Sometimes when I hear the things that my friends who have children tell me I wonder what the hell is happening in suburbia. It's clear that the social-climbing, keeping up with the Joneses factor is ferocious in some communities, particularly those situated next to more affluent ones. In recent years it's been fed by a wave of home equity loan-financed purchases of more cars, home theatres, giant additions designed so that children never, ever have to share a bathroom, luxury vacations, and other trappings of what middle-class people believe to be characteristic of the lives of the wealthy. I know people whose kids refuse to wear anything that doesn't come from Hollister or Abercrombie and Fitch -- companies whose stores refuse to hire anyone who isn't, as the mother of one employee who looked like a cross between Jodie Foster and Gwyneth Paltrow once told me, "perfect."
Kids have always been cruel to each other. I was a chubby kid and I developed pimples at the age of nine, which ended up with me being called by a nickname that referred to my skin problems by the very boys I wanted to like me when I was thirteen. I look at photos of myself from that time and wonder about the disconnect between how I felt and how I looked. But at least in those days, kids had to be cruel to your face, or if not to your face, at least it took place in meat world.
Today, kids can gang up on each other without even leaving the house. Perhaps what happened to the Meier family could have happened even when I was a kid. I'm sure that even then, there were kids who killed themselves because they could no longer bear the ridicule of their peers. But what the hell does it say about a society in which PARENTS get involved in the tormenting? What kind of sick fuck do you have to be to play mind games with a teenager because she had a falling out with your kid?
If I were an adolescent now, I probably wouldn't have survived to adulthood either.
(via Melissa)
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