To celebrate Mother’s Day this year, the national group Mothers and More held a contest inviting members to submit particularly gag-inducing media images of mothers. Chosen among the worst was a newspaper column by J.D. Mullane in the Bucks County (Pa.) Courier Times, bashing “make-believe moms” with the nerve to plunk their kids in child-care programs while taking time for themselves: “Real moms do the heavy lifting of child care … and the grunt work of lugging the kids around while running errands and shopping.”
Mothers and More was appalled — not by the concept of these supposedly self-indulgent moms, but by the (ahem, male) columnist granting himself the right to judge their authenticity.
“Apparently this writer believes that a ‘real mom’ … must wear her children around her neck 24/7 as some sort of badge of selfless commitment,” shot back a Web site commentary.
Meanwhile, Mothers Ought to Have Equal Rights (MOTHERS), founded by well-known feminists and authors Naomi Wolf and Ann Crittenden, was also observing Mom’s special day. The Washington-based organization’s Web site encouraged mothers to get political for the holiday, suggesting they host workshops on the economic disadvantages — lost wages and benefits, missed promotions — of being a child’s primary caregiver. The site even includes a downloadable script for the workshop: American mothers, the script warned, are plunged into “a pervasive system of economic dependency and vulnerability.”
Hey, whatever happened to mushy cards and breakfast in bed?
Flowery tokens of appreciation for moms have not gone the way of the hand-shaped clay ashtray. But 90 years after Congress granted them an annual day of appreciation, some mothers are beginning to call for more substantial recognition. Some describe it as a “mothers’ movement,” which might seem like a lofty term to describe the below-the-radar efforts of a scattering of organizations — including Mothers and More, MOTHERS, Mothers Movement Online, the National Association of Mothers’ Centers and Mothers Alliance for Militant Action — along with miscellaneous writers, academics and individual women. Neither a support group trading helpful household hints, nor a coalition formed around a single issue like the Million Mom March against assault weapons, the movement is not your typical coffeehouse gathering of moms: Its hodgepodge of sympathizers don’t share identical agendas, aren’t necessarily aware of one another’s existence, and, in some cases, probably don’t even think of themselves as forming an official movement.
“This is sort of where the women’s movement was, circa 1963 — the pre-rumblings,” Susan J. Douglas, coauthor with Meredith W. Michaels of “The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined Women,” a biting cultural critique that could serve as a primer on many mothers’ movement ideas.
For now, there’s not much direct action — no picketing or shoving fliers under windshield wipers. The movement consists mainly of old-fashioned consciousness-raising, with advocates writing and talking about ideas that — depending on your outlook and personal experiences — are either obvious or incendiary. From a feminist standpoint, they resent what they see as the insipid stereotypes and narrow standards surrounding American motherhood, the trivialization of caregiving work, and the lack of economic and social support. They would prefer that dads equally share the diapering and dentist appointments; in fact, they’re careful to insist that those fathers who do fill caregiving roles deserve more support from employers and government, too. But they also pragmatically face the reality that, in most families, the chores are not divided equally, that mothers and fathers deal with different challenges (typical fathers, they acknowledge, may have issues of their own). They share a willingness to break long-standing taboos and confess that, for all its rewards, being the primary caregiver for children isn’t always as idyllic as it’s cracked up to be.
“When I became a mother, I realized that everything I knew was wrong,” said Judith Stadtman Tucker, 48, a former graphic designer who now edits Mothers Movement Online, a year-old clearinghouse for information about social, economic and political issues surrounding caregiving. “I sort of sat back and said, ‘Wait a minute, this sucks. Why is it that I’m going through all this and my husband’s life is pretty normal and he’s doing the same things he was doing before? What about this equality thing?’”
Tucker said she wants people to “question why we think the things about motherhood that we think.” Such as why the arduous work so often extolled as “the most important job in the world” seldom earns anything, in real life, beyond cocktail-party yawns. Why it’s not merely unpaid, but an economic liability for those who perform it, whether or not they also hold outside jobs. Why society hands mothers so much responsibility for how their children “turn out” but so little authority that mothers often find their parenting practices subject to condemnation from strangers. Why “child-friendly” spaces tend to segregate kids — and thus their caregivers — from other adults, and vice versa. Why busy contemporary mothers feel increasing pressure (what Douglas and Michaels call the “new momism”) to lavish their offspring with exhaustive attention — Flashcards and Mozart! Elaborate craft projects! Daily “floor time”! — that even the full-time housewives of previous generations were spared.
“June Cleaver was not expected to spend every golden moment with her children,” said Joanne Brundage, founder of the nonprofit advocacy group Mothers and More. “She kicked them out the door in the morning.”
Brundage is a soft-spoken, self-effacing, snowy-haired 52-year-old with two teenage sons and an adult daughter. She started her group 17 years ago after being forced to quit a post office job for lack of good child care. Lonely, exhausted by the demands of a colicky baby and suffering an “identity crisis” over the loss of her job, she ran a newspaper ad seeking other at-home mothers for conversation that extended beyond cloth vs. disposable. What started as four women gathering in Brundage’s Elmhurst, Ill., living room has since swelled to an organization with 7,200 members in 174 chapters that has, over the years, turned increasingly political. The organization’s Internet home page proclaims a mother’s right “to fully explore and develop her identity as she chooses: as a woman, a citizen, a parent or an employee”; asserts women’s “right to choose if and how to combine parenting and paid employment”; affirms “the wisdom of each mother to decide how to care for her children, her family and herself.”
