Parenting

Such was the fury over the issue that last night, CNN posted a follow-up specifically on babies and air travel, featuring advice from a psychologist who says, "The other people on the plane do not have to be subjected to your child crying. It is absolutely not something that they should be expected to endure. They can't leave. So if you're flying, it means that you may have to get out of your seat and walk around, pace the airplane and make sure your child has a pacifier and a bottle. You may be tired at the end of the trip, it may not be a great flight for you, but that's your job as a parent."

In 10 years of parenting, I have flown roundtrip with my children exactly three times, so I have way, way more experience listening to other people's babies scream and having other people's toddlers kick my seat than anyone has putting up with mine. And I've still got to say: If you think you "absolutely" should not be expected to endure children fussing on a plane, you are going to be one miserable, bitter traveler. Oh, wait! Maybe you already are!

As soon as the CNN story posted, the commenters again came out swinging, racking up nearly 3,000 posts in a matter of hours. While many took the rather reasonable stance typified by the poster who said, "Wow, we do live in a society and babies are a part it," others had a somewhat dimmer view.

"I do not want to hear babies screaming on a flight. Period," wrote one gentleman. "When I travel, I am usually working and very tired. I use the flight to catch up on rest. If your child cannot stay quiet, or at least be quieted down quickly, then don't fly with them, because you will hear from me directly." I'm sure he's a delight with the flight attendants, too. Of course, the old chestnuts were also in heavy rotation: "You are selfish and only thinking of yourself," wrote one user, while another added that, "If as a parent you are unable to adequately handle the rigors of parenting in various stressful situations (such as an airport) then perhaps you should not have had children to begin with."

But perhaps even more deeply at odds with reality were the commenters who echoed the CNN story itself, the ones who blithely observed, "Think ahead of every eventuality beforehand and be prepared for it. Apart from one instance when one baby was sick, I have never had an unruly, noisy or disruptive child," and, "Those of us who were lucky enough to have competent parents didn't annoy the heck out of too many other people." See? If your kid cries while the guy in 23F is working on his PowerPoint presentation, it is so your fault.

Does society lack for lousy parents and bratty kids? I don't see us running out of either any time soon. So it's surely a good thing that, within that lightning rod CNN story, there were plenty of wise reminders that parents traveling with kids should err on the side of preparation and attention to their offspring and courtesy to their fellow passengers. It doesn't, however, change the fact that kids are loose cannons who often, just for the hell of it, make noise and poop in their pants.

If the wailing baby in front of you is bumming you out, that's understandable. If you think "you should buy a muzzle for your kid" or that the parents need to "remind me to get a seat next to you during every flight you take from now on so I can scream in your ear the entire way," you may want to consider the possiblity that you have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. And that's the real great illumination of the CNN story -- something many of us already know all too well. Sure, flying sucks and the planet is full of rude, clueless people, but if you really want to see some outrageously childish stuff, just go straight to the comments section on any story about how other people ought to behave.

In sympathy and frustration, I cried myself, and finally I said, screw this. I started to charge into my son's room when my husband grabbed my arm and gently suggested we continue to give this a try. I glared at him and contemplated divorce.

It was ridiculous, this sleep training, horrible. "Remember, when he cries during this process he’s not unhappy, he's angry at you," a fellow mom had told me by way of encouragement. This did not help.

The crying went on for what felt like hours. And then ... it stopped.

"Was he dead?" I wondered. "Can half an hour of crying kill a child?" But the reality was something different: For the first time in seven months, he fell asleep without being nursed.

The next night, same drill -- anxiety, tears, frustration -- but he cried for a shorter time and then fell asleep. The night after that, he went down without a peep. And thus began a bedtime pattern that still holds to this day, that brought happiness and much-needed rest to our little family. 

