well tim, as a friend of mine says, criticizing what people in portugal say about their children or their properties: every farm is a microclimate, every child supergifted...
It's funny, too, until these maniac parents see their kids hit elementary school. In the US, it's not unheard of for a school teacher to be cornered by angry parents demanding to know why their child was given a poor grade.
I've read a few newspaper accounts of parents getting into fights at kid soccer/football/baseball games.
A work colleague joked about how one of his friends was a martyr to his kids, spending all his freetime shuttling them to and from clubs, sports, and other activities--he did it because he believed it was his moral obligation and to help his kids "get ahead". A mother in that same department once cornered me to brag about how she forced her daughters to take violin, piano, ballet, et cetera et cetera. Another parent compelled his kid to go to soccer (football) practice and guiltily confided to me that maybe he overpushed it--because he'd never got to play soccer when he was that age.
Our children may be lucky that our "do what you couldn't do as a child" fetish amounts merely to buying hundreds of Roman soldiers!
A lot of the adults of our generation seem to be little more than cyphers of corporate Stepfordism.* Americans are just so crazy aggressive about any shred of their vanity you can imagine. Is it different in Europe? I'm guessing it isn't (people are the same everywhere). But, at the bloody** least I wish I had you guys' vacation policies (after seven years, I'm up to 12 days).
* For non-Americans: "Stepford Wives" was a horror movie about an army of clones taking over a suburban town.
** Somebody is probably going to get mad that I said bloody.
-Tim