Still, many mothers — including some, Brundage said, in Mothers and More — are uncomfortable with political stances asking them to define themselves apart from their children. It’s hard to shake the feeling, Brundage said, that “once you’re a mother, you have no needs of your own, you have no wants of your own, you’re there to serve your family, and to think otherwise is to question your dedication and your love for your children.”
That maternal love is real, of course, and mothers-movement supporters don’t deny its power. But they contend that it is being exploited.
“I have one son, and I would die for him,” said Crittenden, author of “The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued.” “I would give up anything for him. But I don’t want somebody else telling me what I have to give up.”
Crittenden’s MOTHERS aims to bolster the economic security of caregivers at all income levels by calling for laws such as paid parental leave, Social Security credits for at-home mothers, and proportionate pay and benefits for part-time work. A college-educated mother may pay a “mommy tax” of $1 million in lost income and benefits over the course of her lifetime, according to Crittenden. Lower-income mothers who stay home or work part-time may sacrifice hundreds of thousands of dollars in wages and benefits, while those who hold outside jobs struggle with onerous job schedules, inflexible employers and inadequate child care.
A primary caretaker of children is “just getting hammered, whatever social class you’re in, at any income level,” Crittenden said. “The workplace is set up for people with no private life.”
Advocates generally don’t take a position on whether moms “should” stay home with their children; they point out that many mothers move back and forth between work and home, or combine the two. Mothers and More — about a third of whose members hold paying jobs — officially (and publicly, when contacted by journalists seeking to feed the controversy) denounces the concept of a “mommy wars” conflict between working and at-home mothers, insisting it’s largely a media construct that pits mothers against one another.
Despite similar-sounding terms, the mothers’ movement should not be confused with the “opt-out revolution,” as a New York Times Magazine piece dubbed the phenomenon of high-powered women ditching careers to stay home with their children. When that article ran last fall (followed by a similar Time magazine cover story in March), some welcomed the media spotlight on mothers’ concerns, while others joined the ensuing chorus slamming the story for focusing on women with the financial wherewithal to give up paychecks. But a few saw that criticism as almost beside the point. The problem, said “Mommy Myth” author Douglas, was that the stories downplayed workplace demands that prodded the decision to quit (once again, fathers were hardly mentioned), and which often are at least as hard on women who can’t afford to stay home.
“The choices that women have are not good choices,” said Linda Lisi Juergens, executive director of the National Association of Mothers’ Centers, a 29-year-old network of programs for mothers that is planning a panel discussion on the mothers’ movement for its national conference in November. “So you make the choice that makes the most sense for you given your circumstances and then you live with the guilt.”
While some pro-mother organizations work to “valorize motherhood as a sacrificial duty, a higher calling,” said Tucker, of Mothers Movement Online, the movement’s perspective is considerably less romantic. It sees moms getting stuck with the bulk of caregiving mainly by default. And though they agree on the need for more support, they don’t claim an exalted status for mothering — indeed, they reject a pedestal whose flip side, they say, too often entails blame and unfair accountability.
Advocates also object to overly narrow definitions of good parenting, and resist being pressured to follow a prescribed set of child-rearing guidelines governing anything from breast-feeding to discipline to after-school activities.
“I have a different personality than you do. Your child has a different personality than mine. Your family may have different values than mine. Something may work perfectly for you, but I may have different results,” Juergens said. “You are trying to do your best, and having somebody come along and make you feel bad or guilty is not helpful.”
And unlike organizations that stress children as the ultimate beneficiaries of pro-mother initiatives, the mothers’ movement acknowledges that mothers’ interests are sometimes at odds with those of their kids.
“Sometimes it sounds very heartless to say that because of how well we’ve been indoctrinated,” Tucker said. “But it doesn’t mean that mothers are unfeeling or uncaring, it means they’re normal and human.”
That idea, at one time rarely vocalized, is becoming more familiar: a flurry of recent novels have detailed darker aspects of the role — drudgery, guilt, isolation, boredom — that don’t get mentioned in Hallmark cards. Motherhood zines and Web sites, like the 4-year-old Brain, Child and the 10-year-old Hip Mama, publish viewpoints conspicuously absent from traditional parenting magazines. Web sites and e-mail loops bring together mothers who feel “powerless, disenfranchised, misunderstood and voiceless” in mainstream culture, said Kim Lane, 39, editor of AustinMama.com, a Web site for mothers in Austin, Texas.
“The overall message I’ve gotten from this project is that mothers are hungry for justice,” Lane said. “We are dog tired of trying to fit into neat little boxes with a smile … We’ve become livid at commercial portrayal of mothers and their roles.”
Ironically, an indifference to mothers’ problems may be, in part, a byproduct of the women’s movement. Douglas and Michaels point out in “The Mommy Myth” that 1970s feminists fought hard to improve day care and workplace flexibility. But others argue that, by encouraging women to snare paid jobs in traditionally male worlds — arguably by necessity — feminism helped downgrade the status, even among women, of unpaid, female-dominated child care. In the end, advocates have settled on diplomatically describing their issues as “the unfinished business of feminism.”