And yet, in certain circles, what we did is considered child abuse. Attachment parenting advocates like, most famously, Dr. Sears say letting babies cry is bad for family relationships and may actually damage infants' psyches. Go to his Web site and you can read a handout titled "Science Says: Excessive Crying Could Be Harmful to Babies." Steel yourself, ye sleep trainers, for talk of "harmful neurologic effects that may have permanent implications on the development of sections of their brain."

Luckily, there are other sleep experts (besides the famous Dr. Richard Ferber, who gave us the sleep-training euphemism "Ferberizing") ready to defend the practice. Dr. Marc Weissbluth, author of "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child," and one of the most popular modern advocates for cry-it-out sleep training, argues in his books and on his blog that not teaching your kid to self-soothe is way more harmful. "Crying is hard," he often says, but "sleeplessness is harder."

Is it any wonder that there is such a glut of products catering to new-parent sleep anxiety? For your crib, perhaps you need a white noise machine, a giant hand-shaped positioning pillow, a vibrating mattress, a mobile that plays soothing rain-forest noises? Or perhaps you need to hire a "sleep training consultant" or "baby sleep coach"?

Yes, those are real jobs; Google it. The first one I found charges $500 for a consultation with written sleep plan, plus 14 days of phone support, which I imagine goes something like this:

Parent (child crying in background): "This suuuuucks!"

Soothing voice of sleep coach: "Just keep at it."

And who needs to pay for an expert when there are so many people online eager to give you advice?

An article on the attachment-parenting site Mothering.com claims: "Babies who are left to cry it out alone may fail to develop a basic sense of trust or an understanding of themselves as a causal agent, possibly leading to feelings of powerlessness, low self-esteem, and chronic anxiety later in life."

Oh, is that all?

"Some people like to neglect their kids at bedtime," writes one similarly minded poster on a Babycenter thread about sleep training. "I'll parent mine."

Burn!

On the other end of the spectrum you have "baby management" proponents, like the controversial advocate of Bible-based parenting, Gary Ezzo, author of the Babywise series, about which Salon ran an influential piece in 1998. Ezzo advocates for a parenting and sleep plan that is directed by the parents, not the child, which means firm scheduling and an acknowledgment that tears are part of being a baby.

So who's right? The stakes are high. "Babies who can't self-soothe quickly grow into preschoolers who won't sleep unless there's a cuddly parent in their bed," writes Melissa Rayworth in a Babble article called "The Sleepless Generation." "That leaves parents and kids exhausted, and marriages strained as couples either sleep separately or share their bed with one or more elbowing, teeth-grinding, frequently awakened offspring."

The ironic thing, of course, is that most of us, myself included, gravitate toward books and blogs that confirm our own parenting style, when in fact we could all stand to take a lesson from the other camps. My friend who never cleans her house, who is totally overwhelmed and exhausted, I encourage to plan out her days more rigorously, to go to a Container Store already. My friend who is super meticulous and almost Stepford Wife-ish I tell to loosen up on the gourmet meals already and let the house go to hell.

When it comes to parenting, the hippies could stand to set some boundaries. The schedulers could stand to relax a little. But neither is apt to indulge in any books that don't reinforce their own worldviews, especially when it comes to something as emotionally fraught as crying and sleep.

When my husband and I first started talking about sleep training, I was against the idea. I couldn't bear the thought of listening to my son cry without picking him up, even if it would be beneficial in the long-term.

So when I went to the bookstore after getting almost no sleep the night before, I wasn't ready to pick up a book by Weissbluth or Ferber. I grabbed Elizabeth Pantley's "No Cry Sleep Solution." "No crying" sounded great to me, as did "solution." The word "gentle" was in the subtitle, too. Wuss that I am, I thought I'd hit the jackpot.

But Pantley just reinforced my feet-dragging. I came to resent her and her self-assured softness, exemplified by one of her more beatific promo pictures, in which she sits on a bed with her husband and their four children, all of them wearing matching blue and white cloud pajamas. For real: Check it out.

And the book just patted me soothingly and told me I was right -- that I should just journal the problem and make charts about my baby's sleep patterns.

