All right. I've plowed through about 1/3rd of the grading backlog (ugh, ugh, ugh) and the boys are at the park and even though I'm totally brain dead (and still in my pyjamas!! Yes!) I might as well tackle this thing b/c it's been sort of rattling around my head all day and it's not like once the weekend's over I'm going to have
more time. Ha.
Note though, that I'm totally talking out my ass in this post, as it's not really something I've studied formally. So this is just theorizing, ok? Also, it's sort of derivitave theorizing, I fear. So please take this as one parent's perceptions of current parenting trends, rather than any kind of real comprehensive overview, 'kay?
The funny thing is, that even though there've been more blog comments on the motherhood question than on anything (except Trevor) so far, I feel oddly like this is a "boring" topic. Which certainly says something about cultural perceptions of motherhood. I also want to acknowledge that yes, the fact that women = mothers, culturally speaking, is a massive piece of sexist bullshit that obviously (with my fucking around and not talking about kid stuff a whole lot and worrying that by blogging motherhood I'm going to bore my readers to tears) I am sort of buying into even as I try to challenge it. Whether it's our universal disdain for "soccer" (or
"security") moms, or sort of studiedly
casual passing references to major illness-type things, I'm not the only person in the world to sort of understate, if not really downplay, the role of parenting in my life.
So I think there's a tension going on here. On the one hand, culturally we define "families" as "couples with children," and we natter on about family values, the importance of families, and so on. On the other hand, we sort of look down on families, and parenting, as boring subjects, and we get impatient. I do, too. I think there's sort of a general sense that at some point in the future, families with kids just sort of happened, and people went about their business, and it just wasn't such a Big Fucking Deal.
Now, part of this is maybe that we're thinking back to when we were kids, and of course it wasn't a big deal to us, because it was the sea we swam in. Part of it, though, might be that the concept of family is in major transition in the last decade or so, in ways it hasn't been for quite some time. So I'm reading this kind of interesting book right now, called
The Feminine Economy and Economic Man, and while I haven't finished it (and I think it oversimplifies certain things rather badly), it makes the interesting point that parents can be viewed, in economic terms, as producers: kids are like a sort of investment, from which we'll eventually draw labor, resources, wealth production, etc. But because we have defined the labor of rearing families as non-economic, more and more women are making the rational economic choice to do something else, that pays well, rather than to sacrifice their labor without any kind of reimbursement. It's an interesting point, and I think it highlights one of the main things that's changed since when I was a kid: the standard middle-class assumption now is that married couples with kids have two incomes. Both parents work.
Now, when I was a kid, my mom worked, and I was a latchkey kid. And I also walked to school (a surprisingly long way, I noticed, when I went back home recently for a visit). But that was a transitional period. After WWII, people moved into suburbs, and middle-class women were pushed out of the labor force, mostly. Lots of work, I think, has shown that the 50's were an anamoly, but the point is they invented the suburbs, and we've inherited not only the physical space but also the beliefs that shaped it. When moms mostly stayed home, kids could play in the street and walk to school because there were moms around. Then, we have a couple of important changes. One, the pill means that women can choose not to have kids. Two, middle-class women start going (back) to work. So, for a while, old patterns (kids walking to school, playing in the streets) continue, even though the conditions that helped support those things are shifting. (And, of course, not all moms were working back then: my mom did, but the neighbor mom didn't). We had this idea that the suburbs were safe for kids (an idea a lot of people still believe in).
But we've also had, in recent years, a lot of high-profile news stories about abuduction, child molestation, school shootings, and the like. So parents get paranoid. My sister, for instance, once shocked me by saying she wouldn't let her 7-year old daughter go to the bathroom in a restaurant by herself. Now, I for one think that this is kind of extreme. But on the other hand, we have a culture where if something bad happens to a kid, we are extremely quick to judge the parents. I don't know if anyone remembers the case of
Danielle Van Dam, who was abducted
from her own bed by a neighbor,
while her father was home. At first it was a shocking tragedy. But as soon as it came out that her mother had been out--until two a.m.!--and that her parents had an open marriage, there was all sorts of bullshit (like the linked article) about how, somehow, this explained it. The parents simply hadn't been careful enough in protecting their kids. There was a grotesque newspaper cartoon, which I can't find to link to, that showed a little kid strapped to a torture table with a looming big fat guy wearing an executioner's hood saying something about how if mom hadn't been too busy fucking around, the kid would have been safe.