The term resonates with women who, thanks to the women’s movement, sailed through school, early careers and even romantic partnerships encountering relatively few barriers or inequities, only to find themselves crammed into unexpected pigeonholes as mothers.
“My husband and I got sucked into this time warp, it felt like, where all of a sudden we were both in these completely traditional roles that neither of us had ever planned,” said Mothers and More president Kristin Maschka, 35, who managed the training department of an Internet service provider until quitting in 2000 to stay home with her daughter. “We’d look at each other and say, ‘How did this happen to us?’”
The mothers’ movement is still too low-profile to have attracted much direct criticism. But many of its ideas clearly make people uncomfortable, even irate. Some supporters of the “child-free movement” (people who don’t want kids) and conservative groups oppose government or workplace benefits for parents.
“Can you imagine politicians using Father’s Day … to describe how they will take care of poor, helpless Dad?” writes Carrie L. Lukas, director of policy for the Independent Women’s Forum, a free-market organization that opposes many feminist ideas. “Women deserve the same respect. Instead of caricaturing us as wards of the state, politicians should focus on getting government out of our lives.”
Major publications, even left-leaning ones, aren’t necessarily more sympathetic: The idea pops up regularly that American mothers, with all their privileges and options, don’t have much to complain about.
“How worried should we be about what these women, which is to say ourselves, are feeling?” asked Elizabeth Kolbert, reviewing “The Mommy Myth” and another motherhood book, Daphne de Marneffe’s “Maternal Desire,” in the New Yorker in March. “If a woman wants to take time off from her career to raise a family, and if she can afford to do so, what more can she reasonably desire? That everyone else act only in ways that validate her decision? … Choosing between work and home is, in the end, a problem only for those who have a choice. In this sense, it is, like so many ‘problems’ of twenty-first-century life, a problem of not having enough problems.”
It’s an intimidating argument: How dare the reasonably comfortable complain, in view of the world’s suffering? But it assumes that lower-income women (to whose plight “The Mommy Myth” actually devotes a fair amount of space) do not share any of the same concerns. And it lets society off the hook, Tucker said, by suggesting “that the work of securing women’s equality in the workplace is over and done with,” and that “the average woman who is struggling to maintain a career and cope with more than her fair share of domestic responsibility is unhappy because she chooses a lifestyle that leads to unhappiness.”
Discontented housewives back in the “Ozzie and Harriet” 1950s would have heard similar dismissals, Crittenden said. “People would say, ‘What have you got to be unhappy about? What’s your problem? You’ve got a nice house in the suburbs.’ I think we are truly in another situation like that. People can’t quite figure out what is wrong.”
Amid the criticism, a gesture of approval recently came from an unexpected quarter. In a Mother’s Day event of its own, the florist service FTD presented Mothers and More founder Brundage with an award that, sarcastic punch lines aside, you don’t hear much about these days.
The company named her Mother of the Year.
“My 17-year-old son, Zach, fell down laughing and, when he recovered himself, he asked me how much it was worth it to me for him to keep his mouth shut,” Brundage said. She laughed, too, but sounded pleased with the tribute.
“It wasn’t that I have the smartest kids or that I’ve gone through the most tragedy — it wasn’t a Queen for a Day kind of thing. It really was focused on the work our organization was doing, and the work that all mothers do,” Brundage said. “They recognize that mothers need more than flowers.”
I first heard about the study linking TV watching to attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder while, fittingly enough, watching TV. “Very scary,” Katie Couric called it on NBC’s “Today.” Indeed. Something sank in my chest as Couric and a psychologist (not one involved in the research) discussed the implication that television can “rewire” the brains of young children and cause them to develop ADHD.
My first thought was, “Oh my God, I bet I’ve wrecked my kids.”
My second thought was, “Oh my God, I bet they’re confusing correlation with causation again.”
Or so I assumed.
The study itself, reported last month in the journal Pediatrics, hardly offers smoking-gun evidence that television causes brain damage. Researchers at the Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle examined massive, government-sponsored health surveys of more than a thousand children, conducted over the past 25 years, which asked parents (among other things) about their children’s TV-viewing habits at ages 1 and 3, and then, four years later, whether their children were impulsive, obsessive, restless, easily confused or had difficulty concentrating. Turned out the more TV the kids reportedly watched as preschoolers, the more often they were described as having those behavioral problems at 7.
It’s a finding worth looking into, no doubt, though it offers little reason to fear that a child who can sing the “Barney” song in nursery school will be on Ritalin by second grade. But that’s the impression you might get from the newspapers and broadcasts. The media were not content to announce merely that an activity enjoyed in 98 percent of American homes, according to the Census Bureau, has been associated with a neurobiological disorder. Instead, when they reported on the study during the first week of April, they took the concept an alarming step further.
“Frequent TV-watching shortens kids’ attention spans,” blared a USA Today headline. “Researchers have found that every hour preschoolers watch television each day boosts their chances — by about 10 percent — of developing attention-deficit problems later in life,” an Associated Press story warned. Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson compared television to crack cocaine and equated its use with criminal child neglect, “now that we know that the passive babysitter we let into the house turned out to be a drug dealer, altering the brain perhaps even more permanently than a bag of dope.”
Actually, we don’t know that at all.
