Katy Read

Though they might seem absurd, personality tests like the MMPI are a $400 million industry catering to businesses, government, schools, courtrooms and therapists. And they often carry grave consequences — influencing whether people are hired for jobs, admitted to schools, receive custody of their children. Paul argues that the tests are so flawed as to render their results misleading or even meaningless.

Paul, a former senior editor at Psychology Today, tells the colorful and often alarming stories behind the widely used personality tests that date back, in many cases, to the early decades of the 20th century. If you assume these tests were developed under meticulously scientific circumstances, Paul’s book is disillusioning: the Rorschach ink-blot test, frequently used in court cases, was inspired by a 19th century parlor game. The Myers-Briggs type indicator, used by most Fortune 100 companies, was devised by a housewife in her living-room chair. The Thematic Apperception Test, used by 60 percent of clinical psychologists, was concocted by a maverick psychologist and his mistress. And for decades, the MMPI’s control group — the “normals” against whom countless people, including me and my eighth-grade classmates, were judged — was a scavenged hodgepodge of rural white Depression-era Minnesotans.

Salon spoke to Paul by phone about the strange history of personality tests, their potentially damaging uses, and the false impressions they can perpetrate.

How did you decide to write this book?

About two and a half years ago, I started to notice that personality tests suddenly seemed to be everywhere. I had a friend who applied for a part-time job at a clothing store, and she was given a personality test called an “honesty test.” She actually failed it, because of a question like “Everybody lies sometimes.” She said yes. She didn’t get the job and was told that part of the reason was that she had failed the honesty test, because you were supposed to say, “No, I don’t lie. People don’t lie.”

That suggests that anybody who passes the test must be lying.

I know. It was so mixed up. Then I had a friend whose child was applying to a private school and had to take the “Draw-a-Person” test [in which subjects' sketches are combed for hidden clues to their personality]. I started thinking, Where did these tests come from, and how can a test claim to measure something as complex as human nature? I started looking into the history of personality tests and how they’re used today, and I discovered this crazy parallel universe where there were these colorful, eccentric, sometimes downright strange people who had made these tests, often in their own image. It came to seem to me as if a lot of the tests really reflected the test authors’ personalities more than those of the people who took them.

Have you taken any personality tests yourself?

I’ve only taken a few, informally, online.

For fun?

Yes. Once I started researching the book I didn’t want to take any of the tests that I wrote about because I didn’t want my results, and whether I felt that they were an accurate reflection of my personality, to influence the way that I wrote about them. I wanted to evaluate the scientific evidence as objectively as possible. Now, of course, I don’t think I could ever take these tests because I just know too much about them and how they’re supposed to work.

One way you subtly underscore your message — that humans are far more interesting than the tests devised to measure them — is by providing fascinating profiles of the tests’ creators. The people are compelling and complex and often even admirable as individuals.

The truth is, in some ways I feel a deep sympathy for the tests’ creators whose stories I tell. I think a lot of them were really looking to understand human nature and they thought a test was the best way to do that. Then, of course, in the process they got sidetracked by their own ambition, or by intellectual rigidity, or by the agendas of business or government. They produced these tests that I think did not fulfill their original ambition of capturing human nature. They kind of flattened and quashed human nature. But in some ways, their original quest was noble and admirable.

Often the success these tests had in being accepted seems to have depended less on how accurate they were than on how well they were promoted.

That’s a secondary meaning of my title, “The Cult of Personality.” A lot of these personality tests became popular by virtue of the charismatic people who created and promoted them and didn’t really have anything to do with how scientifically accurate they were.

All of the tests share some of the same flaws, which are almost inherent in their conception.

Yes. One of the basic flaws that all personality tests share is that they leave out the power of situation. Psychologists know, and I think all of us know from our daily experience, that each of us acts differently in different situations at different times with different people. A personality test is a one-time intervention that at best can take a snapshot of you at one particular moment in this very contrived artificial situation of filling out a pencil-and-paper test.

Another problem is that a lot of these tests fail on the two basic criteria that psychological science has for tests. One of those is validity, or when a test measures what it says it measures. That is, whether the subject actually exhibits the traits indicated by the test. A lot of the personality tests that I write about don’t meet that basic criterion. For example, the Rorschach has very poor validity for a lot of its measures.

How is that determined?

By comparing it against other sources of information: other tests, observation, interviews, biographical information, a diagnosis that the person is given by a psychologist.

Or when a test indicates someone would be a successful employee, you’d check to see whether that person turned out to be successful or not?

Yes, you’d want to compare what the test said to real-world results.

The other criterion, reliability, is when a test delivers consistent results when given to the same person on a repeated basis. There again, a lot of personality tests are very unreliable, in part because people are complicated and dynamic and do change over time and according to situation. Proponents of the Myers-Briggs will tell you that your personality type, as represented by the four dimensions, is inborn and unchanging. But in fact, research shows that when given more than once to the same person, as many as 75 percent of test takers will get a different personality type on the second administration.

So oversimplifying seems to be another big problem with these tests.

That’s right. A lot of personality tests, by their very nature, are engaged in labeling people, stereotyping them — whether it’s a string of four letters, or measuring someone on five dimensions. A personality test would have to be as huge as the universe itself to really measure how unique and individual a person is.

Do most Americans, at some point, get asked to take these tests?

They’re much more common in certain industries than others. In fields like retail, banking, even in business generally, these tests are really popular. Many people in the corporate world are going to have encountered the Myers-Briggs, because it’s a hugely popular tool, not so much for hiring but for management development and team-building and that sort of thing.

As far as education goes, I think that depends too. People of a certain generation were routinely given the MMPI or other personality tests in school.

Taking those tests on Web sites or in magazines is sort of fun; I can see why people, as individuals, are captivated by them. But it was interesting to read that the main purpose of these tests isn’t for self-understanding, or even necessarily for the study of human nature, but mainly for use by institutions and bureaucracies.

In some ways, it was easier for me to see why institutions liked personality tests, because they take complex, irregular, unique individuals and they standardize them. They give them a label that can be moved around and put into the various niches that a corporation or a company needs to have a worker in.

What was more difficult for me to understand, and in some ways more interesting, was why individuals gravitated toward these tests. I couldn’t quite understand why people would be so eager to label themselves, to put themselves in a box. If you’ve ever met someone who’s just crazy about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator — and there are a lot of people like that out there — no one has forced this on them. Some people take this test voluntarily; others, though they take it on orders from their employers, happily identify with its results. They love the Myers-Briggs. They understand all their relationships in terms of the Myers-Briggs. They feel like they’ve gotten so much insight into themselves because of this test.

I came to think that in today’s world we have so many choices confronting us at every turn, in terms of who we date and who we marry, what job we pursue, how we conceive of ourselves as people in the world. It’s very comforting and reassuring to have a test — and in our society we imbue tests with a lot of power and a lot of authority — to have an apparently scientific test tell us, This is who you are, this is what you do, this is the kind of person you should marry.

As you also point out, the Myers-Briggs’ personality descriptions are open-ended, like horoscopes, so that when you read them there’s a ring of truth, a sense of recognition.

These descriptions have a little something for everybody. They hint at things that we all would like to think about ourselves. Or they’re hedged carefully enough so that, sure, they could apply to me. They could apply to anybody. All it takes is for our imagination to fill in the gaps and say, “Oh my god, that’s exactly me, they really hit the nail on the head.”

So on an individual basis, people measure how useful a test is by how well it matches what they think about themselves in the first place.

That’s right. Projective tests such as the TAT [the Thematic Apperception Test, in which subjects are shown pictures and asked to tell stories about them] are a little different. They claim to present us material from our unconscious, from our secret selves, that might be secret even from ourselves. Projective tests are supposed to reveal a part of yourself that you are not even aware of.

Which makes them foolproof, right?

