Tagged with thanks for more snark …

Apr 06 2010
culture, family, feminism

the over-involved Momster, a convenient premise to continue the laydee-hatin’

The MOMster

Why did I even bring this thing home?

The anti-mother element in our culture is one of the hardest things I live with.  I feel its sting on behalf of many categories of mother (because yes, our culture categorizes us) even when I don’t have personal membership in the latest group being lambasted (formula feeders, c-section patients, morbidly obese mothers, mothers in any class besides working-class, mothers of color).  When mama-bashing occurs in a way that seems it could apply to my specific person, I feel it lasered in on my any possible defect even though hell, I know I’m a pretty good mom and a decent human being.

Still, whenever I fail – however briefly or epic in nature – it’s the cultural judgment and denigration of womanhood and motherhood, this enormous pressure to be all kinds of awesome (intelligent, fit, beautiful, kick-ass, kind, organized, unique, sexy, wise and whip-smart), that roars loudest in my ears.  For the moment I swim in guilt and smallness, knowing I’m deficient, and no other mom is as shitty as I, and I’m screwing my kids up, and it’s too late even though they’re only six and eight because I’ve set up all this pathology with my Horribleness and I’d should just give the whole thing up but then that would really screw up my kids and just: Suck.

But that’s just me.  No other mothers ever feel this way, right?  <snort!>

Because, you know, mothers are one group we don’t like to give a break to (like so many groups we belittle).  Our culture’s judgment and callousness towards mothers seems so needlessly cruel (although I suspect it has its uses, more in a minute).  Whenever our media crows the latest horrific thing that has happened to some American child the wail sets up: “Where was the motherrrr?!?”.  More disturbing still, there are those who seem to think the misfortunes befalling children are the just deserts to these women who’ve somehow failed their children (Seriously? Because a child being harmed or killed or dying isn’t already, you know, some of the worst shit that could ever befall many, if not most, parents?).  Mothers are too involved, not involved enough, overbearing, pathetically passive, too selfish, too selfless, too absorbed in their children, too preoccupied with things not their children.  They’re sell-outs if they stay at home to raise families; their priorities are skewed (and wrong and anti-family) if they aren’t home enough.

Briefly, and before I get to my main point, in late October 2009 I remember reading the sickening account of the Richmond, California 15-year old girl who was raped by many male assailants during a school dance.  The story was deeply sad and awful as such stories are; troubling me further were the vast amounts of comments online blaming both the victim herself – and her mother (just for, I suppose, the two of them not having the female decency to avoid rape). As many point out, internet discourse can be shockingly uncivil or cowardly; yet as it is also pointed out, it can also reveal thoughts and feelings people harbor deep within.  In the Richmond story I was struck by how much blame was attributed to the females in the case: the victim and her mother – women both deserving empathy, support, and compassion, I hope it need not be said.

This might seem a shocking example of wrongheadedness but I am here to say it’s nothing new.

It hardly matters the most recent bit I’ve read on the internet that gets immediately to the Mama-hating, because it’s such a common trope.  Funnily enough and as I’ve said, it always hurts to read.  Today’s example (which I am deliberately not linking to; it’s actually not that important who wrote it) happened to be the charge that moms are Boring and their over-involvement is The Cause of Our Country’s Problems.  You know, by ardently caring about chemicals in baby bottles or our parenting techniques or the carbon footprint of our family car we are creating a culture of tit-sucking Dependents who won’t be able to do anything for themselves.

Right.  So now: Mamas?  You’re boring.  Also, P.S., you’re Ruining America.

