Strollerderby

Have We Become Narcissist Mommies?

Posted by Kelly Mills
mom mirrorIt's a cultural law of physics: for every trend, there's a backlash, and maybe deservedly so. This may be the latest, a response to the wave of news magazine articles and parenting books and mommy lit and message boards and (gasp) maybe even parenting blogs. Kathleen Deveny says our obsession with the tribulations of motherhood and our intense need to defend every parenting choice has led us to become narcissist mommies. There's too much whining and it's time to buck up. She's over it. 

Deveny believes some of the overwrought overwriting about diapers and sleeping and how haaard it all is comes from a reaction to the feminist focus of the last generation on professional lives. She cites Camille Paglia: "Younger women today, Paglia says, are simply rebelling against the legacy of women who prized their professional roles at the expense of family. They want to talk about how to balance work and home. A lot."

Personally, I don't care if you whine, as long as you make it funny. But I have sympathy for this point of view: even I get a little tired of reading righteous and earnest treatises on co-sleeping and lactation and mean old husbands who never help out. I also think part of our obsession with being good parents comes from the fact that with therapy and talk shows, we now get to blame our parents for lots of stuff. But that, in turn, amps up the pressure to be good parents ourselves. Parents who nurse and soothe and nurture and encourage and protect. And yeah, parents who whine a little too much. So whaddya think? Are we narcissists?


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Comments

 

BBBGMOM said:

What springs to my mind is how easier it is to share the minutiae of one's day - blogs or even just emails - than it was 25 years ago.  And since it is so easy to share one's [dirty] laundry with the public (or even one's innocent opinion about a hot topic like breast-feeding), it is very easy for thousands of people to read it and for dozens of people to feel compelled to respond.  I don't know if I would call that phenomenon narcissism, although some comments smack of it.  I think mothers have always vented or "whined" - even if only to the washing machine or the dog.  Because we have this medium (Internet) at our disposal, perhaps we are exposing the narcissistic or self-important or look-at-me tendencies that have been part of human parenting all along.  I only get annoyed when parents harshly condemn each other's decisions... but sometimes there is a fine line in offering one's "two cents" and coming off as judgmental.  I wonder if all this blogging and commenting will make us into better writers!!

August 9, 2007 2:42 PM
 

Karen Murphy said:

Yeah, whatever happened to taking a short break while plowing the field to drop the baby out of your womb and then hoist it on your back and continue plowing? Don't you remember when we all did that?

We are SUCH whiners.

August 9, 2007 2:44 PM
 

Mom2Two said:

No one is forcing the author to read all those books or blog posts, if it annoys her so much, she can always not look.  Judging by the sales of "mommy-lit", which I don't read (because it annoys me how the successful powerful female exec turns into a moron when she has children in almost every single book), plenty of people *do* like to read other mother's thoughts.

Personally, I love blogging, it keeps me in touch with relatives and friends all over the country in a really cool way.

August 9, 2007 3:21 PM
 

mcglory13 said:

Yeah, I think if blogs had existed we wouldn't have had performance artists. I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I agree that moms probably always whined about this stuff, just not on such a public level. Much like teenagers always drank, they just didn't post photos of themselves blasted and doing idiotic stuff on Facebook. Different time, different world.  

August 9, 2007 4:04 PM
 

Kelly Mills said:

I think the point about how we can make our parenting trials public now through the internet and email and so on is really smart. Plus electronic mediums have more anonymity, which can lead to more freedom to say whatever, be it complaining