Now, obviously that's extreme, but it demonstrates the culture of "parental responsibility" that we've sort of overdeveloped, imho. It's illegal, for instance, to leave a kid in a car by himself, even if you are just stepping in to pay for gas (and let me tell you what a pain in the ass that used to be, when pseudonymous kid was a baby, and you'd have to unbuckle and inevitably wake a sleeping baby to pay for fucking gas and then, of course, the baby would cry the rest of the way home b/c his nap had been interrupted). In fact, when psuedonymous kid was a baby, I used to pull the car up to the end of the driveway (which went to the back of the house) and
leave him sleeping in his car seat while I went inside, did laundry, ate lunch, whatever. People freak when I tell them that, but moving him inside woke his ass up, and meant I would never have gotten anything done. I also left him sleeping in a stroller, locked in my office on campus once or twice while I went to the bathroom. Potentially dangerous? Hell yeah, if there's a fire. And if anything had happened, you know it would have been "my fault," rather than just a damn tragedy. This kind of caution probably keeps kids safer than they used to be, but it sure puts a lot of pressure on parents, and makes us awfully defensive, sometimes.
There's all sorts of other negligent shit I, personally, do, including drinking when I was pregnant. Let's look at the text of that warning label on our beer bottles, shall we?
"Government Warning: (1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects. (2) Consumption of alcohol impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems." Notice the order and tone. Pregnant women
should not drink. Drivers, however, are merely given information, and left to make their own decisions. This kind of sums up the general cultural attitude towards women once they become moms (and, in fact, it's kind of bullshit: I did my research, and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is a risk, really, only if you drink every day or binge every week. Not if you have an occasional beer or glass of wine. And oddly, it seems to be much less of a risk for first children, regardless of how much the mother drinks). Suddenly there's an awful lot of "shoulds" and "should nots" that I, for one, felt remarkably free of before I got knocked up.
My point? One reason parents drive their kids to school and develop playgroups and formal supervised activities and schedule the shit out of childhood is because we hold them absolutely responsible for every freaking thing that can possibly go wrong. I, personally, think this is backlash central: once moms started working outside the home, we decided to up the ante on "good" parenting. There's this sense in which, if you want to have "it all," you have to do "it all" perfectly (and single women get this shit too, I know: it's not enough to just be a professor, you have to be super-prof. Everyone loves "Sex and the City," with stylish, kicky Sarah Jessica Parker). Also, to be fair, there's probably a certain amount of simple self-consciousness about parenting that's the result of having made it less of a foregone conclusion: now, since you can "choose" to have a kid, you get to interrogate yourself about all sorts of things. Timing, how many, whether or not to stay home, for how long, bottle or breast feeding, public or private schooling, blah blah ad infinitum. None of it is taken for granted any more, and as a result, we've all gotten amazingly self-conscious about children.
Of course, there are probably other factors too. In the 70s, we started bussing kids to school; now that's sort of fallen apart, but we haven't returned to neighborhood schools, so parents drive kids instead. We used to fund public schools way better than we do now, so there were smaller classes and more after-school activities (at least, there were where I went to school). White flight after school integration started certainly didn't help, as it spread the middle-class parents we're talking about out and away from city centers (which I think we're starting to return to), yanked money from public schools, and helped undercut a sense of community; I think there was sort of this sense in which the white middle class decided to take its ball and go home, becaues it didn't want to play with "those" kids. The 80s saw a lot of tax revolt, a lot of rebellion against public spending; and, because birth control meant that it was a lot easier not to have kids, people stopped seeing children as a universal responsibility and started seeing them as a "choice," and we started to get rhetoric about not wanting to pay for other people's choices.