This flavor of vitriolic Mama-depreciation is nothing new.  Authors, pundits, and pop-culturalists have trotted out this particular bit since long before I ever birthed my own: the obsessed monster of a mother who has no life except for living vicariously through her kids.  She used to have a career but now she’s all nipple-shields and carseats and SUVs (we used to diss her minivan and soccer-chauffeuring).  Her involvement with and work for the family are not the result of her genuine caring and the heterosexist hierarchy that both demands these efforts and offers little status nor esteem for them, but rather her pathetic underdevelopment – a projection of her own Narcissism and shallowness.  Her interest and fascination with family life and babies demonstrates her profound limitations; these will surely and inevitably lead to her attempting to manage everything about her children’s lives which will result in ruining said children’s lives and, by extension, Everything Else.  So at this point an article like this will typically have some really cute and sarcastic (but rarely real-life) examples of Epic Fail, like how this woman’s children will be living at home at age 40 and won’t be able to hold a job, yawn yawn, you get the idea.

There are so many problems with this sort of article it’s hard to know where to start.  Let me just begin with what occurs from the example of my personal lived life, because funny thing is?  No woman I’ve personally known is anything like this caricature.

I started my family in a mid-to-upper class environs (though our little family, economically, qualified and qualifies as working-class), mostly white, self-identified “progressive”, and to a soul very – very – doting first-time parents.  The women I knew were those the Over-Involved Mother insults are often referring to: they had privilege (white, straight, moneyed as far as the globe goes), obsessed in doing well by their kids and often mourning their careers (whether on temporary hiatus or rejected permanently).  They found themselves up to their thickened middles in kid-care and parenting books and temporarily sexless marriages (not a uniform factor to all unions I knew, but common enough).  They really did care about this stuff and they talked about it – not all the time, but a heck of a lot.  They were literally just like these articles claim! OH SNAP! HA HA!  LADIES ARE STOOPID!

Of course, all these women had personalities, drives, desires, and yes, ambitions extending beyond family life (although why women, and not men, are supposed to apologize for their passionate work in “family life” boggles me).  A conversation on the playground about the best highchair might not sound too earth-shatteringly Thinky to someone who doesn’t have to worry about keeping a baby safe while eating (and anyway, as to highchair conversations being dull, I wonder why mothers should be required to be more damned entertaining and urbane than anyone else?) but the women themselves were not boring.  You had only to ask, to spend time paying attention – to change the subject if need be because hell, that’s allowed – and you’d find them as Special Snowflake as, well, anyone really. Like M. who was an amazing cellist (who kept teaching music even after breeding) and a pretty gifted photographer and had a career in pro-choice activism.  Like A. who’d waitressed and barfly’d and traveled Central and South America and now balanced a single income with a family of four including a former trust-fund husband while they both didn’t really know how to pay bills.  Like S. who was the most organized person I knew and had made it a priority to travel to lots of druggy outdoor festivals and made Wild and was a catalog of counter-culture.  Like A. who with her husband started an art supply store, and who could get so passionate about social justice that while she talked her breastfeeding child would pop off and A’s nipple would be an angry point while her mouth and mind, undistracted, spoke her passionate truth.  Like B. who read fashion blogs and knew more fashion than anyone I’ve known and started a little recipe blog such I ended up starting my own (I have decent enough readership, incidentally).  Like T. who was a former teacher and had gone through difficult and heart-wrenching infertility treatments and who taught me a lot about being less of an asshole about that sort of thing.  Like K. who was a former drink-and-drug ingenue, a chemical engineer, proficient seamstress, social activist, and B-movie buff.  Hey, psst, that last one is me.

It’s true that many of these women did obsess, and I do mean obsess, about partnership and new motherhood (P.S. they obsessed and thought and dreamed and talked about lots of other stuff, too). And why shouldn’t they?  It is fucking intense!  It has been, for me at least and alternately during different times in my life: amazing, exhilarating, more exhausting than anything I’ve known, rewarding, deeply troubling, by turns sublime and mundane.  I’ve had a lot of hard-working (and incidentally, a handful of well-paying and relatively socially prestigious) jobs, and while I loved those jobs and cared deeply and performed well, there’s nothing that has rocked my worldview quite like mamahood (probably because I was raised in a culture and family that kind of sneered at it).  I am not a boring or shallow or eye-rollingly obsessive person for caring – even caring a lot, for a time in my life – about homebirth or cloth diapers or cooking or sewing up the most perfectly soft blanket I ever could.  I’m not more silly than anyone else doing any other thing because each of these efforts increases my awareness of my abilities, of others’ needs, of the earth, the environment, my neighbors, of Love, of craftsmanship and failure and triumph.

