Picket Fence Post

If you saw my Q&A with Pamela Paul, author of Parenting Inc., you read all about how almost every aspect of modern parenting has been commoditized. You need to potty train your kid, you can buy special potty training books, clothes, diapers/pull-ups, videos, all manner of potty seats, stickers and, last, but not least, even obtain the services of a “professional” potty training coach. (I kid you not.)

My recent GateHouse Media column tackles the outsourcing of parenthood and focuses on how, when my kids were babies, I used to joke about hiring someone to take care of the madness otherwise known as potty training. Now, the joke’s apparently on me.

For years, I’ve written about and railed against the parental insanity that occurs when people buy strollers that cost more than your first, junky used car, and shell out big bucks for unnecessarily expensive children’s clothing (Cashmere for babies? Seriously? Ever heard of spit-up?) and sign their babies up for specialized classes to give them an edge over their peers.

So when I read a New York Times’ review of Pamela Paul’s book, Parenting Inc.: How We Are Sold on $800 Strollers, Fetal Education, Baby Sign Language, Sleeping Coaches, Toddler Couture and Diaper Wipe Warmers — and What It Means for Our Children, I knew I had to read it and interview the author.

Paul kindly agreed to field a few questions from me about her book. The edited interview — which was conducted via telephone — is posted below.

Meredith O’Brien, Picket Fence Post: Your book details dozens of really expensive items, services and classes that today’s parents purchase for their very young, sometimes infant or unborn children, regardless of whether they’ve been proven effective. After you researched these items, like the so-called “educational” videos, you say the reason parents buy into these things, even if there’s no evidence saying they work, has to do with guilt. How much pressure are parents under to spend money on things that haven’t been proven beneficial for their children?

Pamela Paul, author, Parenting Inc.: I think there’s enormous pressure. I think that parents, as they have in time immemorial, want to do everything for their children. [This has been] translated into buying everything for their children. I talk about in the book the anxiety of under-spending, this feeling that taps into our vulnerability, our sense of competition . . . Parents are worried they’re not spending enough, that, “My child will not be able to get ahead and may possibly fall behind [if I don't buy these things].”

In an era of economic insecurity, this is very powerful. Nobody wants it not to be possible for their children [to do better than their parents]. If parents have succeeded economically, they’re afraid that whatever they’ve achieved, they’re afraid their kids won’t achieve, at least not easily.

The other thing I think is that there’s been research that’s come out about ages 0 to 3, that a baby’s brain stops forming connections at 3 . . . [Parents] think, “I’ve got to have my children learning Mandarin by age 3.” This is fueled by misinterpretation of things, of the need for early learning . . . that you’ve got to cram in as much as possible before the age of three or the child will be a dummy.

O’Brien: Do you think people are trying to emulate celeb parents, like Angelina Jolie or Gwyneth Paltrow pushing around her baby, Moses, in an $800 stroller? Do you think parents are trying to copy these celebrity parents even when they don’t have the money to buy these things? Is that a bigger factor in prompting spending on babies than guilt?

(more…)

Item #1: Book: Over-parenting=Wimpy Kids

Over-parenting. Over-scheduling. Over-bearing. Over-praising. Hmmm, what other hyphenated “over” words could I use to describe the general theme of the new book, A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting by Hara Estroff Marano?

Why don’t I let Wall Street Journal reviewer Tony Woodlief explain the book’s message of urging parents to back off and just let their kids be:

” Ms. Marano’s complaint is that over-involved parents are sapping the will of America’s youth, keeping them from learning how to make decisions and solve problems for themselves . . .

“[Ms. Marano says] we’re focusing on the wrong risks. Let children learn from failure. Let them experience all the childhood freedoms and disappointments that are common in the lives of our nation’s heroes. The college-admissions consultants can wait.”

Sounds like a good read, likely to provide me with more anti-helicopter parent ammo.

Item #2: Going to See ‘Sex’ This Weekend?

 Millions of American women are going to take pleasure in Sex and the City this weekend, including yours truly. And, although the main stars of the uber-hyped film are crazily over-priced fashion, sex, Carrie, Carrie’s friends, sex and fashion, squeezed in between the Jimmy Choos and inevitable Mr. Big disappointments are dramatizations of urban parenting. The new flick promises to depict lawyer Miranda’s life with hubby and child in Brooklyn, as well as Charlotte’s raising of her adopted grade-school-aged daughter and unexpected pregnancy (in the now-canceled TV series, she suffered from infertility).

Hopefully, SATC will be at least a fraction as good as its trailer. Or at least serve as satisfying mind candy.

Item #3: Ankle Woes

The Girl is only 9 years old. Yet, ever since she turned her ankle during a basketball practice this winter, she’s been plagued with ankle aches.

