http://online.wsj.com/media/swf/VideoMicroPlayer.swf
Erica Jong says that Attachment Parenting has made parenting too difficult, especially for women. (Here's her essay in the Wall Street Journal.) It makes mothers feel guilty and makes it difficult for women to work. None of these critiques of modern parenting is new. We've talked a lot about this on this blog and on other bloggie places, but I did find her comments about community and politics interesting.
Jong says that attachment parenting is so demanding that it keeps progressive women out of the political process. We've also become so centered on the needs of the immediate family that we haven't reshaped our community.
Indeed, although attachment parenting comes with an exquisite progressive pedigree, it is a perfect tool for the political right. It certainly serves to keep mothers and fathers out of the political process. If you are busy raising children without societal help and trying to earn a living during a recession, you don't have much time to question and change the world that you and your children inhabit. What exhausted, overworked parent has time to protest under such conditions?
The first wave of feminists, in the 19th century, dreamed of communal kitchens and nurseries. A hundred years later, the closest we have come to those amenities are fast-food franchises that make our children obese and impoverished immigrant nannies who help to raise our kids while their own kids are left at home with grandparents. Our foremothers might be appalled by how little we have transformed the world of motherhood.
I think she's right on the money with these ideas. We haven't reshaped our communities. We are too busy to get involved with real political change.
As I'm back in the world of full time parenting, I've found it the whole process very isolating. It's been particularly difficult to belong to a community of other parents of special needs kids. I'm doing it, but it requires research and stealth. She's also right that parenting and working is so time intensive and exhausting that individuals don't have much energy left to make the bigger changes in the world.
I'm not sure that Attachment Parenting is the enemy. I think she identified the problem, but maybe not the cause of the problem.
UPDATE: Read Jong's daugther's essay. Also Hanna Rosin.
UPDATE2: Read Motherlode.
Apt. 11d 
I also think Erica Jong is right on the money, but I think she left out one important point. It’s not the patriarchy or even the right wing that’s enforcing ever-rising parenting standards. Men don’t judge (or very rarely judge) women for their mothering abilities. It’s the other women. Take this from someone who used to live in Park Slope and now resides in a ‘burb that advertises itself as progressive.
As I always say, I am still waiting to find the school where more than ten percent of the parent “volunteers” are men….
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I’m unclear on the details…is she speaking of Attachment Parenting, or Garden-Variety Parenting? I’m not convinced I can take seriously anyone who can assert straight-faced, Mother and father are presumed to be able to do this alone—without the village it takes to raise any child.
Wow–from Scholastic Press children’s book to sine qua non in 16 years! (http://tinyurl.com/2e5s3yw)
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The problem is not “attachment parenting” (although, frequently, the problem is attachment parents.) The problem is that there are actually freakin’ styles of parenting that you can name and categorize people based on.
I very clearly remember people asking if we were going to do “attachment parenting” or “Ferberizing.” As if we needed to decide by the end of the second trimester whether we would be in the camp where failing to pick the baby up constituted child abuse, or whether failing to let the baby “cry it out” constituted child abuse.
I’m hope my parenting does not fall into a “style.” Yesterday I was the hardass with the kid screaming in the restaurant because she wanted dessert but hadn’t eaten any vegetables. Other times I’m the softy coming home with the happy meals past the condescending glare of the “we don’t let our children eat unhealthy foods” parents.
In my mind, it’s not whether attachment parenting is “good” or “bad.” (It would have been bad for us because, irrespective of the effects on the kids, it would have ruined the marriage!) It’s that people try to fit their parenting into a style at all.
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The article as a whole left me kind of cold. Jong criticizes:
“Movie stars proudly display their baby bumps, and the shiny magazines at the checkout counter never tire of describing the joys of celebrity parenthood. . . Professional narcissists like Angelina Jolie and Madonna want their own little replicas in addition to the African and Asian children that they collect to advertise their open-mindedness.”
Should we be ashamed of our baby bumps? Perhaps be sent out to the country for several months until the embarrassing problem can be dealt with?
We hate mothers who judge women who don’t breastfeed or use cloth diapers, but are justified in assaulting Madonna for the crime of having both biological and adopted children?
In reading the article and trying to determine who the enemy is, I was left that she had determined the enemy to be “Everyone but me.”
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I kind of agree, as a parent who leans towards AP, that AP really does contain a push for women to focus exclusively on the controllable parts of childrearing that are to be found within the four walls of the nuclear family home. It’s one reason I’ll only ever say I ‘lean’ that way.
