SPEND enough time at the playgrounds of Prospect Park, Brooklyn, on a typical summer morning and you’ll eventually hear every conceivable nickname for a toddler: Bobo, Little Man, Monster Face.
But for all the individuality on display (ask a parent about a nickname and you’re 
Getty Images
guaranteed an adorable back story), the one term heard far more than any other is generic, reflexive and not particularly creative. It might also have the most to say about modern approaches to parenting.
“O.K., buddy, O.K.!” said a father recently, caving to his son’s demands to be chased. “Nice work, buddy,” said another father crouched low in a sandbox. “Come on buddy, let’s dry you off,” said a mother recently to her half-naked, Croc-wearing puddle jumper.
Like “sport” or “champ” of an earlier era, “buddy” has quietly evolved over the last 20 years into the go-to nickname for American parents, particularly fathers, looking to chum it up with their sons and daughters. How it got there is hard to say; good luck finding an adult who remembers his dad calling him buddy. But like “time out” and “use your words,” “buddy” has for better or worse taken a starring role in the lexicon of modern American parenting.
Like a lot of parents who use the nom de bébé, Dan Pearce, 32, author of the blog Single Dad Laughing, began calling his son buddy around the time he started to walk. “There’s something about a kid hanging on to your leg that just makes him your buddy,” he said in an interview. Four years later, so common is Mr. Pearce’s use of the term that it finally elicited a distinctly childlike query.
“If I had all my buddies lined up in a row,” Mr. Pearce was telling his son Noah, 5,
when they were alone in the car last month, “and I had to choose my best buddy, it would be you.”“Dad,” Noah asked, “what’s a buddy?”
Good question. To some psychologists, the term is emblematic of a shift in parenting trends. Having rejected the authoritarian parenting style that many of them grew up with, American parents today prefer to give their children the opportunity to prove themselves as equals almost from birth, to make those “good choices” that preclude the need for punishment. “Buddy Parenting” is one of the seven deadly parenting styles that the psychologist Michele Borba wrote about in a 2009 book, “The Big Book of Parenting Solutions: 101 Answers to Your Everyday Challenges and Wildest Worries.”
“The gist of Buddy Parenting is the parent’s goal is to be more of a pal than really the parent, the monitor, the overseer,” Dr. Borba said in an interview. “It becomes toxic when you start placing popularity with your kid above establishing limits or saying no.”
But some dads’ use of the nickname is a point of pride. Shannon Carpenter, 37, a stay-at-home father of two in Kansas City, said it shows just how much closer and more supportive he is with his children than his father was with him.
“Not that our dads never played with us or anything,” said Mr. Carpenter, referring to the men in his stay-at-home dad group, “but we do a lot more cooking, house cleaning, child-care activities than perhaps those that came before us did. Perhaps because we are more involved in the day-to-day activities of our kids, we feel more comfortable with them.”
(Another possible explanation proposed by Mr. Carpenter’s group: years of watching “Gilligan’s Island” left the term “little Buddy,” the Skipper’s nickname for Gilligan, lodged in their brains. Or maybe it was the jingle from those 1980s commercials for the “My Buddy” doll.)
The origin of the idea that parents and children could be buddies is hard to pin down, said Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University. But it probably started in the “Free to Be You and Me” 1970s, when parents raised to be “seen but not heard” decided to put self-esteem and creativity ahead of discipline.
The need to cast our children as friends has only intensified as adult life becomes more isolated, Dr. Twenge said. “There is research to suggest that relationships outside our families aren’t going so well,” she said. “We don’t join groups as much, we have this breakdown in relationships, so it’s entirely possible we’re using our relationships with our kids to replace some of the adult relationships we’ve lost.”
As their children edge into adulthood themselves, some parents expect to drop the nickname.“I think as he gets older and I need to really establish myself as the authority figure, I won’t keep calling him buddy,” said Lance Somerfeld, a stay-at-home dad in Park Slope.
Others plan to stand by it, for the simple fact that it’s true.
“I meant what I said to him in the car,” said Mr. Pearce, who sees no conflict between discipline and being friends. “I’d pick him over hanging out with most people.”
கருத்துகள் இல்லை:
கருத்துரையிடுக