Additionally, it seems almost Feminism 101 to point out the conversation dissing over-involved (and boring!) mothers gives fathers an Out entirely. For every over-involved laydee wondering how to pen a birth plan there is often a father who relies on her to shoulder the large part of the burden of worrying about such a life-changing event.  For every highchair enthusiast female there is often a male bankrolling or helping to bankroll the purchase.  Women who run about cleaning house and looking up recipes and reading on parenting techniques are often partnered to an (often male) person who comes home to a child (or children) well-loved and well taken care of.  What gifts these must be for him!  (He often comes home to dinner made, a house and checkbook managed, and a partner who deeply cares about his happiness and helps care for his needs, whatever her personal idiosyncratic tendencies.)

I know some people would like to believe that because I or any other mother (remember, we do not punish fathers so direly for showing any of the above passions or proclivities) get excited about reading up on childhood allergies or learning how to clean with vinegar and baking soda or cooking gingersnaps for a school function that we are tedious Bores of the first degree.  I mean, it’s a little confusing because people like eating the gingersnaps and benefitting from our volunteer efforts and they sure as hell, at some point, likely benefited from such a woman taking care of them. But now?  It’s so passé.  And worthless.  And shitty for America.

So, I don’t relate to the Out-Of-Proportion Over-Involved Mother because I haven’t yet met her – that I know of.  Now a real, true, rabidly-focused or even pathological parent?  Yes, this person exists (in all genders and sexes).  I know this because – guess what, there are all kinds of people out there!  (Like today I read about people who fervently collect artifacts involving human hair!*). She’s just: damned rare.  Really.  Or she’s remained elusive to me at least.  And don’t be so quick to smirk at a mother’s passion and endeavors – a passion that may very well be a temporary life stage borne of the life-changing event of parenthood.  This passion will often involve forging a person who cares passionately about other people, and her endeavors hopefully help raise a generation that learns how to care for one another as well.  After all, truly caring for one another – deeply and with consistency – is not always a culturally-expounded virtue but one at times in our lives we all, every one of us, desperately need.

Because seriously?  Next time you think moms are so, you know, MOM-like and boring and shallow because they give a shit about strollers?  First off, consider going and fucking yourself**, because someone changed your diapers and fed you and loved you up (and if you didn’t get the last I am deeply, deeply sad to hear this), and secondly – just, give me a break.  Women are people.  Even moms are people.  Just people, no more, no less.  And they certainly don’t owe you some kind of hip Awesomeness, all the time.

Kind of mind-boggling, eh?

Mentioned:

Rape in Richmond, CA from CNN.com

“What’s Wrong With Granola, Anyway?” by Wendy Priesnitz from Natural Life Magazine

* Annual Hair & Trade Show in French Link, IN. Mr. Kendall, curator: “Mr. Kendall: “My life revolves around hair.”

** “Go Fuck Yourself”

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Mar 05 2010
culture, feminism

i am literally some bovine person just going through the motions! or: it’s called 101, people

Harmless and delicious? WRONG! You are looking at my PRISON!

Dear reader, today was kind of a cranky day. Like, first? I was bothered by this post at Sociological Images, a blog I love very much, where today someone claimed – in part of a larger point about prescribed gender roles – that cooking was drudgery. You know, taking care of oneself by selecting and preparing food – what an onerous chore! Why should anyone even have to bother?

So why should I care about this one, measly little word in a sea of internet talk-out-the-ass-ness?

Here’s the thing: I read feminist blogs. And I love them (mostly).  And this “housework and kid care is so borrrring!” stuff that asses itself into some (note I said some) feminist discussion?

I get it, I really do. Allow me a summation if you haven’t devoted yourself to the conversation so far. First off, there is a tremendous disparity when it comes to men and women living together; women do a lot more of the domestic work that needs to get done to little respect, status, acclaim, or pay.  If you aren’t aware of this you’re uninformed – it remains to you to decide if this is (however subtly) deliberate on your part.  If you’re aware and you’re not really doing much about it. Um.  Perhaps you shouldn’t be reading here.

