Good week article 3979

On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 05:53:47 GMT, "P. Tierney"

Emily on mk-fl posted this url for a response I think is telling.

The problem isn't a new one at all.

And The Soup Of The Day Is: It's All Your Fault!

The mothers, they are screwing it up again. Frankly, I don't know why we even let them out of the house. Or was that, in the house? Regardless, thank God we have Judith Warner to set them straight.

Warner has recently published a book enbreastled, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. It's currently featured on the cover of "Newsweek" (coincidentally, the magazine with the most intractable mommy issues).

What Warner wants you to understand is that the mothers, they are overinvolved. They are consumed with perfect parenting. They have lost all sense of themselves as individuals, as wives, as friends and lovers. They spend their days wandering around in a narcotized haze of self- and child-absorption, hyped up on goldfish crackers and "Postcards From Buster." They spend hours on kindergarten bead projects! They compete for enrollment in preschool! They drive their children to violin lessons! Why, it's madness! .... Perfect madness!

What I find annoying about books like this is the implicit suggestion that the author is saying something new, that she's donned her HazMat suit and ventured into the infectious underbelly of suburbia and successfully diagnosed a new parenting disease. The truth is, far from writing an original book, Warner is merely repeating the laments and criticisms of decades of experts (for a soul-stirring review of this issue that will make you spit out your coffee in fury, see For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women, by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English). In fact, Warner's wide-eyed ahistoricity is butt-chapping. It's as if she's never read a parenting book published before 1985.

For example, Warner warns that the problem of perfect parenting is a "nationwide epidemic." These alarmingly perfect mothers breastfeed and co-sleep, read and sing to their children, stay up all night "hand-painting paper plates for a clbutt party .... and obsessing over the most minute details of playground politics." Dr. Edward Strecker couldn't agree more: "From dawn until late at night she finds her happiness in doing for her children. The house belongs to them. ... It must be 'just so'; ... Anything the children need or want, mom will cheerfully get for them." Except that Warner is writing in 2005, and Strecker was quoted in Friedan's Feminine Mystique - in 1963.

Or how about the new epidemic of "overparenting," described as parenting that's "over-anxious, over-vigilant and just plain overdone"? It sounds a lot like Dr. David Levy's 1943 book, Maternal Overprotection, doesn't it? There are "long-term consequences" to overparenting, we're warned in 2005: "Over-anxious parents raise emotionally fragile kids - kids who canât stand on their own." In 1943, Levy warned that the children of overprotective mothers would turn out to be "infantile" adults. Hmm.

Interestingly enough, the cure for maternal overparenting has also remained the same throughout history: more love! Sniffing in aesthetic disapproval at mothers who dress in "overall shorts," Warner notes that the mothers she interviewed were "so depleted by the affection and care they lavished upon their small children that they had no energy left, not just for love, but for feeling like a loveual being." In Monday's New York Times, Warner claimed that hot marital love "has gone the way of bottle-feeding and playpens." Oddly enough, in his 1959 child care book, Dr. Levy opined, "The truly feminine mother, fulfilled in her marriage to a truly masculine father, does not overprotect, dominate, or over-fondle her children. ... A man who is a good lover to his wife is his children's best friend" ("Your loveual Happiness Is Your Child's Emotional Security," broadcast one of Levy's chapter headings). Like I said: hmm.

What I find so depressing about Warner's book is the fact that she seems to be a well-intentioned, pbuttionate advocate for women. She obviously cares about her subject matter deeply. She wants things to change. She even outlines a manifesto of sorts, a call to action regarding more family-friendly workplace policies. But that's precisely what Sylvia Ann Hewlett did in her atrocious book Creating a Life - right after she pummeled infertile women for being too psychologically immature to commit to marriage and childrearing in a timely fashion. I'm not exactly mollified by a List of Really Good Ideas, not when it's appended to yet another screed outlining Exactly What's Wrong With Mothers Today.

I don't know why these authors don't question the veracity of the rhetoric itself, why they don't seem to notice that certain forms of mother-bashing reappear with cyclical regularity. In the 1930s, mothers were admonished to lavish all their attention and care on their helpless infants (remember Arnold Gesell?). In the 1940s, women were castigated for doing do. In the 1950s, they were told - once again - that they were needed at home. In the 1960s, they were told that their overparenting was to blame for childhood psychopathology, juvenile delinquency, and communism. In the 1970s, mothers who left home were vilified in popular culture ("Kramer vs. Kramer," anyone?). In the 1980s, working outside of the home was valorized as a sign of women's self-actualization. In the 1990s, "nesting" was the buzzword of the day. Now, in 2005, the experts are concerned: has all that nesting damaged the children?

Hello? Anyone see a pattern here? Anyone suspect it might have something to do with, oh, I don't know, large-scale social and economic patterns? Like, say, the fact that women were encouraged to stay home during the Depression in order to free up jobs for men, and then encouraged to join the war effort and work outside the home during the early 1940s, and then instructed to return home after the war in order to create more opportunities for male employment, and then urged to be tough during the Cold War hysteria that espoused a need for soldiers to feed the war machine (Spiro Agnew actually made maternal overprotection a 1968 campaign issue!), and then implored to stay home during the decade of no-fault divorce and women's increasing loveual and economic power, and then, and then, and then?

HELLO? AM I ALL ALONE OUT HERE?

So I hope that Warner and her fellow hand-wringers will forgive me if I don't get too worked up about the state of motherhood today. After more than seven decades of insults and admonitions, I'm feeling a little numb to predictions of impending developmental disaster. I can't help but notice that women have managed to parent perfectly well, and that children have turned out just fine, regardless of the Hysteria Du Jour.

What makes me really sad, though, is that I have a suspicion which readers will buy Warner's new book, which ones will pour over its pages in an attempt to diagnose and castigate and improve themselves.

And if history is any guide, those readers won't be fathers.

-- Dorothy

There is no sound, no cry in all the world that can be heard unless someone listens ..

The Outer Limits