“You don’t have to put in a lot of effort with your child because you lucked into having an easy kid.”
No, you factory-defective garden gnome. I have “an easy kid” because I work like a convict in the salt mines, pouring in the attention that makes her easy.
“Of course, it’s easy when your kid actually prefers reading to watching TV.”
Yes, you two-legged lawn chair. She popped out of the womb with a book of ancient Greek mythology. Some parents are lucky like that.
Just finished reading “Troubled” by Rob Henderson. Not great literature, kind of an 8th-grade level memoir and a quick read, from a guy who grew up in foster homes and went to Yale. He seems to be simultaneously trying to explain Yalie culture to his childhood friends, and trying to explain poor-people culture to his Yalie peeps. A commendable effort, and refreshingly honest.
He notes this “lucky” thing as a class-signaling tic: just the same way rich and successful people will approve of drugs, single parenthood, and unhealthy eating for everyone else, but will not, for the most part, engage in those things, and certainly would not recommend them to their own kids… they will say they are “lucky” to explain their own achievements, as though they didn’t work for them. But they do not raise their kids as though they believe this. For their own: hard work, achievement, showing up, doing it right, etc. are how you get anywhere. But if you’re talking to anyone else: you’re just lucky.
I think I’ll make my teenager read this one. It’s one of the more forthright discussions of class in the US I’ve run across.
ethyl
–and yeah, I get tons of compliments on how great, smart, well-behaved, well-read, and articulate my kids are. But I don’t hang out with academics, so nobody tells me it’s “lucky”.
Getting them to like reading though: easiest thing in the world. Their parents read constantly, and our small house is dominated by eleven crammed bookcases, plus the shelf with all the board games on top and cookbooks on the bottom. None of us have smartphones, and “the internet” is a shared desktop terminal in the living room.
None of that is accidental, and none of it is difficult. Most people don’t want it.
ethyl
This is absolutely spot on. The use of the word “lucky” in such contexts is definitely a class marker. It’s like those female characters in TV shows who eat mountains of junk food while staying at size two with zero effort. We all know that that’s impossible, but we’re supposed to participate in the pretense that some people are just lucky like that.
A conservative literary critic and college professor
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