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Post by miriel68 on Jun 6, 2018 10:19:38 GMT
On the other hand, my mother actually discouraged us from reading! I still remember reading in front of the tv, and quickly hiding my book between the cushions of the couch when my mother walked by - "No, I'm not reading! I'm just sitting here watching tv." When I got to high school, I convinced her that all that reading was for school, so she reluctantly allowed it. So then she'd catch me reading and say "That had better be for school!" , and I'd lie and say yes, of course it is! I blame this partly on the fact that my older sister rarely ever read, so my reading was considered really weird. And my mother thought I just being lazy and not wanting to do housework, which was so important to her. Why would your mother be crossed with your reading? I get it that she wanted your housework to be done, but why would she prefer you watching television rather than reading? My mother did complain that I read too much, but I was a bookworm and she was worried I was staying in my room all the time, never going out to enjoy myself.
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Post by roverpup on Jun 6, 2018 12:16:41 GMT
That's funny! When I was little, I was allowed to watch three TV shows: Sesame Street, The Wonderful World of Disney and Masterpiece Theatre. Then by the time I was 8 or 9 years old, my parents got rid of our TV altogether so I only saw any shows at friends' houses. Sesame Street wasn’t around when I was young and we only had a TV aerial for watching (cable wasn’t available when I was young) so we could only get 4 Detroit stations (not PBS because it's signal was too weak), one Windsor CBC Station and one London CBC station. They didn’t broadcast all day long either - I grew up in the era of Indian Head test pattern cards that came on about 7 am-ish and sign off cards that popped up sometime after 11:00 or 12:00 pm. Some of the stations didn’t sign on until the afternoon. Disney was on but it was Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color and we could only see it in B/W because no one I knew even had a colour set (we didn’t get one until I was half way through high school and then when Dan and I were married we had to go back to B/W because we couldn’t afford a colour set for a long while). It was years before I ever got the joke about “the horse of a different colour” from the Wizard of Oz! My mom was VERY strict and insisted we only doing school reading during the week! We had to go to our bedroom after dinner and stay in there until we went to bed and “study”!!! She would pop in unannounced every once in a while to make sure we were “studying”. I had to hide any “unauthorised” reading material (novels, magazines) inside the textbooks while I was lying on my bed. I didn’t have a large selection of recreational material so I took to reading the Encyclopedia Britannia for pleasure (I had a set in my room for research for school) and I felt sooooo risqué doing it!! My sister and I also made up huge fantasy stories that were incredibly detailed and told entirely orally at night when we were supposed to be sleeping. They went on for years!! When we were older they mainly centred around The Beatles (in various adventures - one was that they went to Mars or another was that they mysteriously were shrunk and had to get back home to England from Canada). I guess that was kind of a form of “fanfiction”?? But we never wrote them down. Later I even continued them by myself just in my own mind when we were traveling in the car and had nothing to entertain ourselves except staring out the window (kept me quiet and I loved making the stories up in my own head - we weren’t allowed to read in a moving car because my parents thought it was bad for our eyesight and I already had very poor vision). Even today I think back on those stories when I am on a long road trip. :-))
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Post by mllemass on Jun 6, 2018 12:27:52 GMT
Watching tv was entertainment, and my mother could understand why I'd want to do that. But reading was part of education, and she wanted that left at school and not brought home. She didn't get the appeal of reading a book. Although, when we were little, she allowed me and my sister to spend Sunday afternoons at the public library and take out books. I think she just liked having a quiet Sunday without us at home! Ha!
Neither one of my parents had much of a formal education, having left school (in Italy) very young, during WWII. But their reactions turned out to be very different. My father always referred to me as the daughter who would be going to university, long before I knew what university even was. I would be getting the education he had missed out on.
But my mother didn't see the point of school or reading, Yes, you needed to know how to do things, but after high school a girl just needed a nice job in a store or a bank. She herself worked in a factory for over 30 years, so she felt that a job as a bank teller would be luxurious - you got to wear nice clothes and stand on a carpet all day. She wasn't thrilled when I got into university, and was actually angry when I continued my education beyond that. She told me that I was just being lazy by preferring school to getting a job. The most important thing, to her, was knowing how to cook and clean and being able to take care of my future husband and children - and I didn't seem to care about any of that. Well, there weren't any husbands or children in my future, and I think my mother knows that I made the right choices for myself.
I'm one of only three girls in our extended family to go to university, and there are only four of us (out of 21 cousins) all together. Most of my girl cousins were married by their 18th birthdays, and babies soon followed. For years, my mother was so jealous of my aunts that had married off their daughters so quickly. But in reality, only two are still married to their original husbands. (And there was no reason for my mother to worry about my housekeeping skills - I turned out to be as much of a clean freak as she is!)
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Post by onebluestocking on Jun 6, 2018 12:38:11 GMT
That's probably why they didn't need to restrict it! My parents wanted to avoid violent cartoons and "materialistic" shows and toys (I could never have a Barbie with her dream house, Corvette, wardrobe, etc.) I always thought it was odd that I wasn't allowed to see an animated cat and mouse fighting, but could see Ann Boleyn marching up to the guillotine on Masterpiece Theatre. I had nightmares about it for ages!
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Post by ellie on Jun 6, 2018 14:35:37 GMT
That's probably why they didn't need to restrict it! My parents wanted to avoid violent cartoons and "materialistic" shows and toys (I could never have a Barbie with her dream house, Corvette, wardrobe, etc.) I always thought it was odd that I wasn't allowed to see an animated cat and mouse fighting, but could see Ann Boleyn marching up to the guillotine on Masterpiece Theatre. I had nightmares about it for ages! I didn’t ever have a Barbie but I did get a Cindy and had her bedroom furniture and her bath! I remember her bed still. It had fancy white French looking head and food boards and a gold and white bedspread. Cindy lived in some style. 😀 At least you had reason to be frightened bt the Anne Boleyn scene. I was , bizarrely, terrified of “The Mysterons” in “Captain Scarlet” and they were only white circles. 😧
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Post by miriel68 on Jun 6, 2018 17:29:30 GMT
Watching tv was entertainment, and my mother could understand why I'd want to do that. But reading was part of education, and she wanted that left at school and not brought home. She didn't get the appeal of reading a book. Although, when we were little, she allowed me and my sister to spend Sunday afternoons at the public library and take out books. I think she just liked having a quiet Sunday without us at home! Ha! Thank you for sharing it, mllemass! It is fascinating to compare one's childhood experiences. In my family, the first girl to study at the university was my maternal grandmother immediately after the World War I, when Polish Universities allowed female students to recruit. She was very disappointed when my mother married young, having finished only the high school. But what about your sister, did she married and set a family at an early age, as your mother wished for?
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Post by mllemass on Jun 6, 2018 21:15:33 GMT
No, she didn't - but she thought she would. My sister was the same age as my cousins who married very young, so she figured she would do the same. She hated school and barely scraped by. Her plans were to work at some menial office jobs until she became a wife and mother, so education wasn't important to her.
I should mention that my cousins who married young married men they barely knew, friends of their older brothers. Those men were at least ten years older than their young wives. And my girl cousins lived in ridiculously strict families, so getting married meant freedom for them. They were wrong, of course. There was no freedom in being 17 and stuck in a tiny apartment taking care of a baby! It was different at my house, where my mother worked (none of my aunts did) and although my parents were strict, we never felt the need to do something drastic to escape. So neither my sister or I are married, and we share a house around the corner from my parents. And now our cousins envy us!
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Post by queenzod on Jun 6, 2018 22:14:09 GMT
Wow, these stories are amazing. My folks both had advanced degrees (my dad had the first PhD on his side of the family), and reading and academics was highly stressed. I read my way through the entire fairy tales section in the public library. We weren’t allowed to turn on the tv until 7pm (unless you were home sick from school) so I didn’t get to watch dark shadows after school like all my friends. My friend Judy would catch me up up the next day while we walked to school.
I have two older brothers, and they always wanted to watch Rat Patrol, and I wanted to watch Disney, so there was a lot of fighting. Eventually, my oldest brother would say, “let’s vote,” and I always agreed, because I knew that was the Democratic thing to do. I always lost, but I fell for it every.single.time. Just stupid, I guess. 😂
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Post by mllemass on Jun 6, 2018 23:39:41 GMT
The summer before I started university, we had relatives visiting from Italy. My father kept going on and on about it, and seemed more excited by it than I was! I heard him bragging that I had done it all on my own. It was important for people to know that he had never pushed me or my sister to do well in school. I'm just in awe of people who were encouraged to work hard and do their best, or got help from their parents with school work. Never once in my life did my parents ask about school or tell us to do homework or encourage us to do better or even punish us (well, my sister) for doing poorly at school. However we succeeded or failed, we did it entirely on our own.
When I got my first report card in high school, we had to take it home to be signed by our parents and then return it to school. When I handed it to my home room teacher, she looked at it and said "Your parents must have been very proud of you." I shrugged,"I don't know." She said, surprised, "You mean they didn't say anything?", and I answered no. That's when I realized that "normal" parents would have said something, would have praised me, would have rewarded me, would have celebrated somehow. But my parents said nothing, and they never did. As weird as that was, I did grow up working hard and becoming reasonably successful without ever needing anyone to tell me what a great job I was doing.
One of my (boy) cousins recently told me that my father told him years ago that it was important to work hard and have direction in your life. Huh? My father gave him that advice but never said anything like that to me or my sister! I asked my mother about it - why we were never told anything that. She said that there was nothing to say to us because because we always seemed to know exactly what we wanted to do. Oh!
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Post by roverpup on Jun 7, 2018 3:11:54 GMT
It is fascinating hearing about other people's lives. My parents were really hardnosed about schooling. Mainly my mother - she only had the opportunity to finish elementary school (she was one of 11 children and was expected to care for all her many siblings instead of going further in school and also she was expected to find any kind of menial job to help with the family income because it was the Great Depression at that time). My mom put a GREAT deal of pressure on us about doing well in school. If you didn't get "A's" then you might as well got a failing grade. If I got 95 in subject she would ask about where that 5 % went that I missed. She softened a bit when it was in the last few grades of high school but she always demanded excellence. I got the only scholarship I could but it wasn't much $$ so it only paid for community college. Later I put myself through university and I was the only child in my family to get a degree. My dad was a very smart man but again in the era he grew up in was really tough times and him getting his high school was really an accomplishment. He was all about working hard at whatever you did - at one time he worked at 5 different jobs at one time to make sure our family had enough to make ends meet. Both my mom and dad were very proud I got my degree and became a teacher.
:-))
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