Even the study’s authors, led by head researcher Dimitri A. Christakis, caution against drawing firm conclusions, though they do hypothesize along those lines. (And a press release issued by Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center sounded decisive: “The study adds inattention to the list of harmful consequences of excessive television viewing …”) ADHD experts I contacted agreed that the media blew the findings out of proportion. Some also questioned details of the study’s design, though they differed on how much responsibility for the hyperbole belongs to its authors.
“I would say, based on the results of this study, that it would be worthwhile to look at this further. But I don’t think this study can allow one to say, for example, that there’s no safe level of TV viewing,” said Linda Pfiffner, who directs a clinic for hyperactivity, attention and learning problems at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital in San Francisco. “What parents need to understand is that most kids watch TV and most of them do not develop attention problems.”
“It’s easy to take a simplistic view of this study and draw some causal conclusion,” said Jeff Epstein, director of Duke University Medical Center’s ADHD program. “There are a lot of variables that could account for the relationship.”
Much of the media confusion seems to stem from a common error of logic: the faulty assumption that a correlation (in which levels of one thing, like TV, rise and fall in proportion to levels of another thing, like attention problems) means that the first thing causes the second.
Research on children is particularly vulnerable to this sort of misreading, said David B. Cohen, a psychologist and author of “Stranger in the Nest: Do Parents Really Shape Their Child’s Personality, Intelligence or Character?” partly because the interaction of genes and environment is so complicated. According to Cohen (based on research on twins and adopted children), correlations between kids’ traits and their home environment are often not the result of their parents’ behavior — contrary to conventional wisdom and the parenting-advice industry — but of inherited traits and other factors. In efforts to explain the connection between TV watching and attention problems, Cohen said, these other potential influences shouldn’t be overlooked.
The Seattle researchers’ method was valuable, ADHD experts noted, because it involved lots of kids observed over a long time. But because they were working with completed surveys, the researchers themselves acknowledged, they couldn’t control what information was gathered. They didn’t know, for example, whether the kids in the study spent their time watching “Sesame Street” or “Celebrities Uncensored.” They had to take parents’ word on both the children’s behavior and their viewing habits (would a 1-year-old really sit still for five hours, Pfiffner wondered, riveted by a screen?). They didn’t even know how many of the children actually had ADHD (the handful of behavioral problems they measured, Epstein pointed out, falls far short of an ADHD diagnosis). And although they attempted to adjust the figures to account for various aspects of the kids’ home environments (emotional support, maternal self-esteem, etc.) they were limited to the available data and could not eliminate all other factors that might have affected the results.
To do that, you’d have to take a random bunch of kids, randomly assign them to watch TV or not, and see what happens. That’s a complicated and expensive experiment — though one that, in light of these findings, might now attract funding, said lead researcher Christakis.
Christakis and his colleagues’ results are “by no means definitive,” he acknowledged in an interview. “But one has to keep in mind that it’s a very important finding, particularly because it does have some biological plausibility.”
He’s referring to experiments done on rats in the 1980s, indicating that unusual types of visual stimulation can alter the physical structure of young animals’ brains. Christakis and his fellow researchers hypothesized that early exposure to fast-moving television images might do something similar to children. If so, they speculated, those structural changes might contribute to attention problems.
But other factors also could explain the correlation they found — genes, for example. Scientists already know that ADHD is highly heritable. Parents who have it pass it on to their children; suppose those parents also are more likely to keep the TV turned on. The Seattle researchers couldn’t rule that out.
“That was my first reaction when I was hearing about this study: They didn’t measure ADHD in the parents,” Pfiffner said.
Another possibility is that the cause and effect might work in the other direction. Maybe ADHD “causes” TV viewing — that is, maybe small children with attention or hyperactivity problems are inclined (or allowed) to watch more television.
“ADHD kids can’t sit quietly … maybe the parents just give in and say, ‘OK, here’s the TV, do what you want,’” Cohen said.
The study’s authors wave away this interpretation, arguing that 1- and 3-year-olds are too young to display symptoms. But other experts weren’t as quick to dismiss the idea that toddlers with ADHD could be more active and restless than their peers, even before their encounter with the rigid expectations of a classroom leads to a formal diagnosis.
“I don’t find the rationale compelling that they’re capturing kids before their risk has been established,” Pfiffner said.
Neither do I. My own two sons, now 8 and 9, do not have ADHD. But from their earliest years, the boys have been so extraordinarily rambunctious that life sometimes resembles one giant Halloween party. Early on, I developed a grudging appreciation for that smarmy purple dinosaur — or for any screen character who would keep them occupied long enough for me to get dinner prepared, the newspaper skimmed or a phone call made without having to wonder if the living-room curtains were being yanked off their rods.
Not that I was thrilled about relying on the dreaded “electronic babysitter.” I once read a column by a mom who banned TV and boasted about her nonviolent, imaginative, nonmaterialistic kids. Her words echoed accusingly in my skull whenever one of my sons would grab a handful of the other’s cheek and twist, or when they’d beg in the store for some new toy or candy they mysteriously knew all about. Exhausted, I would wonder how to turn them into the sort of kids who like to sit peacefully playing with blocks.