But I also agree that it’s not the root source of the problem…although Dr. Sears might well be one of the sources of the problem. *I* freaked out reading it on a feminist basis and I am no Erica Jong.
I think the core problem is that it is really hard, right now, to do parenting “right” (whatever your right is) as well as work “right” and so many people end up feeling wrong. There is no trust that things will work out; our kids will grow up okay; we will have jobs into the future; and if the carpet is shabby at least it’s clean.
As a hormonal mess on mat leave trying to figure out if it was worth working full-time to net $300/mo after daycare and commuting expenses it was pretty comforting to think that maybe choosing to give up that money would really not be about my inability to set priorities but rather about The Best Decision For My Child which is such a noble and important cause.
But in the end it didn’t go down that way ’cause I also wanted to work, wanted to be on a salary grid with benefits and also – I observed so many kids doing fine with various other configurations.
My husband on the other hand didn’t grapple with that. He has confidence in our ability to pull things off. And that is what I find strange and annoying, even though I can’t see out of my cultural lens to understand why he didn’t feel the direct, personal angst. (He totally shares the long-term angst.)
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Jenn, you wrote my comment (but with much better writing).
I too don’t understand why my husband seems to feel so little angst. But, I think part of the difference is that he feels angst about different things. I’ve found that he’s incorporated a huge amount of “breadwinner” angst into his responsibility to the family. I was surprised about this and find myself talking him down on lots of items he seems to angst into thinking he has to earn money to supply to his children (private schools, trips to hawaii, things that are clearly, in any world, luxuries, not necessities). He has to talk me down when I start worrying about friendships, emotional, whether there’s sexual harassment going on in the 4th grade, . . . .)
“In reading the article and trying to determine who the enemy is, I was left that she had determined the enemy to be “Everyone but me.””
Isn’t that classic Erica Jong? I liked that they had a link to Molly Jong-Fast, but I think she was kinder in that essay than she is sometimes.
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I think Jong would have garnered more credibility for her argument by attacking styles of parenting/societal judgment of parents– rather than focusing on Attachment Parenting. Some of what Dr. Sears says drives me crazy, but he’s not nearly as black and white as Jong assumes.(This essay makes me wonder whether she actually read his Baby Book.) She seems to lump AP-ers with the militant followers who dominate message boards/AP blogs– not the parents who very quietly breastfeed for a few years, co-sleep or homeschool. And I know of plenty of working parents who practice AP (I did, too, when I went back to work).
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Oh, and Erica Jong is one of the last people who I’d want to take motherhood advice from (on par with Palin, either Sarah or Bristol). Hilary Clinton, though, I want to hear how she managed to raise a kid who seems OK, who seems (though, of course, what do I know) to be able to stand on stage and sincerely say “I’m so proud of my mom.”
I’d like to hear advice from Carol Grieder, too, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2009, and whose daughter also seems like she’s doing OK.
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Eh. The most community-oriented people I know now were all sort of rabid AP parents back when the label actually applied (roughly birth to three). The most community-oriented group I belonged to, both in terms of the inward community and in terms of outward action (fund-raising, volunteering, etc) was La Leche League. I agree that some AP ideas can be anti-progressive, and I think that needs a lot of attention, and yet … the most progressive folks I know were also (in GENERAL, not exclusively) the ones most likely to cloth diaper, co-sleep, breastfeed past age one.
And again, what does ANY of that have to do with parenting by grade school? I couldn’t tell you which kids in the class were ferberized if my life depended on it.
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“I couldn’t tell you which kids in the class were ferberized if my life depended on it.”
Indeed.
“I want to hear how she managed to raise a kid who seems OK, who seems (though, of course, what do I know) to be able to stand on stage and sincerely say “I’m so proud of my mom.””
I don’t think we do know. Sure, if the kids’ lives are total Lindsay Lohan-style disasters, it’s hard to hide, but anything less than that has traditionally been kept pretty quiet.
Also, isn’t everybody proud of their mom (barring major maternal substance abuse, creepy step-fathers, physical abuse, etc.)? Heck, I bet even Courtney Love’s daughter is proud of her. Lastly, how hard is it for two highly educated, highly-paid professionals to raise one child? Having only one child is so much easier than having two that it’s not even funny, and I’m not even comparing having one to having three or four or five or six. Having more than one is a totally different gig. (My husband and I periodically each take a child for a week or more, so this is experimentally proven.)
