Have you heard? Bad parenting is the new good.
According to CNN, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, bad (meaning good?) moms admit to leaving their kids alone in the bathtub, spanking, yelling, and loving their spouses more than their kids. It's a backlash against 'hyper parenting,' and some very class-bound (more on this in a post I've been meaning to write forever) notions of what's good for kids. It can also be seen as a pressure release valve for parents feeling oppressed by the cult of the "perfect mother."
My first reaction to this is to wonder why we have to keep having this debate about what a good (meaning bad?) mother is. Apart from health and safety, how is it anyone else's business if you have a couple of beers, or let your dog mop the floor? And the reality is, as Heather Cushman-Dowdee points out, so much more complicated and nuanced than it's typically portrayed. It's also interesting to me that we still find this kind of confessional titillating. Is it still really news that parenting is a mixed bag (containing lots of fluids)?
My next thought was to wonder what this means for breastfeeding. Is it now good (meaning bad)?
I guess that depends on whether or not you see it as ideology. If you do, it might look like one more box to check on the 'good mom' (meaning bad mom?) to do list. It's certainly a choice, but I tend to see it more in terms of biology - a logical extension of in utero nutrition that has evolved for specific nutritional, immunological, and emotional needs of our young. In my mind, it's so normal that to attach it to a particular world view would be a little bit like calling cleaning up poop a lifestyle choice. And you can only treat it as ideology if you ignore or discount the science, which is how The Case Against Breastfeeding got there.
Because breastfeeding has had to battle back from the brink of extinction in this country, and in doing so has required justification along medical and political lines, it's seen as more of an ideological football than it really is. I'm embarrassed to say that I used to think that breastfeeding was something that only left-leaning, anti-establishment moms did. But the far broader appeal of breastfeeding was made clear to me the first time I searched Amazon for a Dr. Sears book and realized that he writes books on Christian parenting. Wait a minute, I thought, they do it, too? I had a lot to learn.
This is why I like Moms Rising and other organizations that shift the focus from judging each other to the real issues that parents face - often in common with families quite different from themselves - like sane family leave policies, health care for all, and fair pay. Just think of what could be done with all those kilowatt hours we spend on angst and vitriol.
Even though the "good mom/bad mom" pendulum has been swinging back and forth for decades - periodically clocking moms in the head - I have hope that we'll see, sooner or later, that we're all in this together.
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