When I tried to convince my husband we should go this route, he just stared at me. "Do you actually think that's going to work?"

What I needed was some hardcore advice to balance out my natural sappiness. You don't need books that fit in with your "philosophy." You need books that balance out your instincts, show you the other side. It's like religion, or politics: Everyone needs a devil's advocate so they don't get wedded to an extreme position.

My best friend, a mother of three, was there with some tough love: "Dump him in his crib," she said. I protested that I couldn't handle listening to him cry, that I worried he would be emotionally damaged and hate us forever, that he would somehow explode from the stress.

Her response? "Dump. Him."

I thought about her children, how they've always seemed well adjusted and happy and -- in all the 18 years I've known them -- well rested. Our pediatrician and my parents told us the same thing, if in slightly less graphic language.

So I did what they said and it worked out better than I could have imagined.

These days, I look at the vehement "anti-CIO" message board posts with a little more perspective. I remember how scared I was of just one or two nights of tears and I remember how upset I got reading the accusations of neglect and child abuse that followed anyone's request for advice on how to sleep train.

Now with some authority I can cry BS on at least one of the many horrible things the anti- camp says will happen: that by sleep training you will become "desensitized" to your child's cries.

First of all: You don't.

Second of all: Wouldn't that be a shame?! It seems healthy to get to the point where you don't completely freak out when your kid cries. I wish I didn't have that crazy, primal, the-sabertooths-are-coming alarm go off whenever I hear a wail.

And now that my son is 3 1/2, it's amazing to me that I was so scared of letting him cry those couple of nights. There have been so many tears since then: over the TV being turned off, ice cream falling off the cone, playground fights. What's another hour, especially one that serves an actual purpose? Those two nights of agony nearly three years ago were almost insignificant -- except insofar as they saved our life.

Ada Calhoun is a writer in New York City. You can buy her new book, "Instinctive Parenting,"  on Amazon. 

Few TV dramas have done justice to the pleasures and pains of raising kids. "Six Feet Under" touched on the feeling of being out of touch with and disempowered by your children – first in the form of Ruth Fisher (Frances Conroy), a passive-aggressive controlling mom who struggled sweetly to find some way to connect with her smart, headstrong children, then, in Nate's (Peter Krause) attempts to battle his own avoidance and controlling urges with his daughter. ABC's "Brothers & Sisters" took these challenges and translated them into an idealized world of open, honest conversations ending in hugging, learning big important lessons and impromptu slow-dancing as a family. If this warm, fuzzy wonderland didn't feel like a fantasy to you, then please let me into your family immediately -- once I stop wretching, anyway.

NBC's "Parenthood" (10 p.m. Tuesdays) tries to offer a middle ground between these two extremes, demonstrating the frustrations of parenting, but leavening it with moments of awkward connection, goofiness, relief and joy. Unfortunately, getting this mix just right is never easy. Somehow, when it comes to parenting and family, shows that are outwardly dark ("Six Feet Under," "The Sopranos") or consistently light ("Modern Family," "The Middle") appeal to audiences much more than those that try to mix the two. Just as with real parenting, finding some balance in portrayals of parenting is nearly impossible. More often than not you fall into bleakness and pessimism, then pull yourself out of it with laughter, deep sighs and a strong drink as the sun sets.

Peter Krause is a good start as harried dad Adam Braverman. Krause has a knack for playing the overly intense control freak -- something in the way Adam clenches his jaw and bugs his eyes out in spite of his easygoing surface demeanor speaks volumes about his inability to control his emotional investment in every little aspect of his son Max's (Max Burkholder) behavior. His dad, Zeek (Craig T. Nelson), wears his more aggressive approach on his sleeve, openly coaching Max while Adam struggles to coach Zeek on how to coach Max.

Zeek: You weren't any different. You had to get over your fear, too.

Adam: We're not raising him the way that you raised us, all right?

