to do "resume-building" activities to maximize possibility that their children will go to top-tier universities and make good money so they can be trophy children.
Privilege informs free-range parenting:
To be privileged means to be allowed to let your children roam free without legal consequence. Parents can let their kids go to the mall, go to movies, go to restaurants, "chill" at friends' houses, many of which have lavish swimming pools, home theater systems, catering complete with sushi and taco bars. This is "free-range" at its finest.
The poor are left out of the equation.
The examples above suggest that the parenting debate of helicopter parents vs. free-range parents is more of a rich person's debate. The rest of America is excluded from the controversy.
Conclusion:
A lot of so-called parenting debates are really not about parenting so much as they're about privilege and economic stratification. To discuss the debate as a parenting one without framing the debate in the larger economic context is preposterous and absurd.
Sample Thesis Statements
I concur with McCrory that free-range parenting is a privilege of the wealthy class and moreover that the very idea of free-range parenting is a canard, a misnomer that should be replaced with a more accurate term: obnoxious fad parenting in which the privileged class embraces the parenting technique du jour in order to brandish its privileged status as rub their rich lifestyle in other people's faces.
Counter Thesis to Above
While I agree that being privileged making free-range or any other kind of parenting easier, I look at free-range parenting as a welcome antidote to the suffocating helicopter parenting that too many parents use to the detriment of their children evidenced by ____________, ______________, ________________, and ____________________.
Counter Thesis to Above
While privileged parents would be well served to stop micromanaging their children's lives as helicopter parents and while some degree of free-range parenting might serve as an antidote to these rich parents suffocating their children, the discussion is irrelevant to the majority of community college students whose economic struggles do not include both helicopter parenting and free-style parenting in place of survival parenting. Therefore, the discussion about free-range parenting is really about privilege and the extremes that the rich have the luxury of experimenting with since they enjoy such a large safety net to collect the wreckage of their folly.
Thesis from a Different Angle
That helicopter parenting is narcissistic and dysfunctional does not make its opposite extreme, free-range parenting, any less insane. Both are pathological extremes that the rich gravitate to because they have too much free time to stoke the flames of anxiety about the future of their children.
Option D
Read the online essay "It's been hot before" and write an argumentative essay about the role logical fallacies in the dangerous denial of global warming and global drought. See "The 5 telltale techniques of climate change denial." For another source, you can use Netflix Explained, "The World's Water Crisis."
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