Occuparenting isn’t easy.
Your precious children? The ones who had violin lessons, SAT tutors, and years of orthodontia and organic lunches?
Postcards from Occupy D.C.
They are now sleeping under tarps, in the mud, rain and frigid weather, in an encampment that is home to a growing urban rat infestation. And their new neighbors are a sizable portion of the nation’s hard-core homeless population.
Things have gotten so grody down there that D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray, who was arrested last spring during a demonstration, has called on the National Park Service to remove the protesters from McPherson Square. Next week, hordes of them plan to Occupy Congress, which could spark confrontations with the U.S. Capitol Police and lead to arrests.
They eat donated or trash-can-scavenged food — peanut butter, bread and doughnuts (sorry, Hostess, no Twinkies) were lunch the other day — or they may even go on a hunger strike.
Take that, helicopter parents.
These are the mothers and fathers who demanded laws for bike helmets and car seats and warning labels on every plastic bag and bucket in the universe. They had the home number of every teacher from preschool to college. And they’ve even been known to call up their grown kids’ new bosses after Junior didn’t get a promotion.
But what happens when these highly groomed offspring go off and join the hundreds living in the Occupy movements camps? To whom do you file a complaint? Who gets the irate phone call?
“She still keeps asking me to come home. I get the calls. And the texts. Every day,” answered one 18-year-old Occupier in McPherson Square.
The camps are full of a wide range of ages and socioeconomic backgrounds, sure. But the movement’s biggest population and primary strategists are the 20something millennials forever burdened with their parents’ insistence on participation trophies for every team member.
So now the Occuparents find themselves struggling with whether to support their child’s participation in a sweeping, political protest movement and the fact that their cul-de-sac kids are living in total squalor.
Sam Jewler, one of the four protesters who staged a dramatic hunger strike in the name of D.C. voting rights , fasted for 11 days — until his parents nagged him into eating.
His dad, Chevy Chase resident Leonard Jewler, was featured in a Marc Fisher blog post years ago when he tried to answer parental school angst with a data analysis on whether kids from D.C. public schools ascend to the same caliber of colleges as kids who went to private schools.
After enough carping from the ’rents, young Jewler broke his fast last month with a glass of coconut juice and a bowl of miso broth.
“My parents were becoming increasingly distressed,” Jewler told The Washington Post’s Tim Craig. “I didn’t feel like it was fair anymore to put that burden on them.”
Eat. EAT !
On Wednesday, the protesters had a chance to do some of that nurturing themselves when they found a baby wearing just a onesie and mittens in one of the tents and called authorities. The father was arrested, and the baby was handed over to the city’s Child Protective Services. Not exactly a helicopter dad, right?
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