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Amy P, one of my daughters has been saying since she was five that she will have only one child, if she has children someday. Why? Because it’s less stressful for the parents and more fun for the kid. (Almost all of her best friends have been only children. Their parents universally report that they want a sibling. Snort.)
However, I do think there’s an experiential difference between having one child, and having two children whose numbers sometimes drop to one. To take one example, I had three infants at once. It was pretty brutal. And yet, my friends who had one infant at a time also found it pretty brutal. I’d be hard pressed to argue that their experience was “easier” than mine. Sleep deprivation is sleep deprivation, you know?
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I can’t tell the difference between the kids who were ferberized or not, but I can tell the difference between the kids who had involved parents and those who didn’t. By involved parents, I don’t mean those who stayed home with the kids. I see a lot of uninvolved parents who stayed home and just let their kids watch TV all day. Those kids are worse off than the kids who went to daycare. There is a growing gulf between the middle school kids, and the gulf is largely determined by parental care.
I think Erica Jong doesn’t quite understand attachment parenting and uses the term too broadly to apply to all kinds of involved parents. She clearly wasn’t an involved parent as her daughter explained. Her daughter seemed to have turned out just fine, but not every kid is able to do that. She is an exception.
What I liked about Jong’s article was the critique that we haven’t done much to revolutionize parenting. It has become even more difficult as we struggled to parent the traditional way and we try to navigate the workplace. I like the utopian ideas of the early feminists of community-based parenting and I think we haven’t done that. In fact, we are even farther away from community-based parenting than in the past. Parenting has become an isolating enterprise. We should be reshaping society, rather than finding bandaid solutions for our immediate family.
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Jody,
There’s also the issue of the entertainment spontaneously generated by multiple bigger kids. On the other hand, that spontaneously created entertainment is one of the things that puts the mileage on parental nerves.
Laura,
Your community-based parenting would have to be done in tandem with the TV parents and the Slurpies-for-breakfast parents. I’m not sure you’d like the resulting compromises.
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While I’ve never had a lot of use for Erica Jong, I was delighted to see criticism of Dr. Sears from a feminist perspective. It’s surprisingly hard to find, and as a critic of AP and occasional editor of the Wikipedia article on AP, I’ve certainly looked. For couples interested in attempting some form of equal co-parenting, the alarm bells should go off when you realize that with a very large family and a medical/authorial career, Sears is essentially writing about the effort his wife is putting in when he writes about parenting.
That said, I’ve had a lot of friends who identify as APers for whom it’s worked really well, and in the other cases–ones where it’s led to divorce–a lot of other craziness probably just got focused through an AP lens. I suspect that the successful ones are able to ignore the parts of Sears et al. they find objectionable more successfully than my wife and I would be able to.
I do wish I had a quote on this, though: “At one point, the Searses suggest that you borrow money so that you can bend your life to the baby’s needs.”
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“We should be reshaping society, rather than finding bandaid solutions for our immediate family. ”
I think that there’s actually an active conflict going on with “reshaping society” v “individual band-aids” because of competitive child-raising.
You’re comparing kids with uninvolved (really uninvolved) v involved. My milieu includes a different spectrum: involved to hyper-involved. I’m find a lot of parents balancing community v indidivual in their children’s lives (i.e. does the kid spend time on the community production, or the select soccer team, or do they do the school play or play on the school team with their friends). In fact, the kids are sometimes actively battling their parents to chose what’s best for the group over what’s best for them. It’s weird, but it’s part of the bigger picture that impairs “fixing” society.
I think Jong might disagree about being an involved parent — I think she’s just say that she was involved through the people she hired, rather than being personally involved. I think whether that works satisfactorily for a child depends on all of the people in the interaction (child, parent, caregiver).
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“Also, isn’t everybody proud of their mom”
I don’t think so, at least, not for something other than being their mom.
My criterion for successful celebrity parenting (and that’s not just 2 high income professionals; celebrities face different challenges) is 1) no unplanned teen pregnancies. 2) a college education 3) a job 4) no arrests for drug or alcohol use 5) no admission to psychiatric facilities 6) no “tell-all” book complaining about how you were psychologically scarred for life by your upbringing.
