Mommy madness

The latest buzzy book about motherhood claims that in an effort to orchestrate an ideal upbringing for their children, women are messing up their marriages, spoiling their kids, and losing their minds.

By Katy Read

Feb 23, 2005 | Playing Mozart to fetuses. Waving flashcards at infants. Indulging preschoolers with back-straining, eye-glazing "floor time." Hauling school kids around to a dizzying whirl of extracurricular lessons and activities. Tossing everything else aside in order to shower children with nonstop attention and encouragement and enrichment and self-esteem enhancement and, and...

Have today's mothers gone crazy?

Yes, in a way, according to Judith Warner's buzz-generating new book, "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety." Warner warns, on the basis of media reports, sociological studies, historical analysis and her own interviews with 150 women, that middle- and upper-middle-class mothers have gone off the deep end trying to do everything right. Whether they're working in paid jobs or staying home with their children or some combination of the two, the overwhelming pressure of trying to orchestrate an ideal upbringing exhausts women, messes up marriages, and spoils children, she says. It leaves women feeling "a widespread, choking cocktail of guilt and anxiety and resentment and regret."

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.

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