Yes, they’re very clever. They’re kind of like psychoanalysis in that way. I have respect for psychoanalysis and some of the insights it’s given to us about human nature. But it’s essentially unfalsifiable, and in that sense it’s not really science. And I think that goes for a lot of the projective tests, as well.

You write approvingly about an unwieldy method of analyzing personality involving having a person tell his or her life story.

Yes, I turned to the life-story approach, and that appealed to me because it’s the oldest way that humans have for understanding themselves. And I think it’s the richest. It has most potential for capturing the complexity of human beings. It accommodates change. It acknowledges the role of culture and time and gender and race and all these things that do shape our personality; we’re not living in a vacuum. So I thought it was worth exploring psychologists’ efforts to use this story method scientifically.

More importantly, I wanted people to think about their own lives in terms of their story, an evolving, rich, complex, dynamic story. I think that’s how we naturally understand ourselves.

But it seems the more open-ended and free-form the tests are, the less useful they are to the institutions and bureaucracies that are looking for something they can use to pigeonhole people.

Absolutely. Those things are kind of opposed, and I don’t think there’s ever a medium point where an instrument that’s capable of measuring a human being in all their complexity is going to be useful to an institution, precisely because an institution doesn’t want that complexity. They have complex people on their hands, in their offices and in their classrooms, and what they want to do is simplify them.

You advise people, when confronted with a situation where they’re being asked to take a test themselves, to walk away — or at least to arm themselves with as much information as they can.

And that’s, unfortunately, all I can say, because people don’t have a legal right to decline a personality test in a way that will still preserve whatever opportunity they’re pursuing. In other words, an employer can demand that you take a personality test, and you don’t really have much say about it. You can walk away, but then you won’t get that job. That’s why I address that final epilogue not only to people who take these tests but also to the people who produce and administer them, because I think a lot of the power is in their hands.

What do you think happens to the results of all the millions of tests we take? Are my eighth-grade MMPI results still being held somewhere in my permanent record?

It’s funny to imagine a huge warehouse out there somewhere with everybody’s personality test results all filed away. There are guidelines for the confidentiality of these results, but those aren’t really enforceable legally, and they’re not really enforced by professional organizations like the American Psychological Association. This is another consequence of having personality tests out there in the world. The questions and the results are sort of floating out there in the ether.

My attempt to find work could hardly be more ill-timed, with unemployment near 10 percent, with the newspaper industry that once employed me seemingly going the way of blacksmithing. And though I have tried to scrub age-revealing details from my résumé, let’s just say my work history is long enough to be a liability, making me simultaneously overqualified and underqualified.

But my biggest handicap may be my history of spending daylight hours in the company of my own kids.

Just having them is bad enough. Research shows that mothers earn 4 to 15 percent less than non-mothers with comparable jobs and qualifications, that as job candidates, mothers are perceived as less competent and committed than non-mothers (fathers, in contrast, rate higher than men without kids). Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Center for American Progress, told me last year that the outlook for an at-home mother returning to work in this economy “kind of makes my stomach drop a little bit.” I know the feeling.

When Paul Krugman warns that many of the currently jobless “will never work again,” I am petrified — hello, 3 a.m.! — that he means me. I long ago lost track of how many jobs I have applied for, including some I wouldn’t have looked twice at in my 20s, but I can count the resulting interviews and have fingers left to twiddle idly. Before I left full-time work in 1996, my then-husband and I, both reporters at the same newspaper, earned the exact same salary. Now my ex, still a reporter, is making $30,000 a year more than that, while I have been passed over for jobs paying $20,000 less.

As I wander the ghost-town job boards, e-mailing my résumé into oblivion, I tamp down panic with soothing thoughts: I have a comfortable house, for now, some money in the bank, for now, a 9-year-old Mazda that rattles alarmingly but runs, for now. Millions of people are hanging by far thinner threads, and I am genuinely grateful for what good fortune I have.

So this is not a plea for sympathy. More like a warning from the front lines.

The recession has already shifted habits and attitudes and will likely usher in long-term cultural changes about which economists, sociologists and political strategists are churning out predictions as we speak. Here’s mine: The economic crisis will erode women’s interest in “opting out” to care for children, heightening awareness that giving up financial independence — quitting work altogether or even, as I did, going part-time — leaves one frighteningly vulnerable. However emotionally rewarding it may be for all involved, staying home with children exacts a serious, enduring vocational toll that largely explains the lingering pay gap between men and women as well as women’s higher rate of poverty. With the recession having raised the stakes, fewer mothers may be willing to take the risk. If it’s not yet the twilight of the stay-at-home mother, it could be her late afternoon. Certainly it is long past nap time.

Statistics suggest mothers are reaching that conclusion. Between 2008 and 2010, the number of stay-at-home mothers fell from 5.3 million to 5 million. (Stay-at-home dads held steady at around 150,000.) Who knows how many others are frantically sending out résumés? Whether they have paying jobs or not, mothers still handle most of the country’s child care, but that “feels like the last gasp of a dying age,” journalist Hanna Rosin wrote last year in Atlantic Monthly. She quotes Boushey noting that “the idealized family — he works, she stays home — hardly exists anymore.” The image of a mother pushing a stroller down the street at midday may come to seem as quaint as that of a 1950s housewife pushing a vacuum in stockings and pumps.

Stay-at-home mothers obsolete? Those among the 5 million who are alive and well and reading this may already be clicking indignantly to the comments section to defend their choices. Go ahead and vent, stay-at-home mothers. I get it. Fourteen years ago, I struggled with my own decision amid a tangle of internal and external messages. Some still seem valid and others now less so, but the difference was hard to tell amid the hormone-saturated, sleep-deprived, advice-swamped bewilderment of new parenthood.

I became a mother during a moment in history when women faced unprecedented career opportunities yet were expected to maintain a level of interaction with their children that would have made my own mother’s eyes roll practically out of their sockets. I was a busy reporter and naive new mom, two jobs that I was led to believe could not, for all practical purposes, be performed adequately and simultaneously. Oh, and while one was commendable, the other was morally imperative.

Like I needed the extra pressure. I already felt responsible for giving my sons childhoods — those fleeting years that would forever loom large in their lives — full of adventure and learning and treasured memories. If I could have enriched their experience by moving to a farm or hitting the road in an Airstream, I would have considered it. But according to the parenting manuals I dutifully consulted, what my boys required was constant engagement with a loving, omnipresent figure, sort of like if God engaged in daily floor time. The parenting experts never said exactly how children like mine, overseen by an ever-shifting cast of underpaid near-strangers in a commercial daycare center, would be damaged. But I got the impression I might as well have gone through pregnancy throwing back shots of tequila.

Meanwhile, my work/life balance … wasn’t. My husband and I kept erratic hours, handing off babies like batons. At work, I lost choice assignments as I dashed out before the stroke of 6, when the daycare began charging a dollar a minute. My editors, probably well-meaning, set me on what suspiciously resembled a mommy track. While an intern handled the tragic late-breaking news of an honor student murdered by her mother’s crack dealer, I yawned through meetings where citizens complained about potholes. (Though who knew how fabulous a steady-paying pothole gig would look to my underemployed future self?)

And the emotional turbulence! I drove to work with spit-up-stained shirt and tear-streaked face, cried at baby-food commercials featuring mothers and infants bonding in what looked like a weekday-afternoon glow. I felt the time flying past. My firstborn wasn’t yet crawling when I began gazing nostalgically at newborns in the park, with their impossibly delicate fingers and mewing cries. Over at the playground, hulking 4-year-olds hoisted themselves around with huge, capable hands, conversing in vast vocabularies. Soon my son would be one of these giants, his infancy vanished into the chaotic past.

My second son was born. Two weeks later, my father was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Sitting near my dad’s bedside, I showed off the baby to my Aunt Millicent, mentioning my plans to return to my job. She shook her head sadly.

“You won’t believe how fast those years go by,” my aunt said. “Try not to miss them, if you can help it.”

