On Parenting Politics

~ Laura

It turns out the Mayim Bialik is an anti-vaccinater. Credibility lost.

Honestly, I am bored with the never ending parenting books and mother wars. Nobody ever says anything new. I suppose I should check out these two new books. 

Published by Laura

15 thoughts on “On Parenting Politics”

  1. “Thanks to what Badinter calls this “nonchalant approach to motherhood” — which she dates to the once widespread practice in France of sending newborns away to distant wet nurses (in whose care they often died) — French society, she says, has successfully framed mother­hood, even working motherhood with multiple children, as an appealing prospect.”
    Fantastic. This too:
    “They don’t much go in for breast-feeding. Soundly rejecting the view that “the ideal mother is enmeshed with her child bodily and mentally,” they drink and smoke throughout their pregnancies.”
    The funny thing is that if you removed the aura of sexy Frenchness from the descriptions of some of these parenting practices (including, from what I’ve seen in previous articles on French parenting, enthusiastic spanking), even Francophile Americans would think to themselves “white trash” and move on.
    Oh, and the traditional psychoanalytic French treatment of autism is backward and cruel to both children and parents.
    (The more assertive French parenting style is probably a good thing, though.)

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  3. It might be helpful to reconceptualize the standard French parenting practices as just a sort of time capsule of US practices of 50 years ago, because that’s what they look like.

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  4. I didn’t even realize Blossom was still working. I think Joey was the more level-headed one, so I’m waiting to see what he has to say about medical issues related to raising children.

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  5. On the Mayim side of things, I have a friend who was using a naturopath to cure her chronic bladder infections….fast forward to me visiting her in the hospital for emergency treatment for what became a massive kidney infection.
    I’m living in the west coast land of “if you just combine the right local/organic foods/herbs, you’ll never get cancer and no bad things will ever happen to you”. And yes, also no vaccinations ’cause they cause autism and asthma.
    Wouldn’t it be nice to have all that control over things?
    I’m all over organic and local foods and healthy living, just not into the magical thinking part of it.

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  6. Yes! I saw that (about Mayim) and thought the same thing. Then I quickly closed the browser window and tried to ignore it, because I love her otherwise.

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  7. The only reason that people can consider not vaccinating is because of the safety of the herd that most of us have created by vaccinating our children. I agree there may be risks with vaccines, I’m willing to take the risks because of not only my child’s health, but society’s health.
    It pisses me off that people seem to think they have the luxury of exposing their child and others because most of us do the right thing.

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  8. Regarding Mayim Bialik, what credibility with you did she have to lose? I mean, I love her as an actress on The Big Bang Theory but I don’t see that translating into anything else. And yes, she has a Ph.D. in a biological science. Again, I know lots of people who have such credentials. I don’t take them as the be-all and end-all on parenting or even on science writ large. We’ve all known someone who’s brilliant in one way and off the rails on a lot of the rest of their lives: celebrities come in the same varieties!
    If we stopped thinking that there’s some valuable insight to be gleaned from someone who’s celebrated because they’ve been a successful entertainer or become famous for being famous, the world would be a better place. No more Jenny McCarthy ignorantly holding forth on her anti-vax superstitions! No more Gwyneth Paltrow telling us how to eat! (Much as I love Ms. Paltrow as an actress, I have no interest in the rest of her life and opinions.)

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  10. What makes her more of a menace than Jenny McCarthy is both the studying and the fact that she is so adorable in so many other ways. Depressing. I loved her, and Joey too. Basically, Wendy’s reaction.
    Your linked article mentions a measles party, and links to a Roald Dahl piece about his daughter’s death from measles. I’ve never heard of a measles party (because measles was always well understood as a killer in my childhood at least): we used to do chicken pox parties, the principle being that it was better for all the kids in the neighbourhood to get it simultaneously so school would be disrupted a lot, once.
    Oh, on drinking and smoking during pregnancy — sure on smoking, even the French shouldn’t do it (my mum was a 40-a-dayer throughout my gestation), but so many pregnant women and the children they give birth to would have a better time if they would just drink a little bit.

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  11. “…the principle being that it was better for all the kids in the neighbourhood to get it simultaneously so school would be disrupted a lot, once.”
    There are at least a couple infections that it’s actually easier to deal with in childhood, so in the absence of a vaccine, there would also have been a lot of medical sense in exposing children to certain things earlier rather than later. Wikipedia says in their chicken pox article that “Infection in otherwise healthy adults tends to be more severe and may be fatal.” Likewise with mononucleosis, “When mono strikes young children, the illness is usually so mild that it passes as a common cold or the flu. When it occurs during adolescence or adulthood, however, the disease can be much more serious.”
    http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/understanding-mononucleosis-basics
    (I had both in my teens, much to my dismay. Yay, chicken pox vaccine!)

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  12. I had never heard of rotavirus until my kids got it in 2006, which was coincidentally the year that the vaccine for rotavirus debuted in the US. My three-year-old spent several hours in ER being rehydrated via IV while her baby brother had to spend a night at the hospital being rehydrated. It was just our bad luck that our oldest entered the germy petri dish of preschool before the vaccine became routine.
    The Wikipedia article on rotavirus says:
    “Although rotavirus was discovered in 1973[5] and accounts for up to 50% of hospitalisations for severe diarrhoea in infants and children,[6] its importance is still not widely known within the public health community, particularly in developing countries.”
    “Rotavirus is usually an easily managed disease of childhood, but worldwide more than 450,000 children under five years of age still die from rotavirus infection each year,[9] most of whom live in developing countries,[10] and almost two million more become severely ill.[7] In the United States, before initiation of the rotavirus vaccination programme, rotavirus caused about 2.7 million cases of severe gastroenteritis in children, almost 60,000 hospitalisations, and around 37 deaths each year.[11]”

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  13. I got mono as an adult at grad school. It was a week before I could walk the 3/4 mile to the health center and didn’t have to beg rides. I got chickenpox in 8th grade. Actually, I got ill while in a canoe on a class trip celebrating our completion of junior high. Somebody’s mom had driven out with lunch and was able to take me home or that would have been a long day. I knew that one was coming because it worked up through my younger siblings in order of age.

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  14. 40-a-dayer! Impressive. You don’t see those numbers much any more. I always figured that once I turned 70, I would let myself go and smoke that much.
    Oh, if we’re going to pick worst celebrity mom, I think Jenny McCarthy would win the prize. And Oprah and Huff Post for promoting her.

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