Through the ongoing wonder that is my sitemeter stats, I found this blog entry: it's another anecdote about public parenting, far more moving, I think, than my own bras-in-Macy's story. It also illustrates something I wanted to point out about the discussion so far: most of what we're considering the hallmarks of "good parenting"--and I include myself in this--is really middle-class parenting, actually. Poor kids still play in the street and walk to and from school by themselves, a lot more than middle-class kids. People who work minimum-wage jobs don't have the luxury of refusing to show up for meetings because they have to pick the kids up from school. Single parents (who tend, for obvious reasons, to be poor) don't have partners to entertain the kids while they shop, or to leave the kids with when they go out, so they take the kids everywhere, which believe you me tends to make you extremely frazzled and impatient and, yes, rude--to kids and strangers alike. Kids who are autistic, or have developmental disabilities or behavioral problems, or whose families are under stress (someone died, someone got laid off, they've had to move recently, mom's depressed) are often way more likely to act "weird" or "bad" in public, and it has nothing to do with the quality of parenting they're getting, which is usually superhuman.

So with those caveats in place, and acknowledging up front that I'm nicely middle class (both mentally and money-wise), and that I only have one very bright and mildly anxious (i.e. conscientious and very easy to reason with) little boy who has had the incredible good fortune to have been surrounded, in his formative years, by extremely doting adults who mostly didn't have kids of their own, so that he is very confident and at ease with grownups and grownup activities--with those things in mind, I'll try to lay out my theories about "parenting today" and how it differs from "parenting when we were growing up," in a little bit.

In the meantime, though, I need my coffee, and I need to tackle the grading of six HUNDRED informal response papers (2/week) that I've let pile up because I am the World's Worst Teacher. Those of you who are looking for something, anything to do other than your own grading might do worse than to check out the blogroll, where I've been silently adding new folks. Like these other academic parents: academom who doesn't update a lot, obviously because she is a better mom and academic than I am; miss teacher, who's been on my blogroll since the beginning, but as she teaches special ed (this is her first year), and is a mom herself, I wanted to point her out; daddyzine, who is a stay-home dad to a professorial wife, like Mr. B., and who writes hilariously philosophical stuff about parenting; Mother in Law who is a law student (ed: not quite. "Law student wanna-be"; her words) and a mother. There are a lot of other parenting academics on my blogroll, but these are the new ones.

There's other new stuff too--check it out. Apparently there's another Dr. B. in the blogverse! How did I not know this, especially since she's not anonymous and is therefore a real Dr. B., whereas I am only pretending. I think that Bicyclemark's Communique has pretty pictures and a good voice and he updates regularly; some of you already know Doctor Daisy, but have you explored the complex layers of her blog? There's a lot of 'em, poke around some; on & on is a good-looking blog, and he's an academic type, and he also links to old-school hip-hop videos you can download, if you like music as well as words.

Ok, so, coffee in hand, it's probably time to grade. Sigh.