"The world will be changed when dads play an equal role in raising children."
-- Gloria Steinem on feminism and parenting
That makes sense.
Nowadays we're hearing a lot of chatter from people like
Blossom, who asserts in her book that spending 24 hours a day, 7 days a week strapped to her children is feminist because it aligns with women's original, natural, biological roles. I guess I can see that, too, but...
Hmmmmm, wonder where this crisis of inadequate-feeling mothers is coming from?
Now, I'm not saying being a "feminist"
anything should follow a specific formula -- just the opposite, feminism is about empowering women to make their own choices and be respected for them. Stay-at-home moms who believe in co-sleeping and other methods of attachment parenting can be feminists, no doubt. But knowing our feminist icons believed men and women should share parenting equally and that women should strive to shatter the glass ceiling, it can be difficult to reconcile the increasingly louder voices that say mothers should be permanently attached at the breast to their children until they go to college.
And using a sensationalistic magazine cover to add fuel to the fire of this whole woman vs. woman vs. woman debate -- on Mother's Day, no less -- is just shitty. Looking at you,
Time magazine.
Time's new cover story (which I haven't read yet but intend to) is about attachment parenting -- a philosophy espoused by Dr. Sears, a religious nut who wrote 1993's
The Baby Book and 1997's
The Complete Book of Christian Parenting & Child Care, which asserts that working mothers are destroying society.
Rather than looking at Dr. Sears' writings and saying, "Hey, that seems like kind of a crappy thing to say about women," mothers are increasingly embracing this point of view. Most of them are young, educated, wealthy mothers -- like your Blossoms -- who have the luxury of saying when they will and will not work.
I wouldn't say my mother necessarily had the "luxury" of staying at home with my brother and me, but my father made enough money and my mother (a teacher) made so little that it ended up being the best solution for our family. I loved having a stay-at-home mom. But I also don't think that I would have felt any less loved or have grown up to be a psychopath if my mom had taught junior high English five days a week.
Why? Because my mother used good old-fashioned common sense and good old-fashioned unconditional love in raising me and, because of that, I felt secure no matter where I was...or where
she was.
I happen to think following our practical instincts, using a middle-ground, common sense approach, and loving our children unconditionally while striving to lead as comfortable a life as possible can make for a happy, well-adjusted child, even more than following a dictated parenting "style." One of the best pieces of advice I received when expecting my son -- one which would likely cause Dr. Sears to gasp in horror -- was from my grandmother, who said: "Don't forget: Your children come to
live with you. They have to fit in your lifestyle."
Because while being a slave to your child's every need (and I'm not talking about young babies, here -- being a slave to them is just a fact of life) sounds good for the child in theory, haven't I also been reading about the epidemic of entitled children, teenagers, and young adults in our society? You know, the ones who make everything about themselves, who lack independent decision-making abilities, and who expect to be rewarded no matter what they do? It's hard for me to believe there isn't a link here.
So where does that leave feminism? I wish I knew. In some respects, the recent surge of interest among young women in domestic activities like cooking, crafting, and homemaking makes me happy because I have always been interested in those pursuits myself. But in other respects, it scares the bejeezus out of me because it feels like my generation is dismissing the progress of the feminist movement -- things like creating equal opportunities for females in the workplace -- as bad or unnecessary, as things that shouldn't have happened because women are supposed to be at home with their babies.
Philosophies like attachment parenting tend to come and go in cycles, but this most recent one seems extreme, cutting to the core of feminism. It seems the common thread in all the motherhood debates is that they marginalize women and cause them to fight amongst themselves and that they don't have an answer.
But what else is new?