But let’s say for arguments sake you’re aware that yes, in heterosexual partnerships the laydeez end up doing more of the kid care, the housework, and the “invisible” errands (like tracking everyone’s schedule, making dentist appointments, knowing where the shot records are kept, keeping track of shoe sizes, shopping for clothes and groceries and, and, and… you get it).  Those of us bent on egalitarian treatment want this to change.  And part of that is we want our families and our media to quit socializing girls and women to take care of everyone else while any attendant menfolk reap the benefits of this invisible but in large part necessary work.  To housework-dissing feminists’ view, housework is de facto “less than” and women deserve a piece of the whatever pie really matters – status, money, acclaim, astronaut jobs (Note: I’m not addressing housework-dissing anti-feminists here. Another post, perhaps).

And of course, I understand this. Make no mistake: women are still pressured to and expected to juggle career, good looks, a hot body, environmental stewardship, solid and healthy friendships, volunteer work, wifedom and motherhood, and run a smooth household.  Penalties for flagging in these pursuits can be severe.  Just-minded women and men are bucking the concept that these goals should be mandatory for women (especially those married to or partnered with a man).  Where I differ from some feminist perspective is I refuse to denigrate those things that are, traditionally, female or femme. After all, the denigration of the female is part of the problem – hello wage gap for instance.

So: picking on the work of self- and household-care using pejoratives and diminishing language to describe it? What a win!  (I am totally typing sarcastically!) Funny thing: I cook a lot, and I clean the house and wash clothes and stuff, and I don’t get paid nor much externally-afforded status for the ins-and-outs of, you know, regular life, all functions to varying degree necessary and normal in Being and enjoying the wonder of our existence (it is only modern convenience and privilege that allows us to opt out).  Perhaps you can take a moment to imagine how I feel – after seven years out of paid work – when my sister-laydeez then heap insult on injury by telling me what I do is so farking mindless and boring! What a way to make sure to never recognize the efforts, integrity, expressive life, and personhood of those who’ve chosen the path! (and who, P.S., baked those fabulous cookies your co-worker brought in that you took two of at break time).

Because, hello, and I literally can’t believe I have to say this, but cooking and cleaning really is work that, you know, has to be done, notice I’m not specifying any particular standard but, hey, it really is a fact of life. It’s not like you can opt out of eating (for very long at least), so show some respect for whoever did the cooking. Also, hello again, if we want men to do their part in heterosexual partnership maybe we should quit disparaging the whole business?

So irritating, really. And here’s the hurtful thing: it’s not one person every now and then who tosses out this kind of diminishment: it’s a subtle but seemingly endless drumbeat – by loads of those with (male) privilege, sure, but including, sadly, should-be-savvier feminists whom I otherwise love and respect in every way.  So: thanks for that.  Heck, we haven’t had a breather from “Women’s work is lesser work” since the 20th century at least*, so why should feminists give us one? (Seriously! I can’t stop with the sarcasm! And yes, I know this indicates a deficiency of me as a writer!).

I hate the de-statusing (NOT A REAL WORD) of any job or vocation – period. I remember as a child hearing jokes about janitors and how crummy and menial and kind of creepy/sketchy they were.  You probably don’t remember janitor jokes because: your dad wasn’t a janitor!  Ta-da! At the time it was confusing because I knew my father was a hard worker who chose jobs he respected and did well at them.  The diminishment of his profession and personhood didn’t match with the man I knew.  Now I’m wishing I would have loudly stopped the Haters in their tracks: “Shut up. My father is a janitor. Polish the floors yourself if you think he’s so unnecessary.”

