10 BOOMER PARENT HABITS FOR MILLENNIALS

Why Reinvent The Play Pen?

via theburningplatform.com

1. You didn’t jump up every Sunday morning for church and now you feel like you’ve let the kids down spiritually.

If you’ve checked the news over the past decade or so you’ve seen moves in The Church like a retiring pope and expressions of remorse after centuries of poor priest behavior.

By not drilling church every Sunday you avoided the confusion young adults feel when they hear and see men of devotion do stupid things. You can talk about the separation of church and state in America and compare it to places like Iran with a straight face.

2. You didn’t enroll your kids in scouts, either Cub or Boy, and you’re worried they seem unprepared.

The scout motto is Be Prepared, but no one prepares kids for a funky scout master. Skipping both church and scouts might have saved your kid from a lifetime of counseling.

3. You avoided fast food as long as you could.

The power of advertising came home strong when your kid knew what a Happy Meal was before their first McDonald’s visit.

Just feel fortunate their first word was Momma or Dadda, not Big Mac.

4. You didn’t let the kids watch R rated movies.

Explaining the puking scene in the movie King Pin isn’t something any parent should have to do. There’s R rated movies that seem worse than others.

If you did let them watch R movies, you probably had enough questions to answer. Better to talk at home then leave it for school.

5. You were selective in which friends you let in the house.

Boomer experience means living through many uncomfortable times with sketchy people. After that you can tell who’s who from the start. If you were wrong about a kid in middle school, you got to make up for it in high school.

6. You volunteered in the schools to keep up with education.

Or you volunteered to spy on teachers. Either way works. One grade school teacher was fired for talking the talk to what he thought was a troubled teen out of state.

Turns out the troubled teen was actually a police detective posing as pedophile bait. Teacher got a scholarship to prison.

7. You participated in their dating life by offering rides.

Whoever they dated was okay with you. But maybe you balked when your fifteen year old son dated a fifteen year old Mexican girl and you dropped him off at her birthday party.

He wore a jacket and tie. She wore what looked like a wedding dress. What could go wrong?

8. You celebrate every birthday and holiday with vigor.

You raise the flag, bake the cake, wrap the gifts. Make it fun to make it memorable. Why not wring joy out of traditions instead of missing the chance.

That box of holiday decoration? Make more of them.

9. You shared your life experiences until your kids memorized them.

“Remember the time when..?”

They do.

“Remember how you…?

They do.

My kid has a nick on the back of his head from the time we played crack the whip and he bounced off a corner, bleeding. We try not to talk about it.

10. You forgot to say, “When your kids torment you, then you’ll know how I feel.”

Instead, you might say, “You little punks saved my life. You don’t know it, but you did. Look at my friends and family. I could have turned out like them, but you saved me.”

This one gives them years of wondering which family and friends you were pointing to.

They may even give their friends a second look.

Dear Millennials, your time is coming sooner than later. Load up and get ready.