There. I said it.
A good friend of mine (who is a dad) posted a blog entry from the New York Times’ “Motherlode” column. It details the results of a survey of 1000 ‘normal’ women who are members of an online mothers’ community. Basically, women are mad at the fathers for not taking enough responsibility for parenting or for doing chores around the house. The writers – both at Parenting magazine and the blog – make it seem like this is an epidemic of anger, corroding the American family.
The writer details the problem thus:
We carry so much of this life-altering responsibility in our heads: the doctors’ appointments, the shoe sizes, the details about the kids’ friends. Many dads wouldn’t even think to buy valentines for the class, for example, or know when it’s time to sign kids up for the pre–camp physical, or that curriculum night is next Thursday at 7:30 and you need to hire a sitter and bring a nut-free vegetarian appetizer that can be eaten without a fork. Even moms who work full-time take it upon themselves to store all this data in our already overstuffed heads. We’re the walking, talking encyclopedias of family life, while dads tend to be more like brochures.
What to do about it?
I proffer an unpopular solution: Moms and Dads both need to stop making their kids the absolute center of their lives.
Seriously. No one should have to worry about self-making “a nut-free vegetarian appetizer that can be eaten without a fork” and bring it to a school function. Or obsess about their children’s schedules or the details of their children’s lives and friendships.
Really, middle-class and upper-middle-class moms? No, really, really?
How did we get here?
When I was growing up, my mom knew who my best friends were (count three names here, maybe), whether or not I did my homework, if I needed new socks and underwear, and if I seemed healthy and happy – and that was it. She had absolutely no interest in elementary or middle school drama, or PTA meetings, or baking me a 19-tier cupcake tree for my birthday party (a tradition which, by the way, didn’t even begin until I was old enough to remember them).
My mom had a life.
Admittedly, sometimes I wish she had been less dramatic and crazy, but I actually appreciate the fact that I did not grow up with an endless litany of “activities” and “playdates” and “extra-curricular classes”. No, I don’t know how to play the piano. But I did learn how to play the clarinet in school band. No, I didn’t take soccer. But somehow I remain thinner and in better shape than some my friends who did, so go figure.
Years ago, I visited Newport, Rhode Island, and took a tour of several of the old Vanderbilt and Astor mansions. You know, the ridiculously luxe “summer” homes of the fabulously wealthy during the late 1900s and early 20th century. In the Vanderbilt home, I learned that Mrs. Vanderbilt obsessed over her children’s education and up-bringing. They were, after all, the future of the Vanderbilt name. In particular, she erased the line between herself and her oldest daughter. Her daughter’s life was the property of Mrs. Vanderbilt herself, and she managed it with military precision. To the point that the girl grew up in a gilded cage of her mother’s fashioning. In the end, she married a man with a “title” that she didn’t even like, all because her mother planned it.
Was this poor, little rich girl priveleged? Yes.
Did she have everything that money could buy her, including the best education? Yes.
Was she any happier? No. By all accounts, she was one seriously depressed young girl.
I’m glad that my mom and dad didn’t pore over my life looking for ways to make it “better” or to give me a “head start”. Somehow, and without a single extra class or tutoring session, I made it into the top medical anthropology program in the country. I think it’s because my parents did something great for me – they made it very, very clear that I needed to take responsibility for myself.
In the end, I learned to craft my own life.
I learned how not to be bored, how to entertain myself, how to self-soothe.
Maybe the reason modern mothers are so angry is that they are giving too much to their children in the first place. Maybe they are angry because secretly they want to be the dads for once, to take it all less seriously. Maybe they are angry because they can’t give themselves permission to be less-than perfect as mothers.
Scale it back, I say. Don’t do some of the “stuff” you are doing – the “stuff” that you think is absolutely integral to your child’s future happiness or intellectual capacity. It isn’t, and that I can promise you.
This is from an article in the London Times:
In her book No Two Alike, Judith Rich Harris, an American psychologist, writes that children just want to fit into the popular culture in which they are being raised, which might not be quite what their parents have in mind.
“In the long run, it is what happens to them outside the parental home that makes them turn out the way they do,” she says. And while most parents know this instinctively, we carry on resignedly making arbitrary rules, labelling things “good” or “bad” with a randomness that reflects our prejudices but baffles our children.
And I’ll leave you with this, an old article from the Boston Globe, to ponder:
Leave those kids alone
The idea that adults should be playing with their kids is a modern invention — and not necessarily a good one
(Illustration/ Aaron Meshon)WHAT COULD BE more natural than a mother down on the rec-room floor, playing with her 3-year-old amid puzzles, finger-puppets, and Thomas the Tank Engine trains? Look — now she’s conducting a conversation between a stuffed shark and Nemo, the Pixar clown fish! Giggles all around. Not to mention that the tot is learning the joys of stories and narrative, setting him on a triumphal path toward school.