Eventually, I realized that I might as well have wished to change the color of their eyes (and, still later, understood that I didn’t really want to fundamentally alter their personalities, anyway). Not long ago, author Daphne de Marneffe mentioned in a Salon interview that her children were so naturally easygoing that she could read whole novels while they played quietly at her feet. “A lot of how children are is temperament, a built-in thing,” explained de Marneffe, a psychologist.
While my family’s story doesn’t prove anything, the experiences of other parents I spoke with don’t necessarily support the research findings, either.
“My child was so hyperactive, he couldn’t even watch TV until he went on medication,” said Adrienne Nelson, who leads an ADHD support group in Chicago and whose son is now 17. She said she didn’t believe what she heard about the study - especially because Nelson, 59, has the disorder herself. “For the first few years of my life, we didn’t have a TV. And I was hyper and distracted. How do you explain that?”
Karran Harper Royal, 40, is skeptical about the study, too. Her 17-year-old was diagnosed with ADHD years ago, and her 8-year-old has shown signs of it and is being evaluated. But neither boy has ever watched much television. The New Orleans mother sharply restricted their viewing for reasons of her own.
“TV makes them relate too much to the television world instead of the real world,” she said. “And I wanted my kids to be in the real world.”
But some parents have trouble shrugging off what people in lab coats say. Having heard about the study, they may be morosely shouldering responsibility for their children’s attention disorders. Like the “refrigerator mothers” who were blamed for their children’s autism 50 years ago (incorrectly, it later developed), parents of children with developmental problems have often found themselves on the accusing end of psychologists’ collective pointing finger.
“The media puts us, parents with ADHD children, in a very negative light,” read a posting on a message board for parents of kids with learning problems. “I am sure we’ll be asked how much TV our kids watch, once someone knows that they have ADHD.” A parent on another site moans, “I have grandparents now yelling at me saying I caused the (ADHD).”
Even parents whose kids don’t have attention disorders may wonder whether there’s reason for concern. Rewiring brains sounds awfully scary — what if all of the effects aren’t immediately obvious? Some mothers and fathers might begin to question whether every C might, without TV, have been a B or an A. But Alison Gopnik, a psychologist and coauthor of “The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind,” warns that child development is way too complicated to reduce to a checklist of practices that determine whether a baby will “turn out fine … or be messed up.”
Still, Gopnik doesn’t see much harm in a little parental guilt. “Being a parent is the most profound moral responsibility anybody has. If you didn’t feel guilty 90 percent of the time, you wouldn’t be a moral person.”
These days, though, few parents complain of a shortage of things to worry about. Peter N. Stearns, author of “Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America,” says decades of alarming news stories and overblown research findings have sapped some of the joy out of family life.
“The experts are undoubtedly well-meaning — and also trying to get attention and funding,” said Stearns, provost of George Mason University. “But the accumulation makes it very hard for parents to feel confident about what they’re doing.”
My questions about the new study’s findings are not intended as a defense of television, or an argument that it’s good for kids: For all I know, the idiot box is justly nicknamed. One can certainly imagine healthier pastimes for small children, activities that engage them in the three-dimensional world of human interaction and physical activity and all five senses. And sure, it’s worth asking just what effect that flickering blue screen is having on malleable young minds. After all, that obnoxious purple dinosaur wasn’t around during the millennia in which humankind did most of its evolving.
On the other hand, the record doesn’t indicate how many of those Pleistocene-era parents emerged with their sanity — and their living-room curtains — intact.
I gather I’m supposed to be — what, amused? touched? — right from the e-mail message’s opening line:
“This is for all the mothers who have sat up all night with sick toddlers in their arms, wiping up barf laced with Kraft dinner and wieners, birthday cake and cherry Kool-Aid, saying, ‘It’s OK honey, Mommy’s here.’”
Whatever reaction this provokes, it seems intended to be positive. It’s supposed to be inspirational, to make me feel good about being a mom. If regurgitated junk food doesn’t do the trick, I’m invited to savor other poignant moments: Walking the floors with a colicky infant. Shivering on the sidelines at kids’ sporting events. Trying to subdue a screaming toddler in the grocery store…
In case these mothering challenges are wearing me down, the message — which I received several times this year, under titles such as “Motherhood” and “Happy Mother’s Day” — offers encouragement. “Hang in there,” it says.
Paeans to motherhood have been popping up in my e-mail in box for years — ever since I had kids and got online, which happened at roughly the same time. Some are full of wisecracks, like Erma Bombeck or Roseanne. But most are sentimental, waxing syrupy amid the puddles of vomit. This one started out as a column in a small-city newspaper, where its tone was more cheerfully empathetic and less aggressively saccharine. As it made its way through cyberspace, it was embellished and rearranged on who-knows-how-many keyboards.
“Please pass this to a wonderful mother you know,” someone has added, in closing.
Whoever sends out these mommy mails apparently wants to cheer me up. They want to boost my self-esteem, which they assume is flatlining. They want to reassure me — God knows, they think, no one else will — that although I am but a lowly mother, I am valued. My suffering is noble. Not for nothing do I forfeit my comfort, my leisure and perhaps my financial security. Yes, I have jettisoned my dreams, but for a glorious cause.
Funny how, after reading these messages, I don’t find myself knuckling away tears of wistful joy. Funny how I feel more like, oh, faking my own death, putting on a wig and shades, ripping open my first pack of cigarettes in 15 years, and boarding a bus for some windswept little Western town where nobody would know me and I could get an apartment above the pawnshop and start a new life.