My father died two months later. That fall, my husband found a new job in a different city. And I — feminist, ambitious journalist, daughter of a woman with a successful advertising career — quit a full-time job at a big-city paper and began part-time freelancing work that brought in less, some years, than I’d made as a waitress in college.

I wasn’t worried, frankly, about the long-term economic consequences, partly because nobody else seemed to be. Most articles and books about what came to be called “opting out” focused on the budgeting challenges of dropping to one paycheck — belt-tightening measures shared by both parents — while barely touching on the longer-term sacrifices borne primarily by the parent who quits: the lost promotions, raises and retirement benefits; the atrophied skills and frayed professional networks. The difficulty of reentering the workforce after years away was underreported, the ramifications of divorce, widowhood or a partner’s layoff hardly considered. It was as though at-home mothers could count on being financially supported happily ever after, as though a permanent and fully employed spouse were the new Prince Charming.

I myself witlessly contributed to the misinformation when I wrote an article about opting out for a now-defunct personal-finance magazine. Amid chirpy budgeting tips and tales of middle-class couples cheerfully scraping by, I quoted a financial advisor bluntly outlining the long-term risks. My editor wasn’t pleased. “It’s so … negative,” she said, and over the phone I could almost hear her nose wrinkling. So I, neophyte freelancer eager to accommodate well-paying client, turned in a rewrite with a more positive spin.

Since then, a few writers have reported the financial downsides, notably Ann Crittenden, who calculated in “The Price of Motherhood” (2001) that having a child costs the average college-educated woman more than a million dollars in lifetime income. More recently , Linda Hirshman (“Get to Work,” 2006) and Leslie Bennetts (“The Feminine Mistake,” 2007) wrote manifestos scolding women who opt out. In 2010, Karine Moe and Dianna Shandy outlined the risks of downsizing a career on behalf of family in “Glass Ceilings & 100-Hour Couples.”

But I might not have realized such warnings even applied to me: After all, I was working. Downsizing my career seemed ideal — research shows 60 percent of mothers would choose part-time work if they could. While my kids spent three afternoons a week in daycare, I did what the experts advised: developed my skills, undertook new challenges, expanded my professional contacts. I advanced creatively if not financially, published essays in respected literary journals that often paid (cue ominous music) in copies of the magazine.

But who had time for long-term financial planning amid the daily demands of two small boys? I took them sliding, skating, swimming and skateboarding, supervised art projects, helped with homework, conferred with teachers, drove to music lessons and dentist appointments and baseball practices. I handled all of their sick days, some involving lingering health problems that, if I’d had an office job, would have exasperated the most flexible employer. Not every moment, of course, was sunny and delightful; there was plenty of crying, screaming and slamming doors (sometimes by the kids, too, ha ha). It was harder than any paying job I’ve ever held.

Salary experts estimate the market value of a stay-at-home parent’s labor (child care, housecleaning, cooking, laundry, driving, etc.) at about $118,000. This hollowly cheerful calculation has always struck me as patronizing, with the effect, if not the intention, of further diminishing our status. Moms — aren’t they the greatest? They should be pocketing as much as a registered pharmacist or the mayor of Chula Vista, Calif., yet they’ll happily accept payment in the form of adorable gap-toothed smiles. An implied, faintly sinister coercion — a good mom doesn’t want money — fuels a system that relies on our unpaid childcare, household chores and volunteer work but offers no safety net.

Few of the arguments for staying home seem as persuasive now as they did 14 years ago. I long ago stopped trusting most advice from so-called parenting experts. The kids I know who attended full-time daycare seem fine, and I doubt my sons would have been damaged if I had kept my job. In at least one crucial way, they’d be far better off: I’d have more money to contribute to their college educations.

Still, like most mothers, I have mixed feelings about my choices, and like most mothers writing complaining first-person essays, I feel compelled to note the upside. I am deeply thankful to have witnessed as much of my sons’ childhoods as I did. I’m a procrastinator, and I can imagine myself thinking of those long playground afternoons as something I would get around to eventually, not noticing the swing set’s shadow stretching ever longer across the sand.

So if some young woman with a new baby were to ask me about opting out I would tell her, as my Aunt Millicent told me 14 years ago, how quickly a child’s early years zip past, how challenging but wonderful they are, how grateful I am for every single moment I was privileged to witness.

And then, unlike my aunt, I would warn her not to do it.

In search of an answer, Niesslein did what many Americans do when their lives need a few tweaks or an all-out overhaul: She turned to self-help experts. A slew of them, in fact, including personal-finance guru Suze Orman; natural health advocate Dr. Andrew Weil; relationship advisors Drs. Phil McGraw and Laura Schlessinger; and the granddaddy of self-help himself, Dale Carnegie, author of the 1936 “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

For two years, Niesslein followed her self-help advisors hoping to improve her housekeeping, financial security, marriage, parenting skills, emotional state, fitness — and even her spiritual life. Her new book, “Practically Perfect in Every Way,” is a part-critique, part-memoir account of that experiment.

The book’s tone is conversational and funny (Orman, the author notes, “seems to blink less often than the average person,” and Weil’s distinctive white beard is “somewhere between Santa and Jerry Garcia”) but also, at times, serious and contemplative. Niesslein recounts how one decluttering expert suggested she walk around her house clapping her hands in the corners of rooms to “disperse stagnant energy.” And she gives special thanks to her remarkably cooperative husband, Brandon, who dutifully took part in the daily relationship exercises Dr. Phil prescribed — though both parties admitted feeling silly. (Brandon on Day 11: “It seems like Dr. Phil doesn’t really expect anyone to make it this far in the book. He’s just making stuff up at this point.”) In the end, Niesslein says, self-help made her life both a little more perfect, and a little less so.

Salon caught up with Niesslein in Evanston, Ill., where she was giving a bookstore reading. Sporting red Dr. Martens and an irreverent sense of humor, she’s now cheerfully unapologetic about her own little flaws: a figure that’s not model-skinny, a temper she can’t always keep from flaring, a smoking habit she doesn’t feel like giving up. Practically perfect, Niesslein seems to have decided, is close enough.

What inspired your experiment?

Well, my dog was dying — isn’t that how all good stories start out [laughs] — and it was my first real brush with mortality. It’s clichéd, but it made me think, “What sort of person am I? What am I doing with my life?” I felt like there was some serious room for improvement.

But it really came to a head when I was watching “Oprah” and she said something I didn’t quite understand. She said, “The first thing about fixing your life is owning the truth about your life.” I was like, “I don’t know what that means.” But everybody on the show seemed to be really grooving on it. So I thought, “Maybe this is what’s wrong with me, that I’m so dismissive of things I haven’t even tried.” I figured: Self-help has worked for some people. I thought I’d be the guinea pig and do the experiments on myself.

So you suspended your skepticism about self-help for the sake of the project?

I didn’t completely suspend it. I wasn’t going to be a sponge and just take everything in. I went into it with two minds, so that I would still use my common sense, but also suspend my disbelief about the awfulness of the prose and things like that.

Had you tried any self-help before?

Not very much. Like everybody else, when I was pregnant I read “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.” But by the time Stephanie [Wilkinson, Niesslein's co-editor and co-founder] and I started Brain, Child, I had a bad attitude about being told what to do. It becomes apparent pretty quickly that it’s difficult to separate regular, factual advice — like how often you should feed a baby — from larger philosophical things.

Still, as a writer, I thought self-help was full of interesting ideas. It sounds like a fluffy topic, but the whole idea of individualism, of luck, of happiness — it is really rich subject matter. Things like: Can an individual really make significant changes all on her own? How much of anyone’s success is a result of action and how much is just circumstance and dumb luck? In some ways, this project appealed to me in the same way that Brain, Child did when we started it: as a way to take a subject that, at the moment in our culture, is considered “lite” — whether motherhood or self-help — and see what else was there. And sure enough, some of the books I wound up disliking immensely, and others I wound up really liking and respecting.

