Sorry I’m Not Perfect
During my junior year winter ball, a student was throwing a party after the dance for the seniors. I was invited through friends, but not the host themselves. I told my parents where I would be and they didn’t seem to have a problem. That was until I got a call in the middle of formal saying that my parents called the hosts parents to make sure everything was okay. To which the other parents responded, “What party? There is no party.” I got that call and my stomach dropped. I ran to the bathroom and called my parents asking what happened. They did not think it was a big deal but it was the biggest deal of my life. I called my dad because I wanted to go home because I was so embarrassed. I had just singlehandedly ruined…show more content… At the time, I did not believe this. My parents trusted me to make good decisions so why would they not just let me be a normal teenager? I understand their need for me to be safe but they should trust themselves in their parenting skills. I was brought up with somewhat of a conditional parenting system. In regards to conditional parenting, Alfie Kohn writes in When a Parent’s ‘I Love You’ means ‘Do as I say’; “Conditional parenting isn’t limited to old-school authoritarians. Some people who wouldn’t dream of spanking choose instead to discipline their young children by forcibly isolating them, a tactic we prefer to call “time out.” Conversely, “positive reinforcement” teaches children that they are loved, and lovable, only when they do whatever we decide is a “good job” (Kohn, "When a Parent’s ‘I Love You’ Means ‘Do as I Say’"). My parents most definitely put me in time outs when I was little. But after the winter ball incident, I decided to put my parents on a time out. Of course my underdeveloped teenage brain thought that I would turn the tables and use their conditional parenting style on them. This worked for about a day until I decided that I was being ridiculous and I needed to actually talk out my frustrations with my parents. Through maturely talking it out, my parents voiced their frustrations with me saying that I had changed as I have grown up. This…show more content… High school is a time for self-discovery and me wanting to go to a party was just a natural part of that. We all have our quirks, strengths and weaknesses. I am sure life would be easier if parents were able to just get their ideal child. But with progressing technology, this idea is not too far fetched. In Bill McKibben’s article Designer Genes, he talks about the possibility of genetic modification of children to behaviorally, mentally and physically makes them “perfect”. The idea of perfection differs from person to person, obviously. But what if we were able to design our perfect child? McKibben writes, “The vision of genetic engineers is to do to humans what we have already done to salmon and wheat, pine trees and tomatoes. That is, to make them better in some way; to delete, modify, or add genes in developing embryos so that the cells of the resulting person will produce proteins that make them taller and more muscular, or smarter and less aggressive, maybe handsome and possibly straight. Even happy” (McKibben, "Designer Genes"). McKibben describes that we have modified objects, so the next step is automatically