Saturday, January 14, 2006
The Madness of American Parenting
I've just gotten around to reading Judith Warner's Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, which came out last year to very mixed reviews. Warner's main thesis is that upper-middle-class American mothers are driving themselves and their children crazy with overparenting, which is largely a result of their having felt driven to leave the workforce and parent fulltime. Warner hits both the personal and the political: her observations are drawn from her own life, as well as interviews with over 150 of her peers in the young mothering biz; and she lays the blame for the "madness" of the upper-middle-class American mother on the shoulders of "the system," that is, the government and the culture, for not providing the supports a parent needs to do the job well without going crazy.
I grew up in this milieu, though my mother did not play the game very well. I may as well confess it: we lived on Park Avenue. But I went to public schools; I had to beg for my music and horseback-riding lessons, and never got the figure-skating lessons I craved. I was not hyper-scheduled at all; in fact, I remember spending countless hours watching "Lost in Space" and "I Dream of Jeannie" after school, while my mom made dinner and we waited for my dad to come home from work. My mom, though a stay-at-home, career-less mother, did not go crazy, because she always made time for herself--she religiously went to her weekly pottery class at the 92nd Street Y, and spent many mornings while we were in school working in clay and perfecting her craft. She's now a successful and recognized potter. And I'm now the (working) mother of two young children.
Of course, I recognize the craziness Warner is talking about, but I don't partake in it. Since I didn't marry a Wall Street financier or a bigtime lawyer, I have to work, and my struggle is different from that of the stay-at-home moms she's describing. I struggle to make sure my family eats well at least most nights; I struggle to make sure that I'm done with my teaching schedule in time to pick up my younger son at school; I struggle to make sure that when I have to go out at night the bedtime routine goes on without a hitch.
Where my struggles match what Warner describes most closely is in my husband's relative lack of responsibility in all this. Warner devotes one chapter to what husbands are doing while their wives are going crazy, and it seems to be basically--opting out. She reports this, and then gets back to her main point, which is that the government should provide better support services for mothers.
If I were her, I would have lingered on the non-participation of fathers a little longer, because it seems to me that this is a major problem that we in the feminist movement must have the chutzpah to address. How could it be that even when mothers are working fulltime, even when mothers are earning more money than fathers, mothers are still doing most of the housework and childcare? I know this to be so because I see it in my own life, and the lives of my working-mother friends. It's outrageous, and it's both the symptom and the source of women's craziness.
Are American men really any different from their counterparts in Africa or Asia or Latin America? Aren't they all equally macho? American men have realized the benefits of having women out in the workforce, and those benefits are considerable. But when it comes to the work of the home, they're as neanderthal as any stereotypical Talibani, just more circumspect about it. If women protest, they're not executed in the public square--they're just divorced.
On the one hand, my response to Judith Warner's depiction of the trials and tribulations of the upper-middle-class American mother is scorn: how can these women be so myopic, so self-centered, so lacking in any kind of broader social conscience? If they spent less time overparenting their kids, and more time thinking about what they could do to make the world--including their corner of it--a better place, they'd make both themselves and their kids a whole lot happier. On the other hand, I do have compassion for them, bless their hearts--these women are trying to do the right thing, and it's not their fault that the society and their own husbands are so astonishingly retrograde.
I can only hope that the next generation of parents, that is, our children, will be a whole lot more egalitarian when it comes to the responsibilities of mom and dad at home!
For a review of Judith Warner's Perfect Madness, see The New York Times Book Review
or Salon. For another earnest inquiry into the "domestic glass ceiling," a.k.a. the gendered inequities of the contemporary American family, see The New York Times Week in Review for January 15, 2006, "Today, Some Feminists Hate the Word 'Choice,'" by Patricia Cohen.
I grew up in this milieu, though my mother did not play the game very well. I may as well confess it: we lived on Park Avenue. But I went to public schools; I had to beg for my music and horseback-riding lessons, and never got the figure-skating lessons I craved. I was not hyper-scheduled at all; in fact, I remember spending countless hours watching "Lost in Space" and "I Dream of Jeannie" after school, while my mom made dinner and we waited for my dad to come home from work. My mom, though a stay-at-home, career-less mother, did not go crazy, because she always made time for herself--she religiously went to her weekly pottery class at the 92nd Street Y, and spent many mornings while we were in school working in clay and perfecting her craft. She's now a successful and recognized potter. And I'm now the (working) mother of two young children.
Of course, I recognize the craziness Warner is talking about, but I don't partake in it. Since I didn't marry a Wall Street financier or a bigtime lawyer, I have to work, and my struggle is different from that of the stay-at-home moms she's describing. I struggle to make sure my family eats well at least most nights; I struggle to make sure that I'm done with my teaching schedule in time to pick up my younger son at school; I struggle to make sure that when I have to go out at night the bedtime routine goes on without a hitch.
Where my struggles match what Warner describes most closely is in my husband's relative lack of responsibility in all this. Warner devotes one chapter to what husbands are doing while their wives are going crazy, and it seems to be basically--opting out. She reports this, and then gets back to her main point, which is that the government should provide better support services for mothers.
If I were her, I would have lingered on the non-participation of fathers a little longer, because it seems to me that this is a major problem that we in the feminist movement must have the chutzpah to address. How could it be that even when mothers are working fulltime, even when mothers are earning more money than fathers, mothers are still doing most of the housework and childcare? I know this to be so because I see it in my own life, and the lives of my working-mother friends. It's outrageous, and it's both the symptom and the source of women's craziness.
Are American men really any different from their counterparts in Africa or Asia or Latin America? Aren't they all equally macho? American men have realized the benefits of having women out in the workforce, and those benefits are considerable. But when it comes to the work of the home, they're as neanderthal as any stereotypical Talibani, just more circumspect about it. If women protest, they're not executed in the public square--they're just divorced.
On the one hand, my response to Judith Warner's depiction of the trials and tribulations of the upper-middle-class American mother is scorn: how can these women be so myopic, so self-centered, so lacking in any kind of broader social conscience? If they spent less time overparenting their kids, and more time thinking about what they could do to make the world--including their corner of it--a better place, they'd make both themselves and their kids a whole lot happier. On the other hand, I do have compassion for them, bless their hearts--these women are trying to do the right thing, and it's not their fault that the society and their own husbands are so astonishingly retrograde.
I can only hope that the next generation of parents, that is, our children, will be a whole lot more egalitarian when it comes to the responsibilities of mom and dad at home!
For a review of Judith Warner's Perfect Madness, see The New York Times Book Review
or Salon. For another earnest inquiry into the "domestic glass ceiling," a.k.a. the gendered inequities of the contemporary American family, see The New York Times Week in Review for January 15, 2006, "Today, Some Feminists Hate the Word 'Choice,'" by Patricia Cohen.