Zeek: Oh, OK. What's that supposed to mean?

Adam: It means I don't want him to feel like everything in life is a war.

Zeek: (Sighs.) Oh, sonny. It is a war.

For a pilot to get straight to this clash between a parent's and a son's perspective over how a kid should be raised is impressive, with or without the smart, funny 1989 movie starring Steve Martin as its precursor. That the scene is handled with just enough contempt mixed with polite restraint is a testament to the director's and producers' hard work in finding the right emotional tone between too harsh and too idealized. (In the original pilot, this scene was a shouting match that came off as far less interesting and revealed less of their relationship.)

Although the dynamics between Zeek and Adam are more nuanced than they were in the original pilot, other aspects of "Parenthood" are kinder and gentler to the point of feeling forced. Where the pilot felt scrappy, slightly harsh and occasionally very dark, the series tries to maintain a lighthearted, wacky mood that doesn't always match the characters and stories involved. Yes, Sarah (Lauren Graham) has two angry teenage kids, a drunk ex and no job. But look how silly and self-deprecating she is at the interview for the job she doesn't get! Yes, Adam and his wife are worried that son Max has Asperger's, but look at kooky Adam, chasing a possum around in his backyard!

Real parents may have little interest in riding this roller coaster in the rare moments that they're allowed to relax, by themselves, without children around. At 10 p.m. on a Tuesday night, after a long day of dealing with your own crazy kids, do you really want to watch a married couple learn that their son has Asperger's? Even if the next scene features Dad's siblings cracking up and sharing a joint, that doesn't help -- in fact, it rings a little false, like those parents who repeat that their kids are a "true blessing" in the breaks between shouting harsh words at them.

The most disconcerting change, for those of us who saw the original pilot of this show last fall, is the replacement of Maura Tierney with Lauren Graham in the role of Sarah. I'd never taken much notice of Tierney before, but she brought a lot of warmth and vulnerability to Sarah, the 38-year-old single mom whose life has been a series of reckless choices and haunting regrets. Graham plays Sarah with much more humor and harried-mom shtick, and though Graham is of course fantastic and has great timing, it's really sad that Tierney's breast cancer robbed her of such a wonderful role. And Tierney vacating this role robs "Parenthood" of a lot of weight. More than any other actor on the show, Tierney had a way of balancing the gravity and levity of parenting in a way that felt organic, rather than manic.

Even as the TV landscape changes by the minute, you have to wonder why a network drama about domestic life can't quite touch the same darkness that it might on a cable or premium cable channel. The networks are obviously afraid of a harsh portrayal of parenting, but what they end up with -- sugarcoated heaviness -- isn't a solution, and it's destined to alienate viewers much more than the shadows and low moments of a show like "Six Feet Under" ever would.

So what does work, as far as network family shows go? Five years ago no one would think the answer would be "sitcoms," so tired and stale was the old formula of goofy dad, nagging mom and adorable, supernaturally clever kids gathered around the couch. But thanks to ABC's "Modern Family" (9 p.m. Wednesdays), somehow, some way, the domestic comedy has been revived from its half-dead state and transformed into a thing of true beauty.

If you aren't watching this show yet, trust me, you should be. From the cool-dad foolishness of Phil Dunphy (Ty Burrell) to the eye-rolling spats between Cam (Eric Stonestreet) and Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) to the gruffly lovable weirdness of Jay (Ed O'Neill), this show features wall-to-wall great moments and hilarious lines.

My favorite character of all, though, is weird little gentleman Manny (Rico Rodriguez). Somehow the interplay between the babying of his Colombian hottie mom Gloria (Sofia Vergara) and the tough love of grumpy older dad Jay works in each and every scene. How could you not love writing over-the-top scenes for these three? This week, Jay accidentally kills Manny's turtle, but lies and says that a raccoon jumped in the window and killed it (after making little, muddy stuffed-animal footprints down the wall and across the carpet).