What made the difference?

Well, my favorites are the ones that don’t force you to navel-gaze so much. They focus on the inside and the outside. Martin Seligman [psychologist and author of "Authentic Happiness" and other books on "positive psychology"] does that. And Oprah — I think that is actually one of the great things that she does, when you look at the balance of her show.

The thing is, even among the authors I really liked, there is still this underlying idea that, with enough get-up-and-go, you can fix things by yourself. And for some things, that’s probably true. But there is also such a thing as luck. One of the big ideas in self-help right now is that there’s no such thing as luck. Or as “The Secret” [Rhonda Byrne's recent bestseller] says: You put out positive thoughts and it will come back to you. It’s a lovely idea, and I think it’s a very American idea. But I don’t think it makes it true.

It seems like the foundation of the self-help concept is this idea that personalities are infinitely malleable. But isn’t it possible that we’re not as changeable as self-help experts like to, or pretend to, think?

Yes, exactly. Even in the best self-help, just by virtue of it being self-help, you have to believe that you can change things. But there are some things, I think, that are part of your temperament. And then there are some things that you can’t change by yourself. Having job security, for example, would really improve quality of life for a lot of people. But one individual can’t decide, “I will have job security.”

I also think people change in ways that they don’t necessarily intend to. During my experiment, I wound up having panic attacks, which I’d never had before in my life. I wound up sleepwalking more. I could chalk some of those things up to the self-help, but it might have been [the result of] other events in my life during that time, too. I called it an experiment but, you know, there was no control group.

But you did see a possible connection between those problems and your two years of very intense self-focus?

I did. These books say you’ll have all this knowledge, you’ll be empowered, you’ll be the master of your destiny. But the flip side of that is that you become acutely aware of all the burdens that you have, too, and your responsibilities. You’re responsible for your financial destiny, and especially according to the folks [I was reading], women are responsible for what’s going on in their relationships.

Yes, I found it interesting that you mention in both your marriage chapter and your housecleaning and organizing chapter that most of the burden of improvement tends to fall on the woman.

Self-help is very old-school in that way. I think it’s changing, in the same way that our culture is changing — women are moving into the traditional men’s realm, but it’s taking a lot more time for men to move into the traditional women’s realm, into the domestic stuff. When you look at the financial advice, there’s a lot targeted to women these days. But housecleaning and relationship advice is still very much targeted to women. When I was taking the Fly Lady‘s [housekeeping] advice, I got 15 e-mails a day, and some of them were testimonials. And one that really struck me was from this guy, who said, “Thank you for teaching my wife how to clean house. I’ve been trying for years to teach her.”

But he took no responsibility for it himself.

Yeah, and that is why I stopped following the Fly Lady’s advice. Because I realized that I was the only one in the house who was very interested in it.

You note something similar, though less overt, with Dr. Phil and his relationship books.

Dr. Phil is very careful to use the gender-neutral “your partner,” or “your mate.” But I think we all know who’s actually going to be reading this. And at one point he has a note to his women readers, saying that his wife, Robin, the long-suffering Robin, fixed their relationship with no help from him, [mimics patronizing tone] “and you women readers can do it, too.”

You write at one point that your own life is “practically perfect in every way.” I’m sure you were being a bit ironic, but you do have a good life. How different do you think the experience would be for people who have more serious problems?

I wonder about that. Because on the one hand, I know there are probably people who would think of me as a whiner. I have everything I need to be happy. And I wasn’t desperately unhappy. But I felt that something could have been better. On the other hand, I have a lot of resources, in terms of money and time and motivation, to do this. And yet I still felt like I failed in many regards.

You feel like you failed, or like the programs failed?

Well, I think the programs did — but the emotional takeaway is still that you’ve failed.

There’s some comfort in having somebody tell you what to do, somebody who supposedly knows what they’re talking about. But do you think self-help also breeds a sense of helplessness in people, in the sense that they aren’t able to function in their ordinary lives without the advice of experts?

For me, it did. I really started to unravel during this project during the parenting and marriage chapters, where I was thinking about every single thing I did before I did it, including in my own home and with the people I’m closest to. It really undermined my confidence as a parent.

What was the best advice you received?

Generally, I wound up liking any sort of advice that split the focus between your inner life and the larger world. I really liked when Martin Seligman said, “Focus on your strengths, and use them to compensate for your flaws.”

What was the worst advice?

There are so many ways that advice can go wrong. I think the worst advice is advice that doesn’t have an escape hatch, that doesn’t say, “You know what? This might not work for you.” That’s what drives me crazy.

Were there any lasting results or advice that you’ve kept in your life?

I got a retirement account set up. I lost 10 pounds. And now I have methods for avoiding getting all fired up about very petty things. I find them very difficult to apply in the moment, but I can do it afterward, to talk myself out of a bad mood.

How did your husband and son feel about the experience?

Brandon, was a very, very good sport about it all. Though I know he was very happy when the marriage chapter was done.

“Just kill everyone in sight, Mom,” Jack advises.

Until now, I’ve never had any interest in playing a video game. Like many parents, I regard them with a queasy tolerance. I’d prefer my sons spent more time reading, playing outside, interacting with the real world. I’ve heard the warnings: video games are violent, addictive, that playing them makes kids fat.

But I have also wondered whether the experts’ misgivings — and, for that matter, my own — stem from simple middle-aged skepticism toward the newfangled, suffused with nostalgia for lower-tech childhoods of the past.

Parents have always been expected to act as media gatekeepers for their children, scrutinizing and evaluating according to age and personality, banishing anything too bloody or scary or sexual or profane. For my parents, that meant tucking “The Story of O” safely away in the underwear drawer (nice try, Mom). Today it requires wading through a relentless tide of movies and music, thousands of cable channels, an Internet that seems to swell as infinitely as the universe itself. But video games are particularly hard for me to assess, because I don’t even know how to turn on the console system. I’m sure I’m not the only parent who, struggling to keep on top of all of this but confronted with a yawning gap between what’s ideal and what’s practical, winds up drawing a shaky line somewhere in between and hoping for the best.

A contrarian new book promises to let me off the hook for much of that monitoring and worrying. In “Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter,” Steven Johnson claims that video games, along with TV and other entertainment media, actually exercise the brain. Gamers become adept at jumping into unfamiliar video environments without a glance at the manual, poking around and testing strategies until they find ways to solve complex problems. These skills, Johnson writes, have “great real-world applicability” — one example he mentions is how easily kids pick up and use high-tech gadgets — and he even offers evidence that video games (along with TV and other entertainment media) boost kids’ IQs.

As Jack and I play on, it becomes apparent that my first triumphant slaying was beginner’s luck. I can hardly get my droid to run in a straight line — he keeps going backward, zooming into the air, crashing into rocks. I get killed repeatedly (and reincarnated instantly, each time, as a new droid). Fumbling with the controller, I am, so to speak, all thumbs.

“What do we do with all these buttons?” I ask.

“I’m not sure yet,” Jack says, explaining that the buttons do different things from one game to the next.

Testing and fiddling, he quickly learns to make his droid flip summersaults, fire a thermal detonator, ride a dinosaur. When momentarily disoriented, he calmly studies the screen for clues. “I don’t know where I am … I’m leaving the forest … Seriously, where am I? Uh-oh, I’m in a big battlefield!” As Johnson predicts, Jack possesses a nonchalant confidence that, sooner or later, he’ll figure things out.

That helps explain why Jack teaches me the intricacies of my own cellphone and digital camera, why at 8 he was the only one in the family who could operate the DVD player. But it’s hard to tell whether he transfers his deductive skills to other real-life situations, whether his intelligence and self-assurance have been enhanced by playing video games.