I can’t go back and defend my father post-humorously to a handful of elementary-school children, but I can sound my horn in defense of my work today.  I’m proud of my work.  It has value.  My work is caring for other people – not just the ones I partnered with and gave birth to but also the neighborhood children, the working mother and father whose kids need a sleepover, the friend who’s sick, the husband who’s “real” work means he can’t get away for personal errands during the day, the cancer patient who is cheered by my loaf of homebaked bread. These are all real examples from my last week.

Thich Nhat Hanh – who’s been on my mind and in my blog lately – has written a couple dozen amazing books.  If I may be permitted (and yes I may), I’d like to relate a deeply meaningful passage from my book Anger: Wisdom For Cooling the Flames (warning: be careful not to get reader’s whiplash in the difference between Thich Nhat Hanh’s literary tone and my own):

About fifteen years ago, an American Buddhist scholar visited me while I was in the United States.  She said, “Dear teacher, you write such beautiful poems.  You spend a lot of time growing lettuce and doing things like that.  Why don’t you use your time to write more poetry?” She had read somewhere that I enjoy growing vegetables, taking care of cucumber and lettuce.  She was thinking pragmatically and suggested that I should not waste my time working in the garden but should use it to write poems.

I replied, “My dear friend, if I did not grow lettuce, I could not write the poems I write.” This is the truth.  If you don’t live in concentration, in mindfulness, if you don’t live every moment of your daily life deeply, then you cannot write.  You can’t produce anything valuable to offer to others.

A poem is a flower you offer to people.  A compassionate look, a smile, an act filled with loving-kindess is also a flower that blooms on the tree of mindfulness and concentration.  Even though you don’t think about the poem while cooking lunch for your family, the poem is being written.  When I write a short story, a novel, or a play, it maky take one week or several weeks to vinish.  But the story or the novel is always there.  In the same way, although you are not thinking about the letter you will write to your beloved one, the letter is being written, deep down in your concsiousness.

You cannot just sit there and write the story or the novel.  You have to do other things as well.  You drink tea, cook breakfast, wash your clothes, water the vegetables.  The time spent doing these things is extremely important.  You have to do them well.  You have to put one hundred percent of yourself in to the act of cooking, watering the vegetable garden, of dish washing. You just enjoy whatever you are doing, and you do it deeply.  This is very important for your story, your letter, or anything else you want to produce.

Enlightenment is not separate from washing dishes or growing lettuce.  To learn how to live each moment of our daily life in deep mindfulness and concentration is the practice.  The conception and unfolding of a piece of art take place exactly in these moments of our daily life.  The time when you begin to write down the music or the poems is only the time of delivering the baby.  The baby has to be in you already in order for you to deliver it.  But if the baby is not in you, even if you sit for hours and hours at your desk, there’s nothing to deliver, and you cannot produce anything.  Your insight, your compassion, and your ability to write in a way that will move the other person’s heart are flowers that bloom on the tree of your practice.  We should make good use of every moment of our daily life in order to allow this insight and compassion to bloom.

Thich Nhat Hanh is eighty-four years old this year.  He has never partnered with a woman nor had his own children to care for, yet he sees as deeply into our common lives as anyone could.  His words ring of truth and are like clear, cool water after the ugly thoughts that swirl in my head and the passions that grip my heart when I see my life’s work so repeatedly devalued.

And this passage – the truths this teacher relates here – are in large part why, even though living in a world that so often devalues women’s work, I don’t consider cleaning, or chopping carrots or searing garlic, or putting a bandaid on the knee of my child a worthless enterprise.  Even if some of the men and women I want to stand with and fight alongside, do.

Mentioned:

“Little Girls Wear Whisks” at Sociological Images

* Good Housekeeping’s Good Wife Guide, 1955

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Feb 19 2010
culture, family

good luck with that really hard work! & here’s some more unrestrained vitriol:

Ruffians

My entitled, terrible children

This morning when I log in for my morning Inter-netz fix I immediately see two of my Tweeps (yes, I use that phrase! My husband hates it! It means a person I follow or who follows me on Twitter, if you are someone like my Mom who is reading this!) have linked to the online Details Magazine article: “Are You Raising a Douchebag?” And I simply can’t help it – I have to click through. For one, I’ve caught the trendy and infectious glee of the insult “douche”, just like everyone else.*  Secondly, I feel myself drawn to the latest bit of Parenting Pop-Culture Babble even though, upon bringing the article up, I experience that inward groan as I’m assailed by ALL CAPS:

