"Hipster Parents": And Now David Brooks Weighs In
Brooks covers the usual complaints against the hipster parent set: failure to grow-up, worship of fashion and the icons of youth, and an inability to surrender to Barney. My response to David, and anyone else ranting and raving about Babble and all other supposedly hip parenting modalities of expression, is “turn away.” If it bothers you so much, then just don’t read it. On the other hand, most scrappy types enjoy a fight and I can certainly respect that.
Truthfully, I find major media covering non-vanilla parenting very heartening. If Babble hadn’t come along when it did, I would have been forced to pillage and burn every copy of Parenting Magazine in every doctor’s office around town. How many smiling, skinny, happily crafting and cooking suburban moms can one stand reading about before one is driven to heavy drugs? The nice thing about all this discussing of the hip parents, is it gives us a new scapegoat and something against which we can measure ourselves. And I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather be compared to an angst-ridden hipster than a Prozac filled cheerful-head any day of the week.
Slate is joining the “Notes from the Underbelly” television show pile-on that began a few days ago here
Thank God to all the women (and men) out there that didn’t submit to wearing mom jeans or living in the suburbs. This website has probably been the only thing to save my sanity since I accidentally became a mother a year ago. I don’t understand what exactly you’re supposed to morph into when you start having kids, but I never thought that I would get so much shit for acting like myself(gasp). This website is great. urban parents are great. Moshing in the sandbox is great, if thats what you’re all about. Give us some breathing room, you might just find that the hipsters are actually really great people. p.s. rebecca woolf is my heroine.
Tomorrow I leave for Austin, Texas, to participate in the SXSW festivities and for the first time in
Could there be any greater contradiction between the qualities of responsible parenting and the devil-may-care insouciance of a “black-on-black maternity tunic”?
read more of “Back to the Barcalounger Alternadad” at http://www.suburbankamikaze.com
plus, who even moshes anymore? so lame!
So funny. I wrote about this a few days ago. I thought maybe I was imagining things. And then David Brooks starts ranting against hummus. Hummus!
Brooks had to find something to write about now that he’s run out of ways to apologize for this administration’s handling of Iraq.
Truly, it rings false. I think Brooks was just looking for a hot topic to write about- and an opportunity to come up with some clever phrasing. Face it, we all try to make our kids into mini versions of ourselves, whether we live in the suburbs or the city. It’s inevitable. Hipsters are going to raise little hipsters. Farmers are going to raise little 4-H club members. They’ll all rebel when they’re teens and find their own way, so what’s the fuss?
My take on this is too long to post here…
http://orvetti.typepad.com/lads/2007/02/from_the_hip.html
I wonder at it all. I really do.
I think what is boils down to is that we all have this idea of what a parent should be.
So when we become parents and DON’T turn into this stereotype that we all envisage and that the media sells us….we are all a bit worried and all a bit boggled.
I don’t think it has to do with balance or not giving up your lifestyle…If you were not a suburanite golfing muffin making childless person, why would you become that when you had kids.
Aren’t you just YOU? Aren’t you just the same person/type hip or not hip that you were before you had kids?
We don’t switch from NIN to Celine Dion the moment we squeeze out a kid!
After reading all the hoorah..i really think it all boils down to stereotypes and visions of parenthood. All coming from comparing our selves to other parents, OUR parents and what the television tells us.
If we could all stop worrying about what a parent is supposed to be or do or look like and stop the judgement and fuss…I think we would all get along much better.
We do need to ignore all the mainstream stuff….except to point out that parents like all humans come from all walks of life.
It has nothing to do with Gen X or Gen Y or Urban vs suburban.
We just are.
I am the same if not slightly more shell shocked version of my former self.
I still like the same music and shows and count it towards age more than anything that I am not obsessed with fashion and makeup anymore.
Parenting may shift our perspective, but not who we really are.
how incredibly, unbelievably lame. somebody had to be posterchild for angry old curmudgeons everywhere. “ah, i will jab them!” he says, “by reminding those whipper-snappers with their weird clothes and stupid music that anti-conformity really IS conformity! mwA HA HA!”
yes, but hating on the weird kids went out in, like, the 50s, right? are you really THAT old?
“thank you and a-to-the-men, crankmama.”
That there’s some more of the HIPSTER talk!
If David Brooks wants to write about how toddlers should dress, he should write a column in the Style section of the New York Times. It seems that the limited space avaiable for Op-Ed columns in the Paper of Record should be reserved for issues that actually matter.
i’m full of shit
I’m not sure if I’m a true hipster parent or not…probably not…but I definitely feel more comfortable and more at home when reading these type of blogs specifically babble and magazines rather than your everyday parenting magazines that just aren’t realistic.
Furthermore, I’m not trying to be “cool”. I’m just trying to be me.
But I must confess that sometimes I am a little too cheerful. I can’t help it!
I don’t consider myself to be a “hip” parent, in fact, if you ask my teenager, I’m anything but. I read columns and sites like this one because they give me a fresh look at things. New ideas, new points of view, and a lot of times people are saying the things I’ve been thinking.
I think there are parents out there that focus too much on keeping a part of themselves seperate on “having their own lives”. Parenting is something you commit to…..but that doesn’t mean you have to give up everything. There can be a happy medium, a place in between where we get to be bitchy, irreverant and maintain our own identities. I had a name and a personality a long time before I became “mommy”. Having children didn’t erase that.
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/opinion/25brooks.html?ex=1172552400&en=4e8f1f17ec7b9ef2&ei=5121&emc=eta1
This link should work.
And once again, thank you and a-to-the-men, crankmama.
Why do you charge for your content NY Times? WHY? I really wanted to read this.
The most infuriating thing for me is that I receive paychecks from the Times and I still don’t get a Times Select login… cheapskates.