After arranging for a baby sitter.
The origins of mommy mails are mysterious. Few are signed or attributed, though in some cases versions with names attached can be hunted down on the Web. They aren’t spam. They are forwarded to me by people I know, mothers themselves who, in turn, have received them from mothers they know. By the time I see them — sometimes the same ones, over and over — these messages have passed through many in boxes. Perhaps some come from Web sites such as Inspirational Stories, which offer browse-able collections of motivational messages on mothering (and other topics). Though some of the pieces on that site come with bylines attached, most of the mommy mails with which I’m familiar are marked “Author Unknown.”
Whether cute or religious or maudlin, mommy mails profess to celebrate the wonders of motherhood. Underneath, though, many share the same disturbing subtext. It sucks to be you, they imply. But luckily, you’re a martyr.
That’s the way I read them, anyway. Take the perennially popular one titled “…That of Being a Mother,” which — though sent to me numerous times unsigned — is elsewhere attributed to an author of religious and inspirational books. Here a young woman announces that she’s thinking of starting a family. Her mother (in other versions it’s a friend who already has kids), tears welling, wonders whether to reveal what lies ahead.
“I want to tell her that the physical wounds of child bearing will heal, but that becoming a mother will leave her with an emotional wound so raw that she will forever be vulnerable,” the older woman muses.
She contemplates how her daughter’s career will be “derailed by motherhood.” How “her life, now so important, will be of less value to her.” How she will want to hang in there anyway — “not to accomplish her own dreams,” which apparently have also plunged in value, “but to watch her child accomplish theirs” (unless that child is a girl, I guess, who may have children herself someday and be expected to forget about her dreams, too…).
The mother weighs these sacrifices against a quick recap of motherhood’s rewards (“the exhilaration of seeing your child learn to ride a bike … the belly laugh of a baby who is touching the soft fur of a dog or a cat for the first time”) and makes her decision. It’s no contest.
“‘You’ll never regret it,’ I finally say. Then I reach across the table, squeeze my daughter’s hand and offer a silent prayer for her, and for me, and for all of the mere mortal women who stumble their way into this most wonderful of callings.”
My problem with mommy mails isn’t that they exaggerate the downsides of motherhood. I’ve had my own horrific experiences with vomit, freezing sports events, and grocery-store blowups. Probably all three in one day.
No, what creeps me out is how average mothers are presented as shouldering these burdens with an air of acceptance that falls somewhere between Stepford-like and saintly. These mothers do not complain. They endure the indignities, weather the abuse, tackle the drudgery, surrender their dreams with tears in their eyes and smiles on their lips, never forgetting they are pursuing the “most wonderful of callings.”
So where does this leave those of us “mere mortal women” who have responded, at least on the tougher days, with yelling or muttered profanity? Or who, more importantly, insist on clinging to a few dreams of our own? Mommy mails do not acknowledge our existence.
Occasionally, though, mommy mails hint that these scarily stoic women are not always thrilled with their lives. In “Why Women Cry,” which I received two or three times in the past year, a boy catches his mother weeping and asks why. “Because I’m a woman,” she replies. The kid, understandably still baffled, asks God why is mother is weeping. The Almighty explains that every woman is granted the ability to “take care of her family through sickness and fatigue without complaining,” as well as the stamina to put up with the children “who hurt her very badly” and the husband who “tests her strengths and her resolve to stand beside him unfalteringly.”
Usually, women deal. But for the really tough times, God adds, they receive “a tear … to use whenever it is needed.” He makes it sound a little like a cyanide pill.
Mommy mails may read like propaganda for motherhood, a type of motherhood dimly recalled from some not-quite-real past. But deconstruct these woeful tales, and you notice they make motherhood sound like hell, while suggesting that mothers like it that way — or should. Whatever the senders think they’re doing, I don’t believe these messages are pro-motherhood at all.
Yet I have to keep reminding myself of this. Because damned if they don’t haunt me, those virtuous mothers from the mommy mails. They may endlessly forgive their errant family members, but they’re not so easy on other mothers. They hover over me like reproachful angels, frowning and gently shaking their heads whenever I yell or complain or sneak off to read rather than squat on the floor with action figures. They set the standards for “good” mothers — and, by omission, define the shadowy territory occupied by the rest of us. Against my will and my better judgment, they have insinuated themselves into my conscience. They are a mechanism — though not the only one — for keeping mothers in line.
Which, I sometimes suspect, is exactly what they’re intended to do.
But hey, lately a new kind of mom-related e-mail message has been appearing in my in box. They’re not sent by friends. They’re not at all poignant. But I will say this: The subject lines are novel.
Like “Here are some horny soccer moms.” And “These moms are some of the hottest around!” And the oddly specific “Pete’s mom is ready for hardcore action after some beers.”
I’m no big fan of either porn or spam. The combination, slithering uninvited into my computer, is contemptible. Yet I can’t help finding it a tiny bit heartening that, among the weird sexual tastes to which other porn spam alludes — farm animals, Paris Hilton — at least a few people out there apparently get turned on by, of all things, mothers.
If there’s some dark Freudian explanation for this, I don’t want to hear it. I prefer to think it’s only for nice reasons that, to some minds at least, the word “mom” evokes not a pathetic exploited wretch or a paragon of virtue but, well, a hot babe.