A “natural” scene? Actually, parent-child play of this sort has been virtually unheard of throughout human history, according to the anthropologist David Lancy. And three-fourths of the world’s current population would still find that mother’s behavior kind of dotty.
American-style parent-child play is a distinct feature of wealthy developed countries — a recent byproduct of the pressure to get kids ready for the information-age economy, Lancy argues in a recent article in American Anthropologist, the field’s flagship journal in the United States.
“Adults think it is silly to play with children” in most cultures, says Lancy, who teaches at Utah State University. Play is a cultural universal, he concedes, “but adults aren’t part of the picture.” Yet middle-class and upper-middle-class Americans — abetted, he says, by psychologists — are increasingly proclaiming the parents-on-all-fours style the One True Way to raise a smart, well-adjusted child.
There is now a concerted effort to spread adult-child play beyond its stronghold in the upper- and middle-classes of wealthy countries. To this end, many cities and states support programs of some sort. Massachusetts will give the Parent-Child Home Program, which has 33 sites in the state, $3 million this year (up from $2 million last year). Through the program, staff members visit the homes of low-income residents and offer tips not just on good books for toddlers but also on “play activities” for parents and kids. Likewise, the eminent Yale psychologist Jerome Singer has partnered with a media company to devise imaginative parent-child games (examples: “My Magic Story Car” and “Puppets: Counting”) that librarians and social workers can teach to low-income parents.
Lancy is concerned that specialists behind the movement — psychologists, social workers, preschool teachers — are too aggressively promoting this intense, interventionist parenting style to low-income parents, and that they are are too quick to claim that adult-child play is crucial for human development. He doesn’t quite rule out that some interventions may improve literacy — though the data are murkier than the psychologists admit, he insists. But the programs, with their premise (as he sees it) that a whole class of people is simply parenting badly, leave their advocates “open to charges of racism or cultural imperialism.”
. . .
One inspiration for the article, Lancy says, was that he kept coming across accounts of parents who felt guilty that they did not enjoy playing with their children. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman and the economist Alan Krueger, both at Princeton, have found that parents routinely claim that playing with their kids is among their favorite activities, but when you ask them to record their state of mind, hour by hour, they rate time spent with their children as being about as much fun as housework.
In his article, Lancy draws on decades of ethnographic work to show how rare parent-child play has been in the world. The Harvard anthropologist Robert LeVine, for example, observed in a 2004 paper that among the Gusii people of Kenya, “mothers rarely looked at or spoke to their infants and toddlers, even when they were holding and breast-feeding them.” (So much for the universality of peek-a-boo.) On Ifaluk Island, in the South Pacific, tribespeople believe that babies are “essentially brainless” before age 2, so there is no point in talking to them.
The goal of the Yucatec Maya is to keep babies in a “kind of benign coma,” through bathing and swaddling, so that parents can leave them and get work done. As recently as 1914, the US Department of Labor’s Child Bureau advised parents not to play with babies, for fear of overstimulating their little nervous systems.











On Cougar Town – ABC’s new show
25 09 2009OK. I watched the debut of this show the other night, and I have to say that I, like Judith Warner at the NYTimes, disliked it. I thought the show itself was trying too hard and I found myself wondering if anyone who still looked as great as Courtney Cox over the age of 40 would really have as many insecurities and anxieties. I doubt it, but maybe I’m wrong.
Something the show did get right, I think, was the sense of loneliness that Cox’s character feels after she gets a divorce. That is all-too real for most women. There’s the sense of relief that you’re out of that dull or horrible marriage, to be sure, but then follows the crushing realization that you are no longer young and you are spending your nights alone with your book or the latest reality television show. Even a bad marriage insulates a woman from having to feel old and alone. So that hit the right note for me.
But, then, I just don’t believe that someone like Courtney would be alone for that long. Her odds are upped, aren’t they? What about the rest of us? With our sagging boobs and dimpled butts? If we have a scintillating personality or a fascinating life, then maybe we will do well on Match.com. But, if not? Ouch.
Perhaps one of the most disturbing things about the show was Christa Miller’s face. Is she in the running to become the new Joan Rivers? She used to be so cute on the Drew Carey show, back before all that face-saving surgery. Yikes.
If you watch the show, you’ll see what I mean. Her face barely moves and her lips are ridiculous.
This is exactly what I hope NOT to be like when I’m over 40. To my friends out there, if I go overboard someday on the silicone and botox, please set up an intervention and show me a tape of Christa Miller on Cougar Town. I’ll understand.
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