Gen-X Hipsters?

There has been much buzz about an article in Time Magazine on the new generation of parents and the attempt to make their kids as hip as they think they are. Author James Poniewozik writes:

"It is said that children should be seen, not heard, but that expression is sometimes better applied to parents. Until recently the most egregious parental oversharing was usually your sister-in-law's Christmas letter or the guy with the endless stream of baby photos. But there's a new species of chatty dad and mom: the hipster parent-memoirist." Time: 2/8/007

Poniewozik makes the obligatory argument that parenting has changed for the Generation X crowd which probably could have been stated without his article; that's never a good sign for something you hoped would be thought provoking. However, I suppose it is worth pointing out that the "Children of the Children of the 60s" will obviously be more about punk rock and 80s pop than their parents before them. Truth be told, I have felt this impulse somewhat in wanting the boy to listen to "grown up" tunes fancied by myself and my wife, but when I turn on the XM feed from the computer I find that he responds much more to XM Kids than our favorite channel, Flight 26. You'll get the occasional Beatles track redone or some 90s band doing a cover of their own song translated into "Muppetese", but for the most part it's simple songs in 4/4 time.

While Poniewozik takes the time to point out the idiosyncrasies of Gen-X parents, he only briefly acknowledges his own membership in the club while writing the rest of the piece as if he were an outsider. In the concluding paragraph he remarks:

"I sympathize with the parents. But I sympathize more with the toddlers whose bouts of playing with themselves, feces hurling and projectile vomiting are being recorded, page by gigabyte, for posterity. Someday, one will write his or her own memoir of growing up in public."

This idea of our kids growing up with blogs and journals written about their daily routine is especially poignant in my newly refocused blog since I have wondered what the boy will think of my psychoanalyzing his every action, making light of his adventures in peeing into a toilet, or his awkwardness in learning the English language. It'll of course be years before I'd even be able to talk to him about it, so all I can do is press on and hope he'll forgive me for our generation's "family album".

What I think Poniewozik forgets is that everything that our parents thought was cool was too "them" for us to ever take seriously or talk about with our friends. Did any of my fellow Gen-Xers go to into class one day in elementary school and say, "Hey man, my parents saw Hendrix at Woodstock!" or "Check out my awesome Beach Boys t-shirt!". Of course some of us came to appreciate the sounds of the 50s and 60s, but none of that shows up in any of the parents from the Time article. So, why would Poniewozik ever expect our kids to think of us as anything but (to borrow a Baby Boomer buzzword) "squares"?

Right now our kids wear what we want them to and listen to what we like, but that's only for a fleeting few years before we're not the coolest thing in their world. It's not their fault and it isn't ours, but we have to let our kids define themselves and all we can do in the meantime is expose them to our "groovy tunes" and do whatever makes them feel loved but not smothered. Maybe one day down the road if you're lucky, your son or daughter will find an old U2 t-shirt or some old mix CDs and say, "Hey Mom and Dad, what are these all about?" Then you'll probably cry happy tears that make them get embarrassed and red in the face...just like our parents did with us.