Gloria: You lie. I'm Colombian, I know a fake crime scene when I see one.

Jay: I was hanging up the new poster, and it fell on top of him. It was an accident.

Gloria: You have to tell him.

Jay: No, I've been through this before. When Mitchell was 9, I was supposed to take care of his bird. It got out and flew into a fan. It was like a bloody pillow fight. To this day, Mitchell looks at me, I see him thinking, "That's the guy that killed Fly-za Minnelli."

Gloria: Fly-za Minnelli?

Jay: How did I not know that kid was gay?

The memorial for Manny's turtle is priceless ("Turtle, reptile, pet, Shel Turtlestein was many things," his homage begins), but then almost every single line of "Modern Family," every story, is pure genius. Why settle for a full hour of lukewarm drama about parenting, when you can savor a funny but still heartfelt half-hour instead?

What "Modern Family" really nails, though, is the way real parents experience the highs of parenting. It's not about chasing possums through the yard or making jokes with your siblings then clinking glasses of red wine. The real moments of sweetness and gratitude come when everything is going to hell around you. Even as the chaos unfolds before your eyes, even as you're flooded by the noise and the conflict and the little battles and the mess, the soundtrack changes for a minute. You take in the madness from a distance and think: This is what it's all about.

Then someone throws up on your pants.  

I love this picture. I'm an adoptive mom myself, so it's a relief after all the mug shots of misguided missionaries trying to smuggle children out of Haiti. In the video that accompanies the online version of the story, "A New Home for Wislandie," adoptive mom Beth gently rocks a little girl who is lively and mischievous but also clearly in need of comfort.

Yet the Globe's photo spread, video and story by Maria Sacchetti -- "Joy, Frustration Brought Home" -- raise big questions for me, too, because of all that isn't said or shown. This front-page feature, more than all the press about those criminally ignorant Baptists, exemplifies the cognitive dissonance that's part of transracial adoption.

Why is the white-savior storyline so entrenched? And why is it so hard for the "objective" journalistic voice to talk about race?

The racial difference of Haitian adoptees and their adoptive parents isn't mentioned once in this story. Perhaps the photo and video are supposed to lay that issue on the table -- and they do -- but the story frame is the usual one of dedicated church members (Wislandie's adoptive father is a pastor) visiting Haitian children in a Christian orphanage in Port-au-Prince.

To be fair to Wislandie's new parents and the orphanage (the Marion Austin Christian School) and this story, "about 10 Boston-area churches regularly send mission groups to help at the school," Sacchetti writes, and the connection prospective adoptive parents have formed with children apparently often goes back to when they were toddlers. Many of the prospective adoptees are in their teens.

Before the earthquake, some adoptions were already in process; according to the article, a few, like Wislandie's, have been successfully completed. But other potential adoptive parents and adoptees wait, mired in even more bureaucratic red tape, as conditions for the orphanage children worsen. (In this same issue of the Globe, the story above Sacchetti's, after the jump inside, is headlined "Haiti Wants Refugees Back in Ravaged Areas.")

As Massachusetts state Rep. Barry Finegold asks: "These children are never going to have families in Haiti, so why not try to bring them into loving families in Massachusetts?"

Yes, why not? The rhetorical question rings true in the most immediate way for longtime orphans. Seventeen-year-old Auguste Joseph wants to join his frustrated adoptive parents in Ashby, Mass. Like other kids in the orphanage wearing Red Sox T-shirts, Auguste is quoted as saying, "I'm dying to go ... I've been waiting for a long time."

But for many of us in the international adoption community -- adoptees, adoptive parents, birth parents and adoption workers -- this question is far from simple. After "why not?" I also wonder, "what next?"

There are hints of the dissonance to come in an evocative description at the end of the Globe feature: Wislandie is now wearing pink Crocs and has a bedroom of her own. "It is not an easy transition," Sacchetti writes; the girl's adoptive parents "look alternately joyful and exhausted."