ARE YOU RAISING A DOUCHEBAG?
YOUR INDULGENT PARENTING IS SPAWNING A GENERATION OF ENTITLED HIPSTER BRATS

Right.  That by-line?  Chances that this author (one David Hochman) has absolutely nothing valuable to offer in what follows except a series of smarmy zingers that sound kind of truthy about today’s kids – and at some point he will lean back and sweepingly claim these observations apply to a lot of kids, hell maybe even “kids today” if we’re lucky?: One Hundred to Yes.

Sure enough, the following copy is a relatively dense body of pithy snark about Terrible Kids and the Terrible Parents Who Raise Them (yes, “spoiled” gets trotted out, as does “brat”, “fetishized celebrities”, and a handful of other juicy kid-hate phrases).  Hochman illustrates in detail the snotty little shits who send back foie gras and “fashion-bull[y]” their peers if the latter aren’t wearing Junior Dolce & Gabbana (I had to copy and paste that from the original article! Because I do not know how to spell fashion houses! Because I know nothing about fashion!).  For being a relatively short article (and a remarkably insubstantial one), it is packed with quips like, “Put it this way: If it’s your child, not you, who gets to choose your weekend brunch spot, or if he’s the one asking how the branzino is prepared, it’s probably time to take a hard look at your own behavior.”

Ha ha! Yes!  This is so relevant to so many parents I know.  Actually, none!  Okay! Let’s move on:

Also, Hipster Hate.  It’s so fun!  I mean, doing an exacting send-up of hipsters means we get to demonstrate our knowledge of said Hip cultural edifices (what’s branzino?) but at the same time sneeringly dismiss those who are enthusiastic about pursuing them.  Picking on hipsters – it’s almost like a way to dehumanize a group of people and assume they only have the most shallow, superficial personalities and aren’t real, whole, earnest human beings!  Nevermind that I have yet to meet someone who self-identifies as “hipster”, but I have heard about a hundred examples of people smirkingly referring to others as such.  I could gladly go the rest of my life not hearing the moniker invoked as a vague, snooty pejorative, but I fear I won’t be allowed to.

Midway through the article there’s a brief, oh so brief, departure from picking on contemporary and/or wealthy parents and their kiddos:

It’s not just about money, though. Since the nineties, a surge in overprotective parenting has promoted discussion over discipline and made leisure activities contingent upon nanny CPR training (have you ever even considered letting your kid play with a pocket knife or a rusty Flexible Flyer, never mind have a paper route?).

Off-topic: at this moment my own children are playing with a pocket knife and a rusty Flexible Flyer (and likely an arc welder to join the two), but let’s get back on point.

So apparently we’ve had some “discussion over discipline” since the nineties. That’s some terrible shit.  Or wait – what do you even mean by that? Nevermind, forget a relevant discussion about overprotective parenting (and there are many to be had)** – no, we need hand-wringing and broad statements! Cue quote from author Katie Allison Granju:

We no longer allow children to have personal autonomy, to experience hard knocks, or to take real risks. [...] The result is a nation of overweight, overindulged, overly neurotic kids who whine and moan and often can’t function on their own.

Right. An entire generation.  Not one parent allows one kid to take a risk, ever.  Oh, and TEH FATTIEZ!

Why do I care about this article?  I know what you’re thinking: Why fuss? It’s a blip on the screen.  Yet, I see so much of this sort of thing: an author inexpert on the topic, gathering up a bunch of “authorities” to make a bunch of sweeping claims about Parents and Kids Today, as if today’s parenting culture was a monolith of Borg-like assholes going through the motions, rather than a complex, heavily nuanced series of mores, values, and traditions being fought in the trenches by, you know, real people.  In fact I’d posit that part of today’s parenting culture, indeed, are the throw-away judgy articles like this one, and I cringe when I read them – because I know how bad they make people feel, and not bad in a “Hey, you’re right, thanks for putting your finger on it!  I’d been feeling bummed about this. Now let’s motivate myself for some change!” way.  Just: bad.

