Two Sides of the Coin

So I'm exactly 10 days away from having a kid and I log onto Boston.com hoping for the temporary vicarious thrill of some breaking news about about the earth opening up and swallowing an SUV (talk about poetic justice, Earth First has nothing on the actual Earth itself), and I come across an online forum about people who let their kids run rampant in public places. Not a forum for the faint of heart. Forget the war in Iraq, forget property taxes, forget immigration, if you really want to see what's going on in peoples' heads, throw out a question like "How do you feel about parents today not disciplining their children?" and step back and watch the fur fly between the breeders and the non-breeders. I didn't leave a post on the forum because there were enough people who had already expressed the same opinion, ie; You decided to have 'em, you've got to be the one who tells them to be quiet and behave.
On the other hand, there's an article on the Boston Globe's site about Augusten Burroughs' memoir, "Running With Scissors". Apparently, some people are trying to make him into the next James Frey, but his brother is backing him up and saying that not only is everything true, but he might have held back a little bit. So there you go, someone who is the product of a completely unsupervised childhood turning into a talented writer, albeit with a few stumbles along the way. (go read "Dry")
I think that's really the dilemma that a lot of parents face. On one hand, you have people who impose their will on every aspect of their child's existence. I honestly forget where I saw it, but there was an article online recently about countries in Asia where parents put their kids into boarding schools by the time they are 3. Maybe that kid will grow up to be the chairperson of Toyota, maybe they will turn out to be walking timebombs of repressed emotions.
On the other hand, you have (as people call them around here) the Cambridge Parents. "Cambridge" seems to be a code word for head-in-the-clouds knee-jerk liberalism that only works on one side of the Charles River. The theory being that if you raise children to "experience the world creatively and actively" then they will grow up to be wonderful well-adjusted adults with bucketfuls of compassion for everyone. Have I actually known people who benefitted from this approach? Maybe a couple. Most of the time when I come across the full grown results of that parenting style, they have an irritating habit of expecting the world to revolve around them. Ironically, this is the same outlook on life that most people are complaining about, but what can you expect when the Republican Party behaves the same way?
Ultimately, I think some of the best parenting advice I've ever heard came from on of the worst fictional parents in television history, Livia Soprano;
"Babies are like animals. Someone has to teach them right from wrong."

Two Sides of the Coin