(I think Clinton and Gore’s children qualify — though I don’t know about all the Gore children. Bush I & II and Reagan’s don’t and I don’t think Amy Carter does, either, but don’t know enough about her to know)
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bj,
The Bush twins seem to have turned out pretty well (aside from the fake ID/slightly underage drinking thing). One’s a teacher, the other has worked in African AIDS charities. Al Gore Jr. has had a rather colorful career, generating the following unforgettable headline: “Al Gore’s son arrested on drug charges
24-year-old was driving Prius at about 100 mph, authorities say.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19601277/
One of the young Bidens (a social worker) has had a number of run-ins with the authorities.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/5075909/Video-alleged-to-show-Joe-Bidens-daughter-snorting-cocaine.html
If you google “Chelsea Clinton drunk photos” there are some unflattering pics of her falling down drunk.
I think it’s safest to assume that in any major political family, there’s at least one child who has done deeply embarrassing and/or illegal stuff. Scratch that–in any family with teen or twentysomething kids, there’s at least one child who has really screwed up, not always in ways that are obvious to outsiders.
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“No arrests for drug or alcohol use” is much too strict of a standard. I think everybody should get one (or two if it is just drinking), as long as no one is hurt, before people start to worry about them.
“No admission to psychiatric facilities” is counterproductive because there are a great many people who really need admission to psychiatric facilities and only rarely is this for issues of how they were raised.
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“”No admission to psychiatric facilities” is counterproductive because there are a great many people who really need admission to psychiatric facilities and only rarely is this for issues of how they were raised.”
That crossed my mind, too.
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I’ll just say that judging from the NYTimes on Sunday, Frances Cobain is NOT proud of her mother…so I’d say there’s definitely a Bad Mother and not just in the Ayelet sense.
I don’t want to take parenting advice from Erica Jong, who’s daughter did have a serious drug addiction (which she neglects to discuss in that article), though that’s not my problem with her. I don’t really take advice from anyone but people who I think actually care about me, unless its merely of the super practical, parent-hacks kind of thing.
But I do think AP, while it works for people, does have political implications. You are free to do whatever works for you, but I think its a fair criticism. But I do think that most parents stumble on the parenting style that works best for them, thank god, and raise good kids, even if its not MY way of doing things! and whoever said that women are the ones judging is SO right.
I will say though that in my LA public school, a LOT of dads help out. Maybe they are freelancers or unemployed, but I see a lot of them.
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“I’ll just say that judging from the NYTimes on Sunday, Frances Cobain is NOT proud of her mother…so I’d say there’s definitely a Bad Mother and not just in the Ayelet sense.”
Bummer.
“I don’t want to take parenting advice from Erica Jong, who’s daughter did have a serious drug addiction (which she neglects to discuss in that article), though that’s not my problem with her.”
And Jong still wrote the article about how contemporary parents are overdoing it? Wow.
I found this section interesting:
“We like to imagine that mothering is immutable and decreed by natural law, but in fact it has encompassed such disparate practices as baby farming, wet-nursing and infanticide. The possessive, almost proprietary motherhood that we consider natural today would have been anathema to early kibbutzniks in Israel.”
I read that and I think, so what happened to those kibbutzes with their revolutionary structure? I haven’t read a lot about the history of the Israeli kibbutz system, but I have a vague recollection that mothers wanting to live in the same home with their children was the first nail in the coffin of that particular Utopian experiment. So much for the infinite malleability of mother-child relations.
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I don’t think Jong cares if we take her parenting advice. I think she wants us those of us who are politically minded to resist *any* parenting advice so that we can challenge the status quo with regard to the social structures that we may find oppressive — which may or may not include parenting norms.
Like Laura, I am frustrated by my own failure to participate in larger political battles. I work full-time and my evenings are spent correcting homework, cooking dinner, bathing children, doing laundry, … and doing more work. Clucking my tongue about the Tea Party while reading the NYT is not satisfying to me as a stand-in for attending organizing meetings, campaigning, and mobilizing people, my pre-children activities.
It may be the case that I can’t have it all all at the same time, and that I have to return to active political engagement in five years or so, but that doesn’t mean that my absence/silence doesn’t currently serve the political right, as Jong asserts.
I think revolutionizing motherhood might look different today (although I would love to live in one of those feminist-inspired apartment buildings with a public dining room and laundry service). I think it might have to do with parents abdicating responsibility for their children’s “success.” What would the world look like if our jobs as parents only consisted of requiring our children to be compassionate and caring citizens, instead of us taking on the burden of their future “success” as individuals?
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