The very idea would strike many parents as absurd. In my neighborhood, where it sometimes seems child-rearing competence is determined by how many mainstream pleasures you deny your kids, video games rank somewhere between toy guns and Twinkies. In many eyes, the medium itself is almost as bad as its message. An acquaintance told me she buys board games for her sons so that “at least they’re not sitting in front of a screen” — as if sitting around a sheet of cardboard were intrinsically preferable. A neighbor forbade her son to touch a video-game controller, though she would allow him to watch as other kids played.

What, exactly, are they afraid of? What was I afraid of? For years, I let my sons play games at friends’ homes but outlawed them in ours. I had grown up just fine without them, and saw no reason why my boys couldn’t do the same. They began pleading for a game system roughly as soon as they could stretch their dimpled fists around a controller, but I held my ground. While friends’ kids upgraded their Nintendos and wore out their Gameboys, my ban gave me a rare feeling of maternal superiority and control. When other parents bemoaned their kids’ gaming obsessions, I could smugly announce that I had never even heard of Super Mario Bros. I might be lax about bedtimes or let orange soda stand in for organic fruit juice. I might pick up dinner at a drive-through while my neighbor’s kids dined on tofu. But here was one patch of moral high ground that I could proudly claim.

The only problem was, when I stopped to examine my opposition to video games, I found it hard to define their actual dangers. After all, I green-lighted other sedentary activities (drawing, checkers, TV), and mildly violent entertainment (a few Saturday morning cartoons that made me cringe). What evidence did I have that video games, in and of themselves, were so much worse? They didn’t seem particularly mindless or brain-rotting; they looked as challenging as the average board game — more so, actually. And if they weren’t any worse than my approved activities, didn’t my prohibition violate what experts tout as the prime directive of effective parenting: consistency?

Meanwhile, the ban only made my sons’ longing grow. “Mom, I can’t go over to Kevin’s anymore,” my older son Cy announced. “It makes me too crazy seeing his PlayStation and knowing we can’t have one.” Jack went the other way, developing friendships with kids purely as an excuse to use their systems. Video games were becoming more intrusive in their absence than they would be in middle of the living room. So when the kids were about 6 and 7, a friend offered to sell me an old Sega system for $25, and I caved. Since then, we’ve gone through the Sega, a Nintendo 64 and three Gameboys, and we’re on to a PlayStation 2.

As Jack and I finish the game level, the word “victory” flashes on-screen. We have captured the command post or conquered the planet or whatever. No thanks to Mom, observes 10-year-old Cy, from the sidelines.

“What,” I say defensively. “I killed a couple of people.”

“We did pretty bad, Mom, sad to say,” Jack reports. “I only killed one person. Well, and R2D2, but I don’t think he really counts.”

Our cheerful conversation about killing might horrify an eavesdropper. But, to me, wasting robots in a “Star Wars” game is closer to shooting rubber ducks at a midway concession stand, and not only because we’re destroying something inanimate. It just doesn’t feel like violence. It’s as if the impulse springs from a whole different part of the brain, not from the primitive depths that drive acts of murderous rage or “take that, sucker” sadism, but from some more composed and civilized lobe that relishes a challenge and a bit of friendly sparring.

Over the years I’ve read enough about media violence to know that it’s hard to tell whether it makes kids more aggressive. Research is inconclusive, and common-sense assumptions come with equally logical flip sides. Maybe our bloodless, comic-bookish “Star Wars” killing is actually worse than graphic carnage, because it obscures bloodshed’s real consequences. Or maybe combat games discourage aggression by providing a benign release valve. British media expert David Gauntlett notes that one study found that a group of young violent offenders actually watched less violent entertainment than average. And as Johnson points out, the most recent Justice Department figures show violent crime is at a recorded low, despite rising media violence.

Even so, I’m not about to fling open the door to an ultra-violent game such as the best-selling “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.” “From the sick insinuations … to the sexually deviant threats … you’ll hear things said in San Andreas that will curl your toes … don’t buy this game for your kids unless they’re thirty,” writes one critic. Parenting expert? Right-wing ideologue? Nope, a game-site reviewer who considers the best-selling “GTA” “a masterpiece.” I don’t necessarily believe my children will mimic brutal acts, but that’s not the only reason to shield them, when I can, from humanity’s uglier side.

So I don’t let them buy games rated M for “mature” (defined by the Entertainment Software Rating Board as suitable for ages 17 or older). And they can’t have games whose box features somebody wielding a giant weapon. Together, these eliminate about half the titles in the store. A nice middle ground, I try to reassure myself. But a lot of good it does I find out as we sit together playing. When I ask Jack what he thinks about violent games, he informs me he has played gory, M-rated games in other kids’ homes. He claims to have no interest in them — “All they are is blowing people’s heads off and doing drugs and S-E-X and stuff. They’re just stupid” — but maybe he’s saying that just to placate me. Or he’d change his mind if tempted by a particularly cool game.

In any case, he makes little effort to set my mind at ease when the topic turns to addiction. He readily admits to being something of a game junkie. “It’s really hard to stop playing — it’s like a cigarette,” he says cheerfully. Though at 9 he has never smoked, the comparison is, of course, unsettling. What if Jack’s obsession, like my own former cigarette habit, goes on for years and years, choking out healthy activities the way tobacco smoke blackens pink lung tissue? Better tighten those time limits, I think, disconcerted.

Tonight, though, I reach my own limit first.

“This is such a tight game!” Cy exclaims, watching us.

“Yeah, I know,” Jack says. “This is a game you want to just stay up all night and play!”

I hand my controller to Cy. Personally, I don’t feel in much danger of getting hooked or staying up all night. After an hour or so of watching a pixelated droid bound across a TV screen, I’m ready for something more, well, three-dimensional. On the other hand, I don’t feel any smarter, either — at least not about the benefits and risks of video games. Johnson’s book is appealing, and it’s hard to argue after reading it that, content and addiction questions aside, video games are inherently more harmful than other sedentary activities: drawing, building with Legos, playing chess. Still, I’d be much more comfortable seeing my sons do those time-tested things.

Yet I want to respect their choices. I don’t want to condemn their tastes just because I don’t share them. How can I expect them to appreciate my cultural interests — to check out the books, movies, museums, Web sites and music that I recommend — if I reflexively scoff at theirs?

These days, I know, parents are supposed to have vehement child-rearing opinions and to stick to them with droidlike consistency. But with video games, as with so many parenting matters, I wind up thinking that almost all the positions — even diametrically opposed ones — make a little bit of sense. And that none offers any guarantees.

So the PS2 stays in the living room.

Which is fine because, unless I’m willing to window-peep at sleepovers, to put households that allow video games in the off-limits category normally reserved for those that store loaded guns in unlocked cabinets, I can’t keep my sons from being exposed to, and tempted by, video games. In the end, I can’t shelter my kids from the modern world.

“We start talking about the challenges of parenting today,” said Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in a recent speech about video games, “and all of a sudden people are exchanging their deep concerns about losing control over the raising of their own children, ceding the responsibility of implicating values and behaviors to a multidimensional media marketplace that they have no control over and most of us don’t even really understand because it is moving so fast we can’t keep up with it.”

As politicians do, Clinton issues proposals — clearer ratings, more research, public-service announcements, industry self-policing — public measures that, for all I know, might help. But meanwhile, parents face a dilemma, and in that one run-on sentence, she captures it. The mass entertainment media are powerful, enormously profitable, pretty close to uncontainable, and constantly shifting. Maybe I am drawn to books like Steven Johnson’s partly because they offer some comfort against the inevitable.

After all, he claims video games can teach my sons to navigate a complex and baffling environment where circumstances change quickly, rules aren’t clear and they’ll have to figure things out, as best they can, along the way.

I sure hope he’s right, because we’re already there.