Most haunting: "Even though she has so much now, Wislandie insists on dividing every snack or sandwich, to give away half to her mother, father, or sister."

The story then closes with her adoptive mom insisting, rightly, that her daughter isn't the only one who has lucked out.

Yet this is really just the prologue. The rest of the real story, which varies with every transracial adoptee and his or her particular family circumstances, is full of complications of race and culture and loss that apparently can't be accommodated in a mainstream news feature.

Here's where I have to ask: Why not? Why can't a daily paper like the Boston Globe, in a metropolitan area that includes a large Haitian immigrant population, tell this story as more than one white family's joy and the frustration of other waiting white families?

At least one caller to a Jan. 20 NPR show, "Where Will All the Haitian Orphans Go,?" raised issues of cultural and homeland loss. These were treated seriously by Tom DiFilipo, CEO of the Joint Council on International Children's Services, the guest on this edition of "Talk of the Nation."

Other sources, such as ColorLines' blog RaceWire, have grappled with the racial question of whites adopting Haitian orphans. And as one topic on the Haitian Internet Newsletter, "Haiti's Orphans, What Are We Going to Do About It?," puts it:

Let me ask you a question: Do you really think that the rest of the world will just fly to Haiti and take all these Haitian kids into new homes somewhere outside of Haiti so they can live happily ever after?

The orphan children of Haiti are Haiti's problem and now is the time to start talking about how we're going to deal with it.

This is our country, these are our kids ...

Discussions about race and culture and international adoption are all over the Internet and in various blog and editorial forums, even in mainstream press outlets. But you wouldn't know it from this Globe feature about Wislandie.

Interestingly, a number of the online comments to the story have been negative, pointing out snidely that there are American black kids waiting for adoption, too. That kind of knee-jerk response flips too far in the other direction, but it's obvious that readers and video-watchers are reacting immediately to the racial difference.

You could argue that daily news features are really people stories. Americans adopting orphans from countries like Haiti or Vietnam (as in my own family) can surely be heartwarming. I would argue, however, that journalists make decisions all the time about whom to focus on and what main idea to follow.

Simplifying the emotional storyline by focusing on getting home to America has political and social implications. It seems to deny that differences of race and culture matter. And I don't think daily news is off the hook for promulgating musty stereotypes, letting anonymous online commenters criticize a story subject or go out on a limb rather than reporting on what this white mother, for example, thinks about parenting a black child.

Of course Wislandie is happy to be free of the current devastation in Port-au-Prince, where many families huddle under nothing but bedsheet tents as the rainy season approaches.

Yet what will she think of her homeland as she gets older? Will she make connections with the local Haitian community in Boston and Cambridge? Will she keep speaking French and Creole? Will she realize that Haiti has a rich history and literature, a complicated history, that  is not just defined by poverty and disaster?

That is the international adoptive parenting journey. It is very possible that Wislandie's adoptive mom and dad will help her along the way. In the video, Beth holds the girl close and talks realistically about adjustment challenges and the scene in Haiti.

But not until I read more mainstream stories that dig into white adoptive parents talking about race, and not until I hear more about the links that can be forged between adoptees and the Haitian American community, will I believe that the discussion about international adoption has moved beyond saving those poor lucky kids from a place better left behind in the rubble.

This dictionary, edited by famous and culturally in-the-know writers, has chosen single parenting to best capture the meaning of onus. To understand what it means to have a cross to bear, a millstone around one's neck, an albatross, liability, mantle, imagine being a single parent.

I am a single parent. Apparently, I have an onus. (Think about the word long enough, and it might just well become onomatopoetic.)

If "onus" sums up single motherhood, "amicable" sums up how one should divorce. It is recited so ubiquitously it takes on a talismanic quality. The word resonates in my head to the point of nonsense, like any word you say over and over again until it becomes strange, a word you don't know, an incantation in a foreign language said by penitents of some other religion. Crowds chant Allah on their knees in mosques; in my head I hear friends, family, helping professionals whispering amicable, amicable, amicable.