One of these messages put it simply: “Moms like to have fun too,” the subject line said.
Reading it, I almost had tears in my eyes.
I used to be a fairly easygoing person, but becoming a mother threw me into a state of low-grade but chronic anxiety. I fretted over my two sons’ refusal to eat vegetables, their sibling battles, their taste for violent cartoons. Problems seemed to be evidence not that my children were normal flawed human beings but that I was a bad mom for not fixing them. I was frazzled when they misbehaved but remorseful when I yelled. If I let the boys play in front of the TV set while I grabbed half an hour of peace — OK, God help me, an hour — with a cup of tea and a magazine, I couldn’t really relax. I feared I was dooming them to lives of, well, I wasn’t sure exactly what, but I worried about it anyway.
In occasional lucid moments, I wondered why I should feel selfish for wanting time to myself, evil for every perceived misstep, and personally at fault for my children’s failure to be perfect. Besides, my kids were healthy, bright and cute, so what was my problem? When I finally began to figure it out, I felt like the horror-movie baby sitter who finds out the threatening phone calls are coming from inside the house.
What I realized was that, while my anxiety may have originally stemmed from inexperience as a mother and assorted child-rearing dilemmas, it was now being exacerbated by the very experts whose books and magazine articles I relied on for guidance. The child-rearing gurus indicated that if I followed instructions my kids would turn out well, the way muffins do if you measure ingredients carefully and bake for the recommended time.
If not, the result could be considerably worse than burnt muffins, and I’d have only myself to blame.
Which, of course, left me uneasy about every slip-up, every inconsistency, every flare of temper, every weary capitulation, every momentary lapse of attention. Much of the advice seemed impractical or ineffective, but I didn’t dare ignore it entirely. Who was I to question the science of child development? I’d turned to the experts in the first place because of questions about my parenting abilities, and their answers implied that I had plenty to worry about.
Now, several refreshing new books assure me that I’m not insane — or if I am, I’m not the only one. Offering a bit of sympathy to exhausted adults for a change, these books confirm that lots of modern, middle-class parents are nervous wrecks. They also lend support for my theory about why, suggesting that the child-rearing experts who appeared and proliferated throughout the past century are at least partly responsible for sending parents on this guilt trip. Most startling, these books suggest that the advice I assumed was based on incontrovertible scientific data is more often a weird hodgepodge of overblown research findings, preconceived notions, marketing strategies and a sprinkling of wishful thinking.
In “Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America,” Peter N. Stearns writes that middle-class Americans in the 20th century came to view children as extremely fragile, despite the prosperity and medical advances that had extended and improved most kids’ lives. Moms and dads became newly distressed about everything that might affect their vulnerable offspring: sleep, discipline, homework, chores, entertainment, self-esteem.
Stearns cites a number of reasons people started worrying, including smaller families (which focus more frantic attention on fewer kids), geographic separation from grandparents and their child-rearing experience, more divorces, time-strapped working mothers and the anxieties connected with hiring child-care help, new technologies such as TV and computers whose effects on young brains weren’t clear.
Decades of pop psychology had taught us that if we’re screwed up, it’s our parents’ fault. Now that we had kids of our own, we were facing the unsettling flip side of that assumption.
As parental uncertainties increased, pediatricians and child psychologists rode to the rescue. However, Stearns writes, “the experts compounded the worry,” offering advice that was generally labor-intensive, often contradictory and frequently alarmist. Many promoted the belief “that children could easily be damaged beyond repair.”
Even the kindly, pragmatic Dr. Benjamin Spock, who opened his best-selling manual with soothing words (“Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do”), went on to “invoke the specter of ‘parental ruination’ often enough to remind parents of their tremendous responsibility,” Stearns writes. That paradox — assuring parents of their competence, then issuing instructions for handling a laundry list of potential problems — was a theme echoed by many of Spock’s successors. Far from trusting parents’ natural instincts, the experts had apparently concluded that raising children was too difficult a task to be left to amateurs.
Yet, despite their claims to the latest knowledge on child development, some of the white coats seem to have gotten no closer to real kids than the other side of the lab’s two-way mirror. “It is conceivable,” rhapsodized author John Watson in the 1920s, “that some day we may be able to bring up the human young through infancy and childhood without their crying or showing fear reactions.” Nearly 100 years later, however, scientists have yet to cure children of negative emotions.
Stearns’ focus on the whole last century as the era of anxiety may be counterintuitive to adult readers who nostalgically remember their own parents as relatively relaxed. But his approach provides some comforting perspective; as I agonize over my children’s PlayStation habits, it’s nice to know that some late 19th century critics spoke out against teddy bears (warning they’d divert affection from mothers and “foster a craving for novelty and variety that life cannot satisfy”).
David Anderegg’s “Worried All the Time: Overparenting in an Age of Anxiety and How to Stop It” covers some of the same ground. But in place of Stearns’ scholarly survey, Anderegg, a child psychologist with a clinical practice, offers a chatty reality check. He shows how the media and panicky parents blow minor or rare events into “crises” and “epidemics.” (Like Stearns, Anderegg reminds readers that there really are crises affecting American children, but that they involve problems like poverty.) He debunks various recent scares — child abduction, school violence, killer nannies — deconstructing them with statistics, research and common sense. Having just heard how to protect my kids from sexual predators in a “Today Show” segment tucked cozily between the weather report and the cooking tips, I welcomed his calming words.