In essence, we've privatized a lot of things that used to be seen as communal responsibilities. And at the same time, we've upped the ante on good parenting: the wage gap between those with college educations and those without, I think, is bigger than it used to be, so it's really important to give your kids "all the advantages"; car seats and bike helmets are required, tv-watching is bad, we realized that convenience foods are nutritionally void (I grew up on frozen tv dinners, anyone else? Raise your hand), we don't believe in spanking any more. A lot of these changes are good: I honestly think that kids benefit from not being smacked, from being listened to, from spending a lot of time with their parents, from wearing seatbelts and helmets. But these changes do require a lot of intensive parenting that wasn't expected of our own parents, and one result of that is that middle-class parents, anyway, watch their kids like hawks. And the more we do that, the more we're expected to do that. The whole culture adjusts its expectations.
Now, having said all this, I have noticed that there are real differences from region to region of the country in terms of how people are "supposed" to parent. For example, I have noticed that on the west coast, parents tend to supervise their individual children on the playground. On the east coast, parents sit on benches and the kids play "by themselves"--which means that, actually, east coast kids play together in playgrounds, while west coast kids play in parallel, mostly interacting with their own parents. Or, say, if you take the A train from Central park to upper Manhattan, and you have a baby, you will notice that at the beginning of the journey, people are less likely to offer you a seat and more likely to avert their gaze if you breastfeed. By the time you get up to Washington Heights (a poorer neighborhood, mostly immigrants, for those who don't know NYC), strangers will smile at you nursing your kid, they'll help carry your stroller, they're just generally warmer. (Oh, and btw, someone asked why the US has a higher birth rate than other developed countries--I suspect immigrant populations have something to do with that.) In the midwest, you've got a lot more grocery stores with car-shaped carts for kids to sit in, family parking spaces, a bigger emphasis on "family"-friendly entertainment and space; the south has many of the same things, plus a strong emphasis on teaching kids to be polite. So I do wonder if some of the annoyance some people feel at some kid behaviors might not be partly culture shock.
So, an anecdote: recently, we found ourselves in a rural part of the country with pseudonymous kid, eating at a very casual family-owned restaurant. Our waiter was probably about 10 years old. Pseudonymous kid was cranky and swearing ("damnit!"). I don't care if he swears; but suddenly, with our 10-year old waiter in rural wherever, I felt absolutely mortified. On the other hand, while visiting an old friend recently, I asked her son (who is a couple years older than pseudonymous kid) to help pseudonymous kid set the table for dinner, and the kid flat-out refused. Afterwards, I had a really interesting conversation with my friend, who is an anthropologist about expectations and child-rearing. She, having grown up poor and with a lot of siblings, felt like she'd been expected to be way too responsible, way too young; I, having grown up with just one sister in a middle-class family, felt like I hadn't been asked to do enough. So my kid sets the table, and hers doesn't. In other ways, though, she is much stricter than I am: her kid isn't allowed to talk back, mine is.
All of which is to say that I think it's really impossible to generalize about how people raise kids, though it's pretty easy to generalize about how the magazines and books that are aimed at secular, middle-class parents tell us we're
supposed to raise kids.
I said I was being derivative, and I am: I think I'm gonna let this topic rest for now. In closing, here is a shitty, tossed-together bibliography of my own personal sources, the stuff I read in pseudonymous kid's early years, a set of partial, popular, non-academic but thoughtful books on the subject. Any of them would make great gifts for expectant parents, by the way; eschew that crappy "What to Expect" book or another cute outfit in favor of any of these:
Cultural Criticism:
The Mask of Motherhood
Mother Reader
The Mother Trip
The Hip Mama Survival Guide
Breeder
Mothers Who Think
Economics
The Price of Motherhood
The Feminine Economy and Economic Man
How To:
Sexy Mamas
Becoming the Parent you Want to Be (best parenting book ever)
