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"How American Motherhood Ruined My Life"
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| HardTranceProd |
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/co...icle4964871.ece
We've been set impossibly high standards when it comes to raising children. What's wrong with benign British neglect?
Janice Turner
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On Monday I waved off my ten-year-old as he left for his school journey. Except “waved off” is insufficient. “Waved off” is a kiss and ta-ta. This was more appropriate to elite forces embarking on a tour of Fallujah than Year 6 spending five days studying coastal erosion in Kent.
We parents loitered for almost an hour while our offspring were briefed and toileted, then formed a phalanx of honour by the coach. As the kids boarded, we actually cheered. “We're like celebrities!” cried my beaming son. Yes, well... A few of us were muttering and looking at watches. But until the little darlings were out of sight, no one dared leave.
It reminded me how, in the decade since I became a mother, parental obligation has mushroomed. These days raising children is like using the supermarket self-checkout, where every few minutes an electronic voice screams “approval needed!” and a woman must scuttle over and placate the machine. No longer is it enough to attend a rugby match, but Sunday training too; we must “watch” yawnsome swimming lessons and sit beside a children while they do their homework - just in case they look up from the scrum/water/Latin primer and approval is needed.
I need someone to blame for raising the bar, and I'm going to choose American parents. In fact, as she's probably selling up her cockney boozer and packing up her patronising children's books with their self-serving homilies neither to bully the beautiful (English Roses), nor gossip about the rich (Mr Peabody's Apples) I might pin it on Madonna, apparently too busy with her Sticky & Sweet tour to comply with her British husband's request for “an ordinary family life”.
When my first son was a toddler I'd schlep over to fancy West London playgrounds just to spy on American parents. While we Brits slumped, hung-over, on benches with coffee and Sunday papers, US mothers were getting down and dirty in the sandpit. “Good job!” they cried at each misshapen mud pie. If two tots disputed ownership of a bucket these moms piled in like UN peacekeeping detail. Oh stop “interacting”, I'd long to cry, and get an adult life.
Since then we've all sucked up the American way of parenting. It is no coincidence that Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow began breeding in London around this time, transfixing us with their glamorous maternity wardrobes, fast-returning figures and macrobiotic packed lunches. Two other American mothers in Britain, shocked at our hand-me-down cots and their inabilty to buy £700 painted summerhouses and wellies patterned with bumble bees, set up the Great Little Trading Company, heralding the onslaught of the marketplace into the British nursery.
What is so vital about America, what makes it so thrilling as a nation, is the deep-rooted belief that everything can be improved, transformed and - with enough ingenuity and effort - perfected. Having the American A-list in our midst - and the disposable income of an economic boom - turned British women from a nation of stubbly legged home-permers and gym-avoiders into waxed, manicured, extreme-yoga devotees.
But apply the principles of self-improvement to parenting and insanity beckons. In 2004 the American writer Judith Warner published Perfect Madness, about middle-class mothers in Washington, who, feeling duty-bound to leave their careers, had funnelled every atom of creativity, ambition and status anxiety into raising children. I read it with snorts of derision: women who micromanaged playdates so that their kids made the “right” friends, scheduled in a dozen improving after-school activities, bought Mandarin Chinese flashcards for their babies, campaigned passionately to have chocolate milk banned from the school canteen. This supercharged motherhood seemed so pushy and anxious - so focused on honing a successful end product, a market leader of which they could feel proud.
With the influx of American bankers to London, we've been able to view this first-hand. Of all the nationalities in London, none provokes such domestic irritation. “They have no compunction in taking over a neighbourhood committee or the PTA,” a West London friend says. “They have absolute conviction their way of doing things is right.”
As we sat in her newly opened bookshop, an American woman walked in. “I've come to say welcome to the neighbourhood,” she declared. My friend thanked her and, after she'd left, remarked: “How dare she! I've lived in this area all my life. Why are Americans so proprietorial?”
Four years after Perfect Madness, this American making-a-meal-of- motherhood ideology has taken hold. Gone are benign neglect, cheery half-arsedness, “very nice, dear” vagueness and rumpled make-do.
London children ricochet between Kumon maths, private tutors and Suzuki violin. Every decision - Which school? Should we innoculate? Must I give up work? - is imbued with disproportionate and anxiety. Food fusspottery has taken hold. Parents arrive at children's parties with little pots of organic snacks, fret over the trans-fat content of a Penguin biscuit. (Yet these days icing on cupcakes must - US-style - be taller than the bun.) Visiting children can't eat what I've cooked because they're “'lergic”. Maybe we've bred a generation of lactose-intolerant ninnies or maybe we've fallen for an American tendency to hyper- medicalise the slightest ailment.
What are we worried about? Our children are the healthiest and safest generation yet born. They would be happier still if we stopped our crazy over-thinking, responded less eagerly to “approval needed”. Meanwhile, I must ready my homecoming banquet, put out the bunting and red carpet. The coach is pulling up.
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and here's a response from today's New York Times:
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/...e-alpha-mom/?hp
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Point taken, Ms.Turner. All of us here bar-raisers certainly know the sort of parent of which you speak. (Not us, never us, always someone else.) And yes, overbearing parenting was probably made in America, and spread abroad. But I have some good news for you. Things on our side of the Atlantic seem to be taking a few welcome steps back from the parenting brink.
Parenting is generational. The Boomers (now in their 50s and 60s) were busy blazing trails and making money. So Gen X (now in their 30s and 40s) went a little overboard to make up for the attention they didn’t get from parents who were never home. (Or, at least, they thought that’s what they were doing. That created a new kind of stress in the process has become all too clear.)
Now enter Gen Y. The oldest of them are in their late 20s, and are just starting to have children. Like every generation they will aim to do exactly the opposite of what their parents did. And while there are certainly still “Alpha Moms” out there, the women who proudly see themselves as “Slacker Moms” are apparently growing.
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| DJ Shibby |
I was impressively raised by an unimpressive mixture of American overparenting and english maternal nonchalance.
It worked out pretty damn good, but I don't give either credit. =P |
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