Unfortunately, Anderegg often sounds too much like just another self-help author. He claims that parents worry because their thinking is twisted by “displaced anxiety” and they’re failing to face their own hidden motivations. Hey, after showing me how sensationalized media reports are making me crazy, don’t turn around and tell me it’s all in my head.
Besides, some of his supposed efforts to dispel worry have just the opposite effect. Thanks to his chapter on television, I now understand exactly how I am harming my boys — diminishing their creativity, damaging their concentration — when I sneak out for those tea breaks.
“If you read wonderfully engaging books to them early on, they will learn to love to read, because reading will always remind them of warm and close parental attention,” Anderegg assures me. Well, I read to them plenty, but for some reason they still like watching “Batman.” For this, Anderegg offers a perfectly bizarre tip: “Place a picture of a nice cold beer on top of the television set. Then imagine that, when your child turns on the TV, he is drinking a nice cold beer instead. Do you really want him to do that?” Um, no, because if anyone needs a drink right now, it’s me.
Curiously, almost all of Anderegg’s examples of media crisis-mongering come from newspapers, TV and newsmagazines. Perhaps averting his gaze out of professional courtesy to fellow parenting authors, he pretty much ignores the many frightening books (and parenting-magazine articles) on some of these same topics. For example, a chapter on “the overscheduled child” makes no reference to a well-known book of that name that warns about the very risks that Anderegg pooh-poohs.
Readers seeking a more skeptical examination of child-rearing expertise will find what they’re looking for in Ann Hulbert’s meticulously researched and anecdote-packed “Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice About Children.” Hulbert takes us into the labs — and the living rooms — of a century’s worth of experts, finding examples of advice that, by modern standards, often sounds laughably wacky, if a little heart-rending. Mothers at one time or another have been instructed to toilet train 3-month-olds, to let babies get exercise by crying, to refrain from kissing or cuddling their offspring. “Never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning,” dictated one 1920s author.
Under Hulbert’s cool-eyed analysis, our presumably more enlightened era’s experts (certainly more prolific; the number of child-rearing guidebooks quintupled between 1975 and 1997) don’t get off much easier. What I found particularly thought-provoking is her suggestion that it’s the twinkly-eyed, liberal softies, the ones I tend to be drawn to, rather than the right-wing disciplinarians, who tend to be the most demanding on parents. While hard-liner and conservative John Rosemond emphasizes letting kids play independently, the grandfatherly T. Berry Brazelton and his sometime-collaborator Stanley Greenspan prescribe extensive daily blocks of one-on-one activity that would all but require a stay-at-home parent, Hulbert writes.
As for science, Hulbert shows that after a century of study, researchers haven’t come close to discovering the best way to raise children. Measuring the long-term effects of childhood experiences is notoriously difficult: Controlled studies are unavailable, cause-and-effect relationships unclear, variables — from genetics to family structure to socioeconomic status — too slippery to sort.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped the experts (or celebrity popularizers) from regularly declaring breakthroughs. For example, a 1997 campaign, I Am Your Child, headed by movie director Rob Reiner, with help from Hillary Clinton, warned that if children aren’t provided with a stimulating environment that includes a lot of parental interaction during their first three years, their developing brains permanently atrophy. “There was only one problem,” Hulbert writes. “Along with most of the media, Reiner failed to note the fact that no such new evidence of neural vulnerability actually existed.” On the contrary, research suggested that young brains are genetically programmed to develop under almost any circumstances — no flash cards required.
Meanwhile, studies on twins and adopted kids have cast doubt on the whole advice industry. Parents’ influence “could not actually be shown to count for much in determining the personalities that emerged,” Hulbert reports. The implication — though unproven — is that, unlike muffin recipes, child-rearing practices have little effect on how the product turns out.
Stressed-out moms and dads, then, may be entitled to lighten up a little. But, I can hear the experts snapping back. “It’s the parents who don’t worry that I worry about,” an authority once told me. Worried parents, in other words, are conscientious parents. Isn’t a little constant anxiety a small price to pay for the sake of your child?
One answer might be that your child doesn’t really benefit. Although these authors don’t uncover much evidence that kids are harmed by parental anxiety (though Stearns does speculate about a link between a growing incidence of depression among children and parents’ frantic insistence on their happiness), neither is there reason to believe that the worrying helps kids, or makes parents more effective.
Certainly, there’s evidence that this cloud of anxiety is hurting parents themselves. Polls show parental satisfaction steadily slipping. “Every inquiry from 1950 on shows a decided margin in favor of childlessness as the happier state,” Stearns reports. Noncustodial divorced fathers are more content than custodial dads. Empty nesters like their lives better than parents whose nests are still occupied.
This hardly seems fair. Few expect children to bring 18 years of nonstop bliss, and some people make the reasonable decision not to have them at all, but surely those who want kids deserve to be happier than they were without them. By now, though, parents are so accustomed to putting our children’s needs first that it sounds almost blasphemous to suggest that our feelings are important, too. Besides, anxiety is a hard habit to break.
Maybe we could think of it this way: If we start changing our attitudes now, then someday, when our kids become parents, they won’t have to face all these worries.
