About overparenting

One of the interesting pictures that I saw these days came from TIME magazine—a worrying mommy is swathing her son with bubble wrap to provide protection from his hair to toes. Yes. It is a picture mocking at over-parenting. The cover story on TIME was “The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting”. According to the article, over-parenting is spreading so quickly since recent decades. Debate about good parenting and bad parenting was launched: is overparenting good or bad?
It is true that concerns about children’s safety, grades, success and future motivate parents to overact their roles as parents. According to me, it is understandable that parents don’t want their kids lose the competition at the starting line. Thus, it is justified that parents send their toddlers to schools that offer Mandarin and Spanish lessons. In this case, more investment in education should be appreciated, but it is hard to measure how much is appropriate.
The TIME article also talked about the hurried lifestyle and intense extracurricular activities. I have to say that hurried lifestyle is no good for both mental and physical development of children. When I sit down and think over the most frequent words that I use in conversation with my son, I realize that “hurry up” and “quick” have quite high frequency. As a parent, I hope to save every free minute and let him to draw a picture, trace letters, play puzzles or at least color something. But I also know that free playing plays an extremely important role in childhood. Kids discover the world through playing themselves and with friends.
But what sounds ridiculous for me is that some parents won’t play piggyback ride any more in case of their kids bang heads on the wall. It is even ironic that a Connecticut grandma wrote to the mayor to chop down hickory trees in order to prevent her occasionally-swimming nut-allergic grandson from being hit from the dropping nuts. Kids are like flowers. They do need sunshine, water and care, but it doesn’t mean that they should always stay in conservatory 24/7. Sometimes, a little wind and a bit of rain will help them to learn more about survival. I really appreciate my son’s school give them two one-hour outdoor free playtime each day. Almost everyday, he shows me something he finds at school from his little pocket.

New Vocabulary:
swathe: to wrap or bind with or as if with bandages
Hullabaloo: Great noise or excitement; uproar
Trampoline: A strong, taut sheet, usually of canvas, attached with springs to a metal frame and used for gymnastic springing and tumbling

from "queer" to "faggot"

When I wrote these English blogs, thesaurus.com helped me a lot with finding new words. Howeve, things are not always so simple. Some words are synonyms, but they are not replaceable. One of the typical examples is the word “weird”. I found “eccentric”, “strange”, and “queer” as its synonyms. Before I picked “queer” as the new vocabulary for my blog, I asked my husband if he knew this word. He answered, “Do you mean gay?” That really surprised me because I didn’t realize that “queer” had been derived as a synonym of “gay”. After I looked it up in dictionary, I knew that “queer” is not a polite way to name a guy with homosexual trend. It mixed some negative attitude while addressing homosexuality. When I googled it for further research, I found out another word with similar meaning to “gay”: “faggot”. Even Wikipedia has an entry for “faggot”—a pejorative term and common homophobic slur against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. It will be so awkward if an English beginner randomly picks “faggot” from dictionary without understanding the real meaning.



New Vocabulary:
Queer: odd or unconventional, as in behavior; eccentric.
Pejorative: tending to make or become worse.
Faggot: American slang, a common homophobic slur against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.