Warner says she recognized the problem after returning to this country after a few years in France, where attitudes toward motherhood were very different. In France, Warner found, mothers are expected to take time for themselves. Their lives are made easier by social supports such as high-quality childcare and generous parental-leave policies. French mothers, in Warner’s view, enjoy a lifestyle that Americans might find almost incredible. “Guilt just wasn’t in the air,” she writes.

“Perfect Madness” landed last week with a burst of publicity — a Newsweek cover story, an excerpt in Elle, a Valentine’s Day Op-Ed in the New York Times by Warner, and the lead review in the New York Times Book Review — and it is sparking debate from kitchen tables to the blogosphere. But Warner, who has written biographies of Hillary Clinton and Newt Gingrich, is hardly the first to decry the trend toward hyper-intensive mothering and the stress it places on women. Like some of her predecessors, she blames such factors as the popularity of the “attachment parenting” philosophy (which holds that even brief separations from a mother can scar young children), a therapy culture that traces adults’ insecurities to their parents’ mistakes, and a shortage of social supports like decent childcare and family-friendly workplace policies.

In contrast to previous observers, however — notably Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels, authors of “The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women,” last year’s high-profile book on the topic — Warner downplays the impact of parenting magazines, child-rearing gurus and other media influences, contending that women enter motherhood already receptive to zealous messages. She points to some unexpected culprits: a diet consciousness that trains women to address external problems through intense self-control, and conservative government policies that, by shifting wealth to the rich, have left middle-class families frantic to improve their children’s long-term economic prospects any way they can, even if it means signing them up for swimming lessons when they’re 4 months old.

Salon spoke to Warner by phone from her home in Washington.

You spent your first few years as a mother in France, where attitudes toward motherhood are more relaxed. Then you moved back to States and you were immediately sucked in to the mommy madness in America. Why?

It takes a lot of inner strength to fend off the pressures that are all around you. It’s very, very easy to get sucked in.

Washington is the most competitive place I’ve ever been in my life, in terms of the kinds of ambitions parents have and the kinds of ambitions they have for their children. I find it even more competitive and ambition driven than New York City, where I’m from. It’s a real pressure cooker. And I think it was easy for me to get sucked in to that because I am from Manhattan. I’m from that kind of environment. It’s what comes naturally to me. I found myself, as a mother, kind of flipping back into the person I was in high school, of just wanting to do everything perfectly and always having that worry of falling behind and not getting the best possible grade on a test.

How did you become aware of it and manage to extricate yourself?

The awareness was immediate, because the culture shock hit me right away. And because of that, I had the gift of having something of a more anthropological perspective than I would have had if I’d never left the country, where this would have just been normal life and I would have been sucked in to it without thinking.

And I would say that working on the book, in a way, helped me from being completely sucked under. Once I was thinking about these issues and making them a conscious thing rather than something I should just live through, then life became material. And when life becomes material, it’s a lot more controllable and the pressures become less toxic, because you have this distance toward everything at the same time that you’re going through it.

But I’m still not outside of these pressures. I listen to the stories women tell and I totally identify with them. There are new pressures that come up all the time, and it is incredibly difficult to stay centered as a parent.

What kinds of pressures?

As my kids get older, there are social pressures that kick in. How many sleepovers are the right number of sleepovers? How many activities should my daughter be doing in a given week? I live in a well-off community, so people can afford to do lots of stuff, and they invite my daughter to do them. Fortunately, in a sense, I can say, “No, sorry, we can’t afford to have you do ice skating, horseback riding, swimming lessons, violin and whatever else simultaneously. So you’ve got to make choices.”

The higher up you go on the socioeconomic spectrum, the more ridiculous it gets, because there’s more money and time to be spent on things.

Other women who have written about these issues — for example, Naomi Wolf in her book “Misconceptions: Truth, Lies and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood” — have been criticized for focusing on problems experienced primarily by middle- and upper-middle-class women. But you decided very deliberately to do so: You interviewed women in that demographic, and your analysis focuses on issues affecting that demographic. Why?

I think of myself as a middle-class person. I live in a middle- to upper-middle-class area. My book sprang from personal observation of the world around me. I also became very interested in comparing the lives of women today with those described in [Betty Friedan's 1963 classic] “The Feminine Mystique.” I became interested in looking back in time, not just of the conditions women were living in but also at their inner world. It became clear to me that it was consistent to keep that focus on the middle class, because that was where the focus has been always, in the mainstream women’s magazines and women’s writing, and in the question of motherhood from the 1960s onward.

I also realize that one book can’t do everything. I would have liked in the book to write more about working-class women and poor women, but there was only so much I could do in this particular book.

The image of the hyper-intensive mother still contradicts a widespread stereotype of contemporary motherhood. People assume that since so many mothers are working at paid jobs, they’re doing far less for their children than they used to.

There are a couple of studies that show that mothers today actually spend about the same amount of one-on-one-time with their kids as mothers did in the past, because they’ve upped the intensity of their mothering so much. One generation back, our mothers didn’t put the same pressures on themselves to be sitting on the floor, building with Legos. They were ironing or gardening or cooking dinner or talking on the phone, and not feeling guilty about doing that.

Yet, we don’t have a sense of being abused by mothers who didn’t do enough “floor time.”

No. Absolutely not. The bad memories that women seem to have, interestingly enough, is of overinvolved mothers who were frustrated and unhappy with their lives and who were overinvested in their children as a result.

There were also a certain number of women I talked to who grew up under more modest circumstances, whose mothers worked at a time when a minority of mothers worked. It became a real ambition for them to be stay-at-home moms because they remembered coming home in the afternoon after school to an empty house, and they remembered a mother — often a single mother — who was scrambling, never having enough money, getting fired from jobs when she tried to be with her kids or go to doctor’s appointments and things like that. And they reacted to that and said they did not want that kind of life for their kids.

The predicament of modern mothers is sometimes referred to “the unfinished business of feminism.” Did feminists drop the ball on this?

It isn’t fair to say that they dropped the ball entirely. I think there has always been a kind of tension on this issue, because at the outset there was this desire to get away from seeing women in their traditional roles and certainly not to have them defined — legally and professionally — by their biology. This was the thing to accomplish. So in pursuit of that goal, you didn’t want to have too much emphasis on women’s roles as mothers, because those roles were limiting them, in the popular imagination, in what they could do with their lives.

Over the years, there were always calls for better childcare, for a greater valorization of the roles of mothers, that kind of thing. But I think what happened is that the abortion issue became so big, it became the major battlefield, and I think that everything else got kind of crammed to the side.

But it’s unfair to the people who were working in women’s movement throughout the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s to say that they dropped the ball on motherhood.

Many people point to parenting experts, to magazines and manuals, that have encouraged this intensive mothering style. But you argue that their advice wouldn’t have much effect if mothers weren’t already primed to accept it.

I’m resistant to arguments that there’s this sort of top-down pressure from the media. That doesn’t make sense. These things exist in our marketplace. If they didn’t resonate with people, people wouldn’t buy the books and the magazines. They wouldn’t take in these messages and run with them the way they do. Frequently what we do with the stuff we read is we push it even further in the way we apply it. The media isn’t shoving some conspiracy down our throats. We’re not passive consumers.

What do you mean?

Let me give you an example. My older daughter was born in 1997, just at the moment when brain research in children was getting a lot the coverage. There was all this talk about what you could do to optimally stimulate your child and help your child’s development. And wherever you looked, the message was that you needed to talk to your child as much as possible, read to your child as much as possible, sing, play games. So I did this during my child’s every waking moment. Until years went by and I was really, really depleted. I felt like I was losing an inner life. I also realized that my child was dependent on me for stimulation, kind of like the way kids can get dependent on television, and that I needed to wean her off it. And that’s been a difficult process, frankly, with both my kids ever since.

Both my kids were born at about that same time, and there was this sense that if you stopped the stimulation for even a few minutes, then the synapses would start withering away.

