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A L S O++T O D A Y

The mother of all years
By the editors of Mothers Who Think
A mom's almanac of the sad, silly, serious and sublime stories that made news in '97

The Abandoned Newborn
A poem by Sharon Olds

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T A B L E++T A L K

What is the perfect family vehicle? Join mothers who shop for cars in Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

I'll be home for sushi
By Debra Ollivier
An expatriate longs for the ersatz holiday spirit of her Los Angeles childhood
(12/22/97)

Catholic school bad girl
By Joan Walsh
Why was I the only one at my grammar school reunion who didn't remember me as a bully?
(12/19/97)

Word by word
By Anne Lamott
When everything in your life goes wrong at once, something big and lovely is about to get born
(12/18/97)

Hot flash
By Ros Davidson
Irradiating America's meat to make it safe is like destroying the village in order to save it, says an activist
(12/17/97)

Time for one thing
By Kate Moses
Getting sick
(12/16/97)

ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

BY STEPHANIE COONTZ | Over the last year a series of sensational stories about individual mothers and their problems has kindled passionate emotions among the general public. In my aerobics class, which serves as my personal focus group on these issues, hardly a week went by when our warm-up stretches and post-exercise showers weren't enlivened by intense discussions or animated debates about something a mother did or failed to do, according to some press report.

The recent birth of septuplets, for example, divided my workout companions right down the middle: Half thought it was tremendously moving, a miracle; half found it an irresponsible contribution to overpopulation or a waste of medical resources and energy that could be better devoted to the thousands of kids stuck in the limbo of foster care.

The death of Princess Diana, on the other hand, united the entire class in mourning, from star-struck youngsters who had copied her hairstyles to earnest students who appreciated her work with AIDS victims to older married women who identified with Diana's very public mistakes and victories as she struggled to find happiness outside a loveless marriage.

The killing of Matty Eappen and the ensuing "nanny trial" were equally engrossing, as our changing room echoed with debates over how much responsibility for the tragedy should be borne by Matty's physician mom. Some of the women thought Deborah Eappen was selfish for working three days a week when she could "afford to stay home" (a standard they never applied to Diana's prolonged vacations from her children). Most just blamed Eappen for bad judgment in letting a "mere teenager" care for a baby and a toddler. The nanny teenager, though, got a lot more sympathy than the teen accused of killing her newborn at her prom dance several months earlier. That teen was widely condemned as a monster.

Even the women who most disapproved of Deborah Eappen's decision to continue working while her kids were young had been outraged by a May cover story in U.S. News & World Report that accused middle-class working parents of "lying" about their need to work. To a woman, my classmates felt that this was aimed exclusively at mothers, and a few had statistics in hand to refute the charge of "selfishness," pointing out that college tuitions have risen by 90 percent over the past 20 years, while family incomes have only risen by 9 percent. But the decision of the vice president at Pepsico to quit her high-powered job in order to spend more time with her family drew almost universal approval, though a number of us wondered whether she might have just cut back if her husband paid equal attention to his own priorities.

The discussions in my aerobics class, like the media coverage from which they originate, are skewed in many ways. Often, for example, the intensity of anxiety stands in inverse proportion to the prevalence of the problem. The prom newborn death was featured in a People cover story asking whether America is seeing a scary new generation of kids "without a conscience," a question that most of my classmates answered in the affirmative. In fact, however, the killing of newborns by their moms is at its lowest level ever in American history. We find the case so shocking not because it is typical but because it is so rare. Far less attention and energy was devoted -- in either our changing room or the nation's newsrooms -- to the much more common tragedy of impoverished teenagers struggling to raise babies by themselves, without adequate finances, support services or even educational information.

Similarly, most comments about whether middle-class mothers should "trust their children to a stranger" missed a much more serious question. No one brought up the looming child-care crisis in America posed by the new welfare law. The "success stories" of welfare reform typically involve single mothers who land minimum-wage jobs requiring up to a two-hour commute each way by public transportation. While the largest national study to date, released this year, found that good child care plus good parenting confer a double advantage on children, former welfare recipients must often leave their children in substandard care for 10 to 12 hours a day. The number of kids needing subsidized child care is expected to triple as a result of welfare reform, and already many states are dropping the children of the working poor from subsidized child-care slots in order to make room for the children of former welfare recipients. Yet this unfair and self-defeating practice generated no debates comparable to those over whether Deborah Eappen should have been away from her children for the three days a week that she worked out of the home.

These strange silences in otherwise loud debates are partly connected to racial stereotypes that lead many people to wrongly assume that most poor people are on welfare and most welfare recipients are black, and that there is no "story" in the problems they face. Thus the Boston nanny trial made Louise Woodward's face and name instantly recognizable around the nation, stimulating impassioned arguments over how heavy or light her sentence should be, especially in view of her youth. Not one of the women in my class -- all of whom had strong opinions on Woodward's sentence -- had ever heard of Lacresha Williams, an 11-year-old African-American girl found guilty of causing the death of an African-American infant in another unregulated home child-care setting and now serving the first year of a 25-year sentence in Texas.

But racial bias is not the only reason for the way these discussions are skewed. It's popular to blame distorted ideas about such issues on the gullibility and ignorance of the American public, but where does such ignorance come from? It's not my classmates' fault that Lacresha Williams never made the national news, except for a lone commentary on National Public Radio. Few of the women who rush off from our aerobics class to work or to other family responsibilities have the time and resources to look behind the newspaper cover stories or the evening news. There they are bombarded with the sensational, the surprising, the photogenic and therefore almost by definition the exceptional cases where our emotional response cannot easily be connected to political or social analysis.

N E X T+P A G E: Beyond killer nannies and dead princesses