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.