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Ok while I was dithering around with bullying, I missed the big story, by Erica Jong, from the Wall Street Journal. She's trying to inflame, which is her thing, and evidently she did, judging by a guest-post response on the Times's Motherlode blog.
I am tempted to file this under tempest-in-an-herbal-teapot, but I must say I appreciate what Jong says about the cult of celebrity motherhood and the tabloids that feed it, and "treating children like expensive accessories." (Does anyone else feel like baby bumps started blooming on magazine covers everywhere literally right around the time we all started having kids? I would love to participate in a discussion about the cultural factors that contributed to why that happened when it did.)
I also like her hypothesis about exerting control at home as a proxy for feeling desperate about the world at large, to wit: "Our obsession with parenting is an avoidance strategy. It allows us to substitute our own small world for the world as a whole." (I definitely feel at times that focusing inward on being a mother is akin to willfully burying my head in the sand. Or, maybe it's that I just can't worry about everything, so I worry about Drew.)
There's also a very entertaining sidebar with quotes from parenting manuals of old, and Molly Jong-Fast's charming response essay about her own mother.
So, all in all, it's Sieve-worthy. Enjoy.
Definitely an interesting read--both Jong's essay and her daughter's response. I don't know that I'd call Sears' book today's bible of parenting, though. Would you? I never read it, though I did read his "Fussy Baby Book." What Jong seems to overlook--and what I think many of us tend to forget--is that we don't have to carry a flag for any particular parenting philosophy. I rolled my eyes at parts of the Sears book I read, but I appreciated his take, and his wife's take, on balancing a mother's needs with a baby's and avoiding burnout.
ReplyDeleteIn the end, of course, it's about doing what works for your family, right? Maybe that meshes with the parenting theory du jour, maybe you take the smorgasboard approach, maybe you tune out the din and go with your gut.