For reasons I cannot yet fully explain (hence I seek etymology and incantations, look things up), I accepted the terms my husband laid out when he left me: Fifty-fifty.

Psychologists write books about children dealing with divorce, and friends are quick with "children need both parents" quips. The truth is, no one will know, at least for some time, whether joint custody was the right choice for my son, or for me. What I do know is that it means I am an albatross-wearing social ill half the time. Or, as my therapist once put it, I have "half a child."

I used to wander the parenting-memoir section of bookstores on my nights "off" from mothering. As I scanned the titles I felt like the one kid on the jungle gym not invited to the play date. The allure of reading these books is to find something that resonates with one's own experience, but they do an end run around single moms. Authors profile moms from the North and from the South, moms who are in the 10 percent tax bracket and moms in the 35th percent, moms who are evangelical and moms who are pagan. But they rarely choose a mom like me. My experience appears in lines like this one, from Judith Warner's "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in an Age of Anxiety": "[N]ot having had a working (hence, absent) mother is not the thing most mothers today cite as the cause of their mom-related psychological woes. It's having an unhappy mother. A divorced mother, perhaps, who was crippled with worry over money."

There seems a huge cultural premium put on encouraging these myths. There is a mommy cabal out there. Caitlin Flanagan writes: "Every morning a child should wake up to see her mother's face." Does this mean, since my son awakes every other morning to his father's face, I am a bad mother? It takes an act of will, or repression, to publish so many books about contemporary motherhood that contain so little about mothers with joint custody of their children.

TV tells me a different story than does mommy-lit. On TV, wives are to become indignant when men have affairs and say things like, "You do that again and I'm going to take the kids and leave you." We are meant to root for these mothers. You go, girl. If he screws around, then you get the kids.

But what about the "onus" part? We mothers are supposed to fight to have our children with us when their fathers go bad, but then we are to be pitied, schlepping around those millstones and bearing those crosses while also slinging baby on our backs, shoulders hurting from the too-low stroller handles.

When my husband had his affair I did not ever once say, "I'm going to take Simon." I had my reasons, good ones, I think, but ones that only can sound self-righteous when explained: I thought the best thing for my son would be to be with his father too. I sacrificed time with him so he could have time with Dad.

I feel relentlessly guilty about this decision, perhaps because I read too much mommy-lit and watch too much TV on the nights Simon is with his dad. Eight years later, a life with my ex now unimaginable and the marriage no longer mourned, I still have not resolved the question of joint custody. It gets right into the crux of motherhood; of what we should do, who we should be. I keep wondering why I wasn't like those women on television. Sometimes I hate them and scream at them from the couch; sometimes I sink further into the pillows to escape the threats, the insinuations: I should have packed that kid into the car and driven away. Shouldn't I?

When Simon was 3, he used to call the time after the lights were out and before he fell asleep "the talking dark"; it was one of those pitch-perfect childhood phrases coined to describe an experience not found in grown-up parlance. In the talking dark, Simon talked himself to sleep. In the talking dark, bad guys were defeated, weather was commented upon, stuffed ducks waddled into ponds. He also got two of everything that year: two bedrooms, two sets of toys, two different jammie rotations. Dad's house and Mom's house were very separate places in his consciousness, a firewall built between them so thick that once, when he was with his dad and ran into me on the street, he introduced us to each other. "Mommy, this is Daddy. Daddy, Mommy." But he had one talking dark. One consciousness to inhabit and one narrative machine with which to invent stories out of the tracks of his days.

Simon will be a very tall, broad man someday. Today, 5 feet tall and chasing 100 pounds, he asks me to lift him up. My back hurts afterward, but it's good exercise. Simon giggles as I toss him around. He's not so heavy.

Anne Trubek teaches at Oberlin College and writes a literary column for GOOD magazine. Her book, "A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses," will be published in fall 2010. 