The funny thing is that when, in the course of writing this book, I went back to the same articles that I had read then, I realized that they weren’t so very over the top. There were little sentences embedded along with all the rest: “Don’t overdo it.” “You don’t have to do this 24 hours a day.” But that’s not what most of us, I think, took away. We took away the same message that people always take away [in the United States] when it’s a question of diet or anything else: that if a little bit is good, a lot has got to be better.

There is, obviously, a certain amount of sacrifice that parents do have to make on behalf of their children, financially and in terms of time and labor. Yet it seems like mothers are taking on most of the burden, as opposed to sharing it with fathers. A lot of women wonder, how can they get fathers to do their share?

I don’t know. I think at this point it’s largely a lost cause for our generation. It’s too late.

Wow.

It just plain hasn’t happened. The statistics overall will tell you that there’s a grotesque inequality of who does what. When you have families where the mother is at home full time, she does almost everything.

So men figure, as long as she’s home, why can’t she just toss in a load of laundry?

This isn’t necessarily a Stepford wives situation where the men are fantasizing about turning their wives into these perfect housewives so they can rule over them. You see a lot of wives caught up in this desire to be this perfect mother and this perfectly functioning creature, and the husbands are kind of shunted off to the side and often made to feel like impediments to the smoothly functioning household. I don’t think they’re necessarily getting a whole lot out of this, easy though it is to get enraged with them.

In terms of what’s going to happen long term and what can we do, I don’t know. An earlier generation would have said go on strike, get divorced — right? But we’re a generation that was deeply scarred by divorce. It’s a little bit hard to imagine someone cavalierly deciding that she’s going to get divorced because her husband doesn’t help out enough around the house.

But resentment and conflicts over this issue put huge pressure on marriages.

The pressure is huge. The divorce rate is down, but the percentage of couples saying that they’re living in less-than-happy marriages is up. I think that there’s a lot of long-simmering resentment and a lot of unhappiness in marriages. And I think it’s quite toxic and very sad and I wonder what will happen 10 years from now, in terms of the divorce rate, if things go on like this. What’s going to happen when the kids are older?

You suggest that getting too much parental attention harms children, leaving them “stressed and anxious and, at the very least, often badly behaved.” That sounds a lot like what experts very recently were saying would happen to children who didn’t get enough attention, who were put in daycare or whatever. It seems that no matter how faithfully mothers try to follow experts’ advice, they get blamed for wrecking their children. Is there any real evidence that kids’ problems are the result of mistakes by well-intentioned mothers?

I think that parents have to take some responsibility for their children’s behavior. In the past, I know, mothers were blamed for absolutely everything, and this was ridiculous and hateful. I am very clear to say in the book that I don’t want to play into that same history of mother blaming.

However, I think that we have gone too far now in the direction of avoiding parent blaming — and this is an issue of parental behavior, not just of mothers’. It is now politically incorrect to even talk about the family environment as playing a role in children’s “issues” — behavioral or emotional. Everything now is brain chemistry and genetics, and, frankly, while that is up to a point true, it also lets parents and society, which is the larger point of the book, entirely off the hook.

While I in no way want to add to mothers’ guilt, I think it does our children a great disservice to not even open our minds and hearts to the possibility that some of the things we do — and by “we” I mean mothers and fathers and educators and society; I can’t make this point strongly enough — have deleterious effects.

Specifically, what do you think parents do wrong, and what effect does it have on kids?

I think we can make our children self-centered by giving them too much attention and making them feel like they’re the center of the universe. I think there are a lot of discipline problems in schools now, a lack of respect for adults, an inability to listen and make eye contact when somebody’s speaking to you. A general lack of empathy. Children are lacking empathy for others because they’re being raised in a way that makes them too self-centered.

I also have heard psychologists make the link between the pressures we put on children and the rise of anxiety and depression among children and people in their 20s.

You ultimately hold our conservative government responsible for a lot of what’s ailing mothers because they’re the ones who have created policies that force middle-class families to work ever harder just to keep up.

I think there’s much greater harm done to women and families by the fiscal- conservative part of right-wing ideology … let me rephrase that — “fiscal conservative” is too mild — that’s been done by the stripping away of social supports, the redirecting of the nation’s wealth from the middle class to the wealthy, the tax policies, the benefit cuts, etc. All of that has contributed to the enormous wealth gap between the rich and poor in America and has made the middle class feel the squeeze and become worried about having their families fall off the map, fall onto the side of the losers. Because to be a loser in our society is such a terrible thing — or rather, not to be a winner in our society is, at this point, such a bad thing.

Things that, in the past, could be counted on to be staples of the middle-class existence — access to good public schools, access to decent healthcare, the ability to buy a house in a nice neighborhood — these are now luxuries. So you’ve really got to be in there, making money, and making sure that your kids have the ability to make money, just to have a middle-class existence. All of that is, at least in large part, a direct result of social policies that stem from right-wing political beliefs. And that, I think, is much more toxic than whatever kinds of so-called traditionalist, family-values rhetoric might come from the right wing.

But if these pressures are mainly affecting middle-class people, how do you explain the frenzy getting more intense as you go up the socioeconomic ladder?

In my mind all this exists on a continuum. It seems to get more absurd the higher up you go because there’s more time and money to spend. It’s always been a bit of a mystery to me why it is that wealthy people can’t sit back and relax a bit, but they don’t seem capable of it.

What advice do you have for women who read your book and see themselves reflected in it? How do mothers get to a place where they are more relaxed? What are your public prescriptions for change?

In terms of what society can do, we need to think creatively to find more support for families. We need to lessen the financial burden on middle-class families, change our tax policies so that the middle-class isn’t underwriting the wealthy as it is now. We need to have public education that people can believe in. We need better support for parents such as part-time daycare for part-time working and at-home mothers. We need universal government standards for daycare and preschool.

On a personal level, stressed-out mothers should talk to other women. Discover that you’re not alone. Think about if there’s anything you can do in your own life to make things less crazy.

In her fourth book, “Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World,” Kephart uses the story of Jeremy’s creative development as a springboard for arguing that many children are robbed of the chance to develop their own creativity. Although Kephart includes video games and television among the culprits, her particular foe is a child’s busy schedule — filled with lessons and activities and college preparation — that she believes is imposed by ambitious parents across the country, including many in her own affluent community outside Philadelphia.

Kephart chronicled Jeremy’s early struggle with pervasive developmental disorder, a condition often mistaken — much to Kephart’s frustration — for autism. “A Slant of Sun,” a 1998 National Book Award finalist, ends with Jeremy at 7, having overcome those difficulties. Now, in “Seeing Past Z,” Jeremy has become a typical boy who attends public school, plays soccer, and plays with friends. He exhibits a child’s active imagination: He invents complex personal histories for the characters in a board game; he asks probing questions that his parents can’t always answer. The book describes how, with the help of Kephart and her husband, Bill, that imagination evolves (although she readily admits that their efforts weren’t unusually heroic or elaborate, but rather the basic Parenting 101 support that busy schedules sometimes force to the wayside.)

Her campaign on behalf of children’s creative growth did not stop with Jeremy: Since he was 9 she has been giving workshops in which she leads groups of neighborhood kids in activities centered around books. This summer, she has expanded the group to include kids from lower-income neighborhoods of Philadelphia.

“I’m writing it with the great prayer that other parents who are reading it will say, Gosh, it looks like fun to start a neighborhood writing group for kids, or a neighborhood music group for kids, or a neighborhood pottery group for kids,” she says. To that end, she includes an appendix full of ideas for anyone interested in holding similar workshops, along with samples of writing by the kids she has taught.

The title of “Seeing Past Z” alludes to line from a Dr. Seuss book: “In the places I go there are things that I see that I never could spell if I stopped with the Z.” Kephart urges parents to help their children find those places beyond Z — beyond the test scores and prizes and résumé-building — to grow in unexpected ways. Kephart spoke to Salon in late July from her home in Philadelphia.