After having had a clean ankle X-ray and giving her injury time to heal, she returned to her normal activities. But ever since the spring soccer season began, The Girl has been complaining, on and off, of ankle pain. Sometimes she has swelling around the area, but not always. She comes home from practice – sometimes in tears – and proceeds to elevate and ice her ankle then wraps it in a bandage.

Another girl from her soccer team is wearing a cast on one of her feet to immobilize her ankle to see if her repeated ankle difficulties will end if she gives her ankle a rest from the tough, cutting movements of soccer. Both girls are in third grade. Aren’t they too young for this kind of thing?

Item #4: Falling Teen Stars

My June Parents & Kids Magazine column revisits the whole Miley Cyrus-Vanity Fair imbroglio and puts it into context with other female, teen idols who have “fallen” and asks the question, “Why?” Unfortunately, I don’t have the answer.

The cover story of this past weekend’s New York Times Magazine was dedicated to the issue of the serious, negative health implications for girls who specialize in a sport at a young age. (Think: Bum knees by the time the girl’s 30.)

I’ve long been an opponent of over-the-top youth sports leagues and coaches pressuring kids to specialize and having families’ lives overtaken by sports.

My kids play sports — one sport a season, with the exception of my daughter’s 9-month-long, once-a-week gymnastics class —  but I feel as though I’m fighting a losing battle against what writer Jen Singer dubbed the “Youth Sports Cartel” which places crazy demands on young players and their parents. (A sassy mom with whom I was recently complaining on the sidelines of a Little League game joked that we should start our own “Slow Sports” movement, in the same vein as the slow cooking movement.)

Now, after reading this article, I have more ammo for my argument that the youth sports world has gone batty. To read my take on this New York Times article, visit my book blog, Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum.

Do you think we’ve gone over the top when it comes to youth sports? Is youth sports specialization prominent in your community?

Image credit: New York Times Magazine.

I was literally aghast when I read this Philadelphia Magazine article last month about mothers who were trotting their daughters, as young as 8 years old, to salons for hair coloring sessions, microdermabrasion and bikini waxes (when there’s nothing to wax down there).

So I opted to lampoon it in my May P&K Magazine column where I argue that if so-called reasonable adults think a bikini wax for a second grader is appropriate, then they shouldn’t be leaving their sons out of this beauty mania and should be treating them to mani-pedis and preventative Rogaine treatments.

You might have heard of Jen Singer from her web site/blog MommaSaid. But it’s likely you’ll be hearing more about her as her new book, You’re a Good Mom (And Your Kids Aren’t So Bad Either) starts getting more buzz. (See the book trailer — yes now there are book trailers — above.)

I sent Singer five questions about the book – which promises to provide readers with “14 Secrets to Finding Happiness Between Super Mom and Slacker Mom.” She kindly answered them below:

Meredith O’Brien, Picket Fence Post: You’ve been blogging and writing about motherhood for some time. Why did you decide to write this book and how did you come up with the idea of 14 tips for moms?

Jen Singer, author, You’re A Good Mom (And Your Kids Aren’t So Bad Either): I’m a recovering Mom-aholic. Though I spent upwards of 100 hours a week with my two toddlers as a full-time stay-at-home mom, I felt guilty folding laundry because I wasn’t giving my children “teachable moments” all 100 of those hours. But when I started to ease up on my impossibly high standards of motherhood — the standards that 21st century mothers created — I realized I was happier, and so were my kids.

Still, I saw other moms slide down the slippery slope into giving up on parenting almost entirely. They stopped being their kids’ filter, letting their fifth graders have cell phones and allow them to show The Sopranos on the back of the school bus while thinking it’s cute to let their daughters wear “Future Trophy Wife” T-shirts to middle school.

I felt that there’s a sweet spot in between where you can be happy and turn out perfectly good kids. So I boiled it down to 14 steps for finding that spot and staying there, and put it into a book.

(more…)

Well, if you ask columnist Paul Campos, the answer to that question would be a definitive, big fat, “Yes!”

In a recent piece, Campos highlighted the controversy sparked by a New York Sun columnist who admitted that she let her 9-year-old son take the subway by himself. (Her first mistake: Telling people about it. Many modern parents, or at least some of the ones I’ve encountered online, seem ill-equipped to deal with any description of parenting that falls in any way short of perfection.)

While describing the negative feedback the columnist received — attacks calling her a horrible and abusive mother, reckless and stupid . . . one woman asked if the columnist had checked her son’s intended route on the subway and street to see if any registered sex offenders lived along the way – Campos wrote, “All this reflects a more general problem: the many cultural and political forces pushing us to behave like a nation of hysterics.”