I'm talking about childhood cancer, but I bet you thought I was talking about childhood mental illness. After all, everyone in contemporary society knows that childhood mental illness is over-diagnosed, that drugging children is the preferred method for dealing with the normal problems of childhood, and that normal children are being treated with powerful psychotropic medications simply because they are quirky and authentic.

That's what Judith Warner (author of "Perfect Madness") thought, too, when she sold a proposal back in 2004 for a book that would explore the over-diagnosis of mental illness and over-treatment of children with psychiatric medication. She knew it for all the reasons listed above: Childhood mental illness was rarely diagnosed in children 100 years ago; since then the number and type of diagnoses have exploded; the number and type of treatments have also exploded; the medications used to treat childhood mental illness are powerful and can have serious side effects; Big Pharma has made a fortune from these medications and is constantly searching for new variations to patent and sell.

But the same things apply to childhood cancer, and no one is suggesting that childhood cancer is over-diagnosed, that chemotherapy is the preferred method for dealing with the normal problems of childhood, and that normal children are being treated with chemotherapy simply because they are quirky and authentic. The conclusions we have drawn from the dramatic increase in the diagnosis of childhood mental illness are wrong. Though childhood cancer was rarely diagnosed 100 years ago, that's not because it didn't exist. It's because we didn't have the tools to recognize it or any effective medications to treat it. Similarly, we need to consider the fact that childhood mental illness is not new, just as childhood cancer is not new; we just lacked the tools to recognize it and any effective medications to treat it.

In "We've Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication," Judith Warner has written a brilliant and compelling book, a must-read for any parent who has a child who is miserable and struggling. It is also a must-read for anyone who thinks he knows that childhood mental illness is over-diagnosed and over-treated. Parents who have dealt with mental illness in a child will find solace here, because someone has finally acknowledged that their child's "issues" are not the normal problems of childhood, that they struggled for years against putting their child on medication, and that their most fervent wishes are not that their child will get A's in order to get into a competitive college, but merely that he or she will be able to live outside an institution without hurting anyone.

Warner details how she came to write a book that is 180 degrees opposite of what she initially intended. It happened because she talked to parents and psychiatrists and looked at what the medical literature actually shows. And Warner details how she and many others came to believe that childhood mental illness is a fraud perpetrated on society by Big Pharma:

The web of belief -- let's call it the "naysayer" position ... is the new face of mental health stigma in our time. It is voiced as concern, as a desire to save children, as a wish to give childhood back to kids, but what it really is, most of the time, is prejudice. And it's a poison.

People who share the views I used to espouse don't see themselves as prejudiced. They believe they are raising their voices in protest of a world that's gone mad, and, in particular, providing necessary pushback against a pharmaceutical industry that's grown way too powerful, with the collusion of our government and far too many research scientists and clinical practitioners.

Warner is not naive:

I want to say here as strongly as I can that I agree that many aspects of today's world of childhood are toxic and that I deplore both the irresponsible marketing practices of Big Pharma and the failure of our government and research institutions to stand up against it.

But we must not confuse one issue with another:

That said, I also fiercely believe that the social climate of family life, the machinations of the pharmaceutical industry, and the lives of children and parents dealing with mental health issues have to be viewed as separate phenomena. Not because they aren't interconnected, but because if you let your feelings about industry and society cloud your vision of parents and children, you run the risk of not seeing them at all. (Emphasis mine)

We have used the wrong measurements to determine whether childhood mental illness is real (the rise in diagnoses, the rise in medications, the profitability of the treatment), and therefore we have reached the wrong conclusions. Children with mental illness always existed; we just never saw them because of prejudice, labeling ("mentally defective") and institutionalization. It would be a terrible sin if we continue not to "see" them today because of our feelings about contemporary society or our feelings about the pharmaceutical industry. Warner points out that real children and real parents are suffering terribly. We should not compound their suffering by pretending that childhood mental illness does not exist.