What made you want to write the book? How did you come up with the idea?

When I first began to write the book — which developed out of essays that I began writing about five years ago — I was looking at the emergence of the imagination in my son. I was interested in all of the elements that fall into place as the creative spirit arises. I would read stories to Jeremy — the Harry Potter books, books by Roald Dahl. He also liked the Lemony Snicket books. He finally got a desire to read realistic kids’ novels on his own. And eventually he began writing his own stories. He started out with made-up newspaper headline stories, went into the comic misadventures of cartoonish characters — funny things that would happen to kids; there would be supernatural powers involved — then moved on to movie synopses, with lists of who would star, who would direct. Now he’s writing a series of detective stories for TV, so they are all straight dialogue and setup.

At the same time that I was doing that, I was teaching reading and writing to the kids that come to my house and watching what happened to them as they worked together to build a community. The kids would talk about how they feel about the books, how the stories relate to their own experience. You could see them being generous listeners, building friendships that held beyond the workshops themselves.

I live on the Main Line in Philadelphia, a predominantly white, upper-middle-class community [and the setting for the 1939 Katharine Hepburn film "The Philadelphia Story"] that has many, many wonderful schools and opportunities for kids — and a whole lot of pressure on these kids to perform, to build a résumé. All of these pressures, I began to believe, were denying kids the right to chart their own course, to dream their own dreams, and to just have time to think.

So you were seeing too much emphasis on goal versus process, on what you achieve rather than what you do along the way. Do you believe that one excludes the other, necessarily?

What I’m most concerned about are parents who insinuate their own ambitions into their children’s lives. I think that a child who wants to be a violinist, and that’s their dream from the age of 3, and they take that on and they live that dream creatively and it is their own dream — I think that is really great if it’s managed in the right way. My concern is more the parents who say, “You will take Japanese to make you interesting, you will do this, you will do that.”

You mention in the book that people actually have suggested that, by taking a less goal-oriented approach, you would hurt your son’s future prospects.

I am seen as sort of this marginal weird mother on the outside who is not booking her son into every imaginable résumé-building category. I’m up against it all the time, frankly, with the kids who come to my workshop. There are parents — not all of them, but there’s a good percentage — whose kids come who say, “But what are you doing to help them with their SAT scores?”

When I was working on the book and I would tell people what it was about, I had a few parents say, “But it’s all about getting into Harvard. If you’re giving him time to dream and write stories that may or may not be published, you’re not giving him the competitive edge. He will have a disappointing adulthood. You’re not giving him the platform to stand on and be successful.”

I don’t mean to sound like an extremist. Certainly, the book is not extreme. I think it’s a gentle book, it’s a “what if?” book, it’s a series of questions, and it is the story of what happens in one family’s life when certain priorities were chosen.

We didn’t schedule him. We made the choice. We looked around and said, “Yes, he’d probably benefit from having clarinet on his résumé or something,” but he wasn’t interested in clarinet, so we didn’t push him. We had him take piano for six months, but he wasn’t interested in pursuing it, so we said fine. We didn’t push him. This year, we’re not putting him in summer school, which is huge around here.

How much responsibility do you as a parent have, does any parent have, for guiding her child this way?

We cannot ultimately build the children of our dreams. Our responsibility is to be there, to share what we love with them, to listen to them as they emerge, to answer questions, and to learn when to step away. If there’s another thematic line that goes through this book, it’s about a mother of an only child who is learning to step back, who is learning to say, “You’re a lyrical writer, and your kid is interested in spy stories and he’s interested in action and he’s interested in things that certainly you didn’t create in him. You’ve had conversations, you know where he’s going, you know that he’s got a good soul — and don’t hang over his work too heavily. Step back.”

Do you have any particular career desires for Jeremy?

They have to come from him. Right now, he would like to be in film, and what he’s particularly interested in is sound editing. This summer, when Jeremy is home, Jeremy and I spend a part of every morning reading classic short stories and talking about them. And then Jeremy and Bill spend in the afternoon time looking at all the computer editing software; he’s actually building a film trailer right now and just having fun with that. And I think that the exposure to all the stories and to the community that I’ve built with him has given him some options. He’s thinking about sound and story. Fantastic! I wish I had that mind.

Do you think that other parents would be able to do the kinds of things that you’re able to do with Jeremy? Would it fit into any family’s life?

I’ve gotten some really nice e-mails, and one of the things the readers are interested in is how you build a neighborhood workshop. Well, these are people who have jobs, and they do things at night and their children have soccer, too, but they are able to find an hour or two during the week, and maybe it’s just for six weeks over the summer. Schedules are schedules. Jobs are jobs. I understand that and I thoroughly respect that. It’s about what you do in the free time that you have, and if you can find an hour or two a week to encourage the child to read or to look into what the child’s writing, if you can find some time to build a workshop for even a month, or four Saturdays in the spring, it is so rewarding!

So you devised a workshop. Tell me how that evolved.

When Jeremy was in fourth grade, I was trained as a discussion leader for Junior Great Books [a nonprofit reading and discussion program offered in schools around the country, often led by parent volunteers]. I got 14 kids in fourth grade, and on Tuesday afternoons I would go over to the school and read the wonderful books the Junior Great Books program put together.

After a year went by I thought, hey, if they’ll have me, if their parents would be interested, we’re going to do more than just read out loud and discuss. We’re going to think about how writers work, we’re going to look at, for example, irony and trick endings, we’re going to see dialect, the tools of writing. And then let’s give the kids some time to write on their own.

What were you doing as a writer during this time? Were you working from home?

Yes, working from home on books, magazine articles, and the business I run with my husband, a marketing communications firm.

How did you come up with the ideas for workshop activities?

I would be lying to you if I said that it was a science. I read endlessly and I’m always thinking about, What part of this book would I like to share with someone else? I happened upon a Norse creation myth about two months ago. It wasn’t age appropriate for this particular group of children. But creation myths, absolutely! Let’s do that, that’s great! So I can’t tell you that I sit here and think in some kind of vacuum that I know what to do. I’m just hungry and I’m always looking for something.

Sometimes I’m scared. Late Friday night I’m thinking, “Is it going to work?” I don’t pretend that I’m the expert. I’m making it up as I go along, and that is the point. Any parent who loves books and kids could do the same.

All four of your books are about your life. [Her others, "Into the Tangle of Friendship" and "Still Love in Strange Places," are about friendship and marriage, respectively.] But you say you don’t like to use the word “memoir” to describe your books. Why not?

Memoir can resemble being cornered in a room with someone at a party and they keep talking and you just say, “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” I don’t believe in publishing one’s personal story just for the sake of telling one’s personal story. I am saying to the reader, join me in a search. I’m going to write this in a way that leaves room for you to draw your own conclusion. I hope my work unlocks for the reader their own memories, their own ideas, and their own quest.

Two of your books are about Jeremy. Is there something about motherhood you find particularly inspiring?

Jeremy was a gorgeous baby. We all feel that way — right? — about our kids, and I couldn’t help putting it down in words. I use words as many people use a camera. I don’t believe I really know how special something is until I start to form the words for it. I write to understand.

How does Jeremy feel about having you write about him?

I would never put anything into any of my books — which have featured my son as well as my husband, friends and some family — unless I know it’s OK with them. Is that cool? Does that make me commercially, you know, sexy? No, it doesn’t. But I consider myself to be a person of the world first and a writer way back there, third or fourth. In this case, he was very excited, because he was happy to have the things that are important to him be so important to me that I would write about them.

How did you decide to include, at the end, the kids’ work?

Because they were so excited about the possibility of having their work put together in that way, and because I wanted to very honestly show this is what comes from the workshop suggestions. Some of it’s unexpected and some of it you’re thinking, hmm, I didn’t mean to inspire that. But it’s what comes, naturally, unedited. These are the voices of children speaking, when unleashed.