Neal Pollack on Hipster Parenting
I’m a Neal Pollack fan. He recently wrote a book called Alternadad, a sort of memoir / rock n roll coming of age tale of a cool kid turned parent. The book discusses everything from early morning baby alarms to pot smoking parenting and just about everything in between. Neal is a former Austinite and is so cool, he found out about Rock N Romp and asked me if he could do a show with us. He’ll be reading and rocking out during SXSW at our party at the Mohawk on March 11. But to the point …
In no small way, books like this (and articles about hipster or Grup parenting) are relevant even to those who haven’t yet plunged into parenthood, since at some point they’ll either take it on or know someone who does, and these issues will start to arise. For the moderately cool, it seems as though being a part of a community (whether it be yoga class, craft mafias or music scenes) is extremely important. More than anything else, it seems as though the so-called “hipster” parents that Pollack touches on and others nod to just want to remain social beings, aware of culture’s trends and involved in things like their city and their … well … identity.
For most of us in this category, having kids didn’t mean we had to grow up and wear khakis, it meant that our priorities shifted and our sleep patterns changed, but it didn’t change who we were. To me, the hipster parenting trend is simply a sign that our baby booming parents raised individuals who are smart enough to have kids and still be who we are. There’s no extreme indie sub-culture that is recruiting new parents and making them wear iPods on the subway with their baby slings, and there’s no radical movement to breed counter-culture activists: we’re just living our lives with children. Why is that so shocking?
As Pollack points out in recent retort to a New York Times piece about hipster parenting: “We ‘hipster parents’ are middle class, and we want the same things that our middle-class parents had: A decent school for our kids, a decent house in a good neighborhood, and decent health care. The rest of it is just window dressing, though, admittedly, it’s fun window dressing.”
So don’t judge the book by the cover, see? Just because you see a tattooed parent with a faux-hawk sporting toddler doesn’t mean you’ve spotted an alien life form. That parent wants safe schools, health insurance, no cavities and reasonable bed times, too. They just look different than traditional (television) parents. On the one hand, the major media’s notice of cool parents is exciting, because it means there’s a large group of people raising kids that are bright, independent and devoted to their kids, not to the dissolution of themselves, but on the other hand, the attention they (well, we, as I was just interviewed by a local paper on the same subject) get based mostly on their appearance is disheartening: haven’t we grown up enough to know that making assumptions based on how people look and who they associate with isn’t always actually informative or fruitful? Is it really that shocking that I have a toddler in preschool who loves Thomas the Train and Charlie & Lola but on Wednesday night I’ll be watching Isis at Emo’s? Is it that outrageous that I’d rather my kid listen to Andrew Bird than Barney?
The article that Pollack responds to can be found here.
I too find it ridiculous that in 2007 people are still so judgemental. After I had kids, I noticed a pressure to “grow up” from a few sources, which really surprised me. I was grown up, taking care of my children and being a responsible adult. Unfortunately some people are so repressed that they can’t fathom a responsible adult wearing punk rock tshirts.