Because oh my gosh! You are not writing this article in a cultural vacuum! Do you have any idea how much judgment/hate there is out there for parents? (especially moms, that’s the funnest Hate there is!).  In fact, maybe that’s why it’s so easy to write and publish this kind of thing – that stuff is out there like oxygen, yours for the taking and inspiration!

Do articles like this help anyone?  Is there a reader out there who, even though unable to relate entirely to the name-dropping and moneyed institutions referenced therein (or maybe they can; more about this in a minute), nevertheless feels that tug of, “Maybe that’s me, raising a douchey kid”?  Oh… maybe. Maybe one or two (note: article will not provide a course of action if this is the case).  Are there lots and lots of other parents who read this and feel gripped with a vague anxiety and an intense knowledge of how much they are judged by the public when out and about with their kiddos?  Uh-huh.  Are there a handful of parents who read this and feel smug that these are other (“rich”) parents raising a generation of jerks?  Yup.  Are there lots of other childfree people who read this and feel their breeder hate (and profound ignorance of some of the realities of parenting) increase? Oh heck yeah.  So hey, good job!

I realize many people write copy to get paid, so a zingy article is the goal in and of itself.  I just wish there was so, so much less of this kind of thing.  Writing an extremely critical article about Entitled Brats and how many of them there are today – apparently cared for by parents who only, only care about living some hip, urbane life – it just doesn’t match up to reality.

Because you know what’s weird?  I actually know parents.  I know a lot of them! Oops, I even am a parent! Weird how this happens! And I can tell you, despite the harsh terminology of articles like this, and the inevitable trotting out of the evil “friend” parent (never has any other progenitor assed out so thoroughly on their job, says the finger-wagging expert, than the Friend Parent), I do not personally know a single parent who doesn’t care very, very much about what kind of person their child is, and who he/she is becoming.  Daily in my life, friends seek me out to talk about their kids’ development, and not even in some hyper-vigilant, paranoid, fussy way.  Like, I’m raising this kid, what should I feed them? & My kid got hit in the face at school.  It’s no big deal but he’s a little sad. & Oh, my kid’s having trouble at night, growing pains.  What do you do for that? Oooooh, what a bunch of tightly-wound superficial assholes we all are.

So, you know, even if as an American parent you’re wary of the popularity of parent-hate, I think articles like these don’t mean much besides a bunch of judgy horseshit.  This particular article is just taking aim and firing at the moneyed, urban (and I daresay mostly white) variety.  If you are a parent whose lifestyle touches on some of the cultural markers referenced – you fly first class and take ski trips and go to brunch – okay, then.  Good luck with that, because this article at least gives you no help at how to navigate your privileged cultural terrain while raising a conscientious, empathetic kid (and just so you know, I don’t hate on money; our family wage puts us at working class but I myself feel relatively privileged by the world’s standards; besides, no matter where you are in America’s socio-economic specturm, empathy is one of our hardest jobs as parents).  Or wait, at the very end Mr. Hochman instructs you not to have such elaborate birthday parties.  And to hire the services of Child Minded, a parent-coaching with a fee of $1200 a day.

And if you are a parent, and your kid is kind of an asshole?  Well, I for one am not going to hate on you.  It happens. BTDT. Call me up, and let’s talk.  I’ll put the coffee on.

(Edited to add: my online friend Daniel Bigler penned a less-ranty, more spot-on post re: the Details piece; you can read it at his blog, last link below).

Mentioned:

Bill Corbett & Lenore Skenazy

Details Magazine, “Are You Raising a Douchebag?”

* “Douchebag; An Insult for the Ages” at The Rotund

“Truthiness”

** Free Range Kids, a blog; my own thoughts on “Just In Case” parenting

Katie Allison Granju (blog)

Daniel Bigler’s post at his blog

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