Unsolicited parenting advice
The New York Times, today:
IT’S difficult when you have a kid,” the photographer Justine Kurland said. “If they’re in a good mood, you can get work done. But if they’re in a bad mood, you’re at their mercy.”Ms. Kurland is known for photographing people in American wilderness landscapes, but the scene this day was the rent-stabilized apartment she shares with Casper, her 2-year-old son, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Casper, named for the 19th-century German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich, had just given a textbook example of one of his trickier moods. His father, the sculptor and multimedia artist Corey McCorkle, who lives 10 blocks away, arrived to take him out for breakfast, but he refused to budge. Instead he sat sobbing, rooted to the kitchen floor, a stunt Ms. Kurland said he increasingly liked to pull when she was scouting locations on the extended road trips she takes for her projects. [continued…]
AAAAAAGH! I can’t even COUNT how many times my parents pulled that stunt on me as a kid. I wanted to stay home; instead, I got a tour of the most boring parts of Massachusetts from the backseat of the car. Every. Single. Weekend. I’m surprised that I didn’t start huffing paint thinner.
For heaven’s sake, lady: Leave. The. Kid. At. Home. It’s not as though she’s living in North Dakota – this is NYC. She can find a nanny. And it’s not as though she has to pay through the nose to avoid the nanny problem — she’s an artist, not a politician. Hire an illegal; no-one’s going to check.
My parents wouldn’t have even needed a nanny — just park me in front of the Nintendo, thank you very much. It would have been good practice for the interminable hours of being parked in front of a computer in college.