As I read Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, all I could think of was how happy I was that my own daughter was settled happily in her dorm room at college. I really don't have to worry about this, I thought. Whatever parental good I did or damage I inflicted on my little darling is already on the books.
But with my relief came a question. Why is being a mother so hard? And why do we all harbor such emotionally corrosive fears that we aren't doing it right?
Mothers rose in anger when Chua talked about the full-contact parenting that denied sleepovers, play dates, TV, computer games -- and where anything less than an A on a report card is a family disgrace on a par, at least by U.S. parental standards, with knocking off a Seven-Eleven.
But I have to think that the outrage was tinged with uncertainty and, quite possibly, a pinch of guilt.
Some of that is personal. By failing to enforce the no-TV-before-homework rule, have I invited my child to be less than she can be? Some of it is cultural paranoia. The Chinese are going to run global trade, build a dominant military, call in our debt and colonize Mars. And it's all my fault.
A catchy title and a little fear of inadequacy makes for a best-seller and some good headlines. But this is actually nothing new. The angst over our supposed failings as mothers is a long running serialization that bounces from too much to not enough to wrong kind to complicity in America's decline.
Before being compared to Tiger moms, we were taken to task for being helicopter moms: same idea, but much gentler on the self esteem. Over-parenting sold a lot of cue cards for one-year-olds, lent logic to playing Mozart in the nursery, made for a lot of very stressful parent-teacher meetings and, at least to some extent, led to the end of dodge-ball and the rise of personal Little League coaches. Generally, instead inflicting outrageous expectation on our kids, we inflicted it on every one around them.
Many helicopter moms, of course, were decorated veterans of the "mommy wars" -- the internecine battle for superiority that pitted working mothers against stay-at-home mothers. The battle lines: working mothers short-change their kids in the name of career; stay-at-home moms are trapped in an unnatural remnant of an earlier time. Those chaffing under one choice would take it out on those who made the other. "If you're wrong, then I must be right -- even though there are a lot of days I don't feel right at all."
As a working mother who raised two kids, I helicoptered in with impunity -- never shy about sharing my thoughts with teachers, coaches or anybody else who affected my offspring. I was on the front lines of the mommy wars -- a stalwart defender of working and parenting.
But in a career studying families, I was also blessed with a chance to observe a rich variety of mothers in action. Particularly during the work on my previous book Raising Boys Without Men, I got to know single mothers by choice and circumstance. I got to know two-mother families. I met a lot of great kids, and a lot of strong women who worked very hard to make them that way.
Because of their circumstances, they were a little too busy to fight the mommy wars, and didn't have much time to over-inject themselves in their children's lives. And I don't think they worry much now about how they measure up against Tiger Moms. They love their children dearly, try to raise them with values, challenge and help them to succeed, and protect them with everything they have.
Best-sellers aside: maybe that is all a mother should have to be.
Follow Dr. Peggy Drexler on Twitter: www.twitter.com/drpeggydrexler
Tom Doctoroff: China's Ambivalent Tiger Moms: When in Rome...
My sister was getting a shampoo in the kitchen sink and said the water was too hot, so my mother slammed her head under the water against to porcelain.
When I was maybe 7, we are playing tag, and circling the adults on the patio. My mother grabbed my wrist, dug in her red fingernail, and dragged it forward with a mountain of skin.
When my mother drives up the driveway for her 5 minute visits on the way to the lottery dealer, when she comes over and asks for a few thousand, when she brings me homemade Italian food ( I do not eat Italian food), I remember what I saw a Rabbi say on the History Channel. "Honoring your father and mother is the hardest commandment."
I never had kids. When I see parents talking to their kids as if the kids were human, well...I marvel. I get a bit jealous, because I have no frame of reference.
I'm sorry, I can't remember the topic.
Without birth control, a gang of kids was usually the result.
Those women did not have the time or energy to worry about messing up their kids.
Today? Small families, often one or two kids, and mothers WORRY if they are doing it right.
THAT is a side effect of having few kids and being more involved with them.
I tried the pronoun substitution (neat device), and it failed at "emotionally corrosive fears." Traditional fathers do not have the luxury of allowing themselves to experience that state...much less write about it.
I agree that it is terribly out of balance. Given the setting in which this all occurs, the lack of balance is no great surprise.
Your words are eloquent and right on target for what happens to men in our culture, and it
makes me very sad that this is the reality for most men. You're clearly more conscious than most and that gives me hope that these silly posts have some meaning. The very men who
are distanced & aloof from their children emotionally are also distant & disconnected from
themselves.
tandem learning in human development.
No matter how kind, compassionate or nurturing a parent is, they cannot guarantee a child the important things: clean air, clean water, a peaceful healthy society that has a place for them and that cares for them. Not being able to give children the important things, parents compensate for their guilt by giving kids every brain-numbing gadget on the market or by being nondisciplinarians or by trying, like Chua, to exert totalitarian control over the child.
How do parents raise happy, healthy, sane children in a society that is toxic, misogynistic, run by and for the military and corporations, where nuclear disaster looms always overhead like some sword of Damocles and each disaster of the day is worse than the last?
Amy Chua cruelly stole her daughters' childhoods to bolster Chua's own hungry disastrous ego. Chua's youngest daughter thought her mother's book should be called "The Perfect Child and the Flesh-Eating Monster Mother." How can unhappy neurotic adults raise happy healthy children? They can't and the evidence is everywhere.
Parents, your responsibility is the environment. Make your home nurturing and wholesome.
Obama's are a great example.
And have faith in millions of years of evolution. Children are not suicidal. They are driven to adapt and master their their environment.
Environment is the total package, from food, to music, to conversation, to modeling what you parents are doing (do your children see you read?), to aesthetics.
Pet peeve is kids watching tv screens in the back of their SUV's or vans! Entertaining Ourselves to Death was a game changer for me (Neal Ferguson?)
As an adult I am so grateful for my parents. As a child I often complained when I wasn't allowed to do what "everybody else" was allowed to do. The older I got, the smarter they became. I tried to follow their example in raising my kids and it worked! Lots of family centered activities with honest interaction between parents and children. High expectations of achievement and responsibility, Praise for the positives and serious discussions about the consequences of the negatives. Most of all spending time together instead of spending money to keep the kids out of your hair.
Today parents seem to be afraid of their children who quickly learn that they can dictate their own terms to mom and dad. If you are a parent, you must also be the adult.
I see two problems here with motherhood. First, by saying there are no manuals for being a good mother, what one is really saying is that one's own mother wasn't so hot. In fact, that is probably true. And it goes back endlessly generation after generation through all the mistakes that cultures, family and the individual have taught and have made. Only a sincere self-examination will reveal these errors in our belief systems and behavior patterns, thereby preventing us from passing them on to our unsuspecting kids.
Second, mothers are nailed to the unspoken law that they rear their children to conform to society. That's one reasons why it is so hard to say 'no' to your kids. "Everybody else is doing it or has it." Whatever happened to the concepts of independence, self-sufficiency, resourcefulness, teaching one's children to stand on their own, inside their truth, be who they really were born to be and not who society says they must be, or even what their parents say they must be?
Just heeding those two things would go a long way to creating good parents and great children.