Life Behind the (Perfect) Picket Fence...

Family life is never as neat and perfect as it is packaged up to be.  What you see from the other side of the fence, as an outsider looking in, is not the messiness and chaos, for the most part.  In fact, a good family struggles to overcome circumstances and situations and hopefully, can struggle together and make it through tough times better for it all.  Presenting wholeness is presenting hope and faith and positive outlooks.

Airing dirty laundry?  Shoot, with closed windows and the demise of the clothesline, it isn't even metaphorical anymore.  I used to be that no one aired anything publicly or privately. Then it was "let everything hang out."  Reality shows?  Even those are edited.

The picket fence for bloggers and teenagers is an interesting question, as far as boundaries go.  For me, I choose to keep my family and their matters mostly all private.  New York magazine has an article about students at Horace Mann in NYC, how they posted derogatory things about teachers on Facebook, how teachers discovered them and confronted the issue and how the whole affair sorted out.  The student who was responsible for the comments is now Student President and teachers have been forced to resign for invading the Facebook territory.  The letters this week to the magazine about the article are evident of the hot buttons being pushed with schools under pressure to get students into top colleges, the ability of teachers and administrators to discipline students and the issues of boundaries and privacy with public postings on Facebook.

As mothers we have a job to protect our children and our family and that instinct runs deep.  Children are growing up in a different world.  How this sorts out, I wonder.

   

Comments

[Janet]

It is a dilemma. I'll stop posting pictures of the kids when they get to school - no sense giving the other kids ammunition. I may have to stop blogging altogether. People are going to get tired of seeing the same tulips year after year. I am VERY concerned that the students were rewarded for disrespect, because that's exactly what it was. Then again, it happens on so many levels. {sigh}

[eleanor mainwaring]

I used to live the "white picket fence" dream, in a white picket fence house, on a white picket fence street, and in a white picket fence marriage. Only my marriage turned out not to be a dream, and when I was no longer living on that street with that husband, I began to realize that maybe everyone else was laboring under the rules of image management, as I had been. Put on a pretty face and go out and show the world your best side and they will all believe you must have attained "it"...whatever "it" is. A town of Stepford wives with perfect houses and children and husbands...was it all my perception, when I no longer "fit" the mold? That life seems a hundred years ago...many of those friendships and neighborhood acquaintances didn't survive my being different. The real friends did...maybe two. What I realized was, that I was never cut out to be a white picket fence girl...I am too eclectic. It felt like trying to put a round person in a square box. I need to surround myself with real people, willing to share their tragedies as well as triumphs...those that will gladly let you in to know their soul and all its scars. Non-judgemental. I am older now and learned that the grass isn't always greener on the other side of the picket fence AND that I wasn't a picket fence person in the first place!

[tut-tut]

Well, with these top colleges finally using their huge endowments to help students rather then the insularity of the institution, perhaps these Richey-Riches won't feel so entitled. Did you see the Education Life section of the NY Times this weekend (or was it last? time flies) outlining how family income as well as student ability will play a part in how much a family will pay?

[naomi dagen bloom]

it would have been respectful if the public had been given the opportunity to think about and discuss issues of privacy before commerce rushed ahead and changed the universe.

thanks for writing this. it is a very troubling topic, as previous commenters have noted. the dissolution of appropriate boundaries--and any of us who use the word will be frowned upon by media of all kinds--lies at the core of our cultural demise.

current presidential race is a good example.