After her column ran, Lenore Skenazy, was interviewed on national television under the headline which asked whether she was the “World’s Worst Mom.” Using crime stats to back up her argument that it’s safe to let her son take the subway, Skenazy wrote: “Somehow, a whole lot of parents have become convinced that nothing outside the home is safe. At the same time, many also have become convinced that their children are helpless to fend for themselves. They write their kids off as ‘dreamers,’ when they’ve never given them a real chance to wake up and develop some self-sufficiency.”

Campos totally agreed, saying in his MetroWest Daily News column, “At the beginning of the 21st century, the typical American suburb is just about the safest place that has ever existed in the history of the world — yet it’s full of terrified people.”

Perhaps if we parents let loose our safety death grip that we have on our kids for a moment or two, let them play outside without us hovering around as long as we’ve issued firm instructions that there is to be no wilding or Girls Gone Wild antics or Wild Kingdom action involving killing or biting things, maybe it’ll be good for everyone, including our kids.

So what say you folks . . . do you think today’s parents are too overprotective of our kids?

You may know Christie Mellor from her Three Martini Playdate books which lampoon today’s parenting trends. Now, the humorist takes on not the grade school set, but twentysomethings (who need a little direction in their lives) in her new book Were You Raised by Wolves?: Clues to the Mysteries of Adulthood. Mellor fielded some questions from your intrepid Picket Fence Post scribe:

Meredith O’Brien, Picket Fence Post: Your two previous tongue-in-cheek Three Martini Playdate books urged parents to raise their children to become civilized, well-rounded adults and to conduct that child rearing in a way in which parents actually get to enjoy being adults and not simply serve as their kids’ executive secretaries and all-purpose servants.

Were You Raised by Wolves? aims to tell young adults — whose parents couldn’t benefit from your Three Martini sage advice in time for their kids — how to be civilized, well-rounded adults. Why did you decide to write this and how do you think college grads will respond to such counsel?

Christie Mellor, author of Were You Raised by Wolves?: It started as a nugget of a suggestion from my publisher — but I had been taking notes for a while on the very topic, I just didn’t realize that I’d already started the book in my head. I wanted to put the fun back into being a grown-up. I remember when I was a kid, being a grown-up seemed all cool and mysterious and fabulous. So I wanted to put the fabulousness back into it, but with some gentle suggestions on behavior and etiquette, to fill in the gaps that may have been left by an overly supervised upbringing.

As far as the twentysomethings responding, well, I’m hoping that since I’m not their mother and I’m not being naggy, that they’ll have fun with it. And maybe they’ll want to pass the book around to people they know. They may not recognize themselves as needing any help, but they may recognize friends or coworkers. And of course, it’s always fun to laugh at friends and co-workers.

The hope is that through the humor, a seed will be planted. A very good and thoughtful friend wrote me this in an e-mail regarding my book which I really should have printed on the back cover:

“It really is a common sense manifesto for injecting a better theology and philosopher into the world (to borrow Ignacious J. Reilly’s refrain from “Confederacy of Dunces”) — which modern culture so desperately needs — using essential older world values in newer world togs, all with your unique and magical style. And never mind the adorable, original illustrations.”

Now isn’t that just the sweetest? I would like to think he’s right on target and that Were You Raised by Wolves? will catch on as an etiquette book, albeit a humorous, hip etiquette book, with recipes and hangover cures. (more…)

The CNN headline says all you really need to know:

“$10,000 for child’s birthday?”

Do not wipe your glasses. Or refresh your screen. You read it correctly.

Ten. Thousand. Dead. Presidents.

The CNN article discussed a company that makes kids’ birthday cakes for the tidy sum of $1,000, and told the tale of a mother who threw $5,000 party for her 3-year-old.

A few years ago, I tried to pitch a column to an editor who thought I was out of my gourd when I argued that there was a good reason to run my piece, saying that someone needed to plead with these people to put things into perspective and to reign in pediatric birthday party madness. At that time, the high-end price for such soirees was a mere $1,000.

“If your mom’s your best friend, who’s your mother?”

So asked the editors at the Reuters news service in the headline to a story which decries the rise in the number of mothers — an expert calls it “epidemic” — who seek to be their children’s best friends instead of boundary-setting parents.

The Reuters article quotes clinical psychologist Stephan Poulter who says that many of today’s parents do not want to establish and enforce house rules. “. . . [K]ids need a parent, not another friend, and this [being best friends with your children] leaves them motherless,” Poulter told Reuters. “This can create a lot of rage in boys, and daughters who are drug-orientated and out of control tend to be motherless daughters of this type.”

I cannot wait to show this article to my kids, who constantly accuse me of trying to single-handedly destroy their happiness by doing irrational and cruel things such as insisting that they bathe regularly, that they go to bed at what I consider to be a reasonable hour (8:30, that’s the goal anyway) and by making them wear coats and long pants in 50-degree weather even when they say they’ll be laughed at in school because all the other kids in their class are apparently donning beach wear. In April. In New England.

Image credit: The WB.