On Sun, 18 May 2008 11:18:42 -0500, Mueen Nawaz wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> Fair enough - in past conversations, I hadn't noticed that behaviour
>> before from you, so it caught me a little off guard. ;-)
> 
> 	I was just testing some waters.

Well, no fault there - I do that myself enough as it is. :-)

> 	I did find the original comment to be quite judgmental, and I was 
a bit
> reactive to it, because I often hear such stuff locally. Given the local
> context, I felt most of them are unjustified (and if I wanted, could
> often find plenty of flaws in their own parenting...). Some people just
> have certain "rules". If you don't hug your kid, you're a bad parent. If
> you don't throw birthday parties, you're a bad parent. If you don't buy
> your daughter dolls, you're a bad parent. Those rules are applied
> without looking at the whole picture.
> 
> 	Based on your reply, that didn't seem to be the case there.

Oh, no, absolutely not.  We're not the kind of people who reach a 
conclusion (generally - of course we do slip from time to time, but it is 
rare) without looking at the whole situation - we've been on the 
receiving end of that more than once (we home-schooled Ken through high 
school, you want to talk about being on the receiving end of snap 
judgments, that's one way to become a target, especially living so close 
to the school he used to go to).  It's extremely rare that we come to a 
conclusion like that on an individual basis (though we do see trends of 
that behaviour all around us - Utah is a place where large families are 
frequently the norm, and often times this leads to burn-out on the part 
of the mom and kids end up raising each other, but without the kind of 
family support structure that was present a couple generations ago.  And 
yes, it is usually mom burning out - since the dad's the primary 
breadwinner in many of these families.)

Jim

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