Top Ten Ways You Know You’re a Gen X Parental Unit

Naps Happen ♦ December 15, 2011 ♦ 21 Comments

We interrupt these regularly scheduled naps to bring you the lamentations that have been kicking around in my head this week, as I realize that I am officially no longer cool.

Top 10 Ways You Know You’re a Gen X Parental Unit

Def Leppard comes on the radio in your car, and you’re torn between closing the window in shame or rolling the window down and turning up the volume.

You accept Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones video games as a fair vehicle with which to introduce the best trilogies of all time to your kids, and you’re still in denial about the unmentionable movies that came after the trilogies.

Your kid owns an Atari t-shirt just like yours and a pair of checkered vans that you find amusing, but in which you would not be caught dead.

Your children wear helmets to ride on a flat surface, in a cul de sac, on a scooter, but you used to plunge down the steepest hill in the neighborhood, bareheaded, while riding on the handlebars of somebody else’s banana seat bike.

You boast on Facebook that your kid refused his children’s music and asked to listen to Weezer or They Might Be Giants.

Your kid is dancing in his underwear, so you tweet that Risky Business is being replayed at your house.

You love John Hughes because he saw high school for what it was and Joss Whedon because he saw it as it should have been.

Your go-to example of living on the edge is eating pop rocks while drinking Coke.

You can’t understand why your kid stares, blank-faced, when you joke about his Christmas request with, “You’ll shoot yer eye out!”

You pull out your favorite childhood books, only to discover that they are politically incorrect, except for Dr. Seuss which turns out to be full of thinly veiled social and political commentary. Then you’re stuck reading them to your kid every night.

Update: Come see what the very funny Jeff Kart had to say about this post on TLC’s Parentables!