Whatever Mums. I Don’t Care Dads. Kooky negligents. Laila K on the rise of competitive I-don’t-care-ing
I didn’t think it was possible, but I’ve identified a new arena of competitiveness within the delightful modern construct of “parenting”.
Bleary-eyed notes from the field combined with anecdotal hissing suggest that ‘comparing who can be the most laissez-faire parent’ is definitely a thing. Whatever Mums, Don’t-Care Dads, Kooky Negligents; I’ve been working on a few monikers but none of them really sum up the MADDENING spectacle of speaking to someone who is trying to appear entirely unbothered with any aspect of child-rearing. They also regard any anxiety or concern as terribly, terribly gauche.
“Ohhh we just let them do what they like,” Kooky Negligent will airily say, wafting a hand vaguely towards her children who are quietly leading the dog into a makeshift Wicker Man, “as long as they don’t lose a limb everything’s fine.”
Recently I was trapped in a hideous social vortex where I was surrounded by a group of women insisting they gave as little a shit about EVERYTHING as possible. It descended into some kind of weird riff on Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch.
“Have you got a pushchair yet?”
“Yeah we’ve got a Bugaboo Bee.”
“Oh wow, posh! We just got a cheapo one off eBay.”
“It was, um, an ex-display model, so it wasn’t like it was new or anything.”
“Yeah, I don’t even know the name of mine. It’s falling apart.”
“Huh, we don’t even bother with one. We’ve just got a sling.”
“We haven’t even got a sling. We’ve just strapped her to a skateboard and tied a bit of string around her ankle…”
OK, OK, I may have misremembered a little here. But seriously, when did things like, um, caring, or expressing any vague concern for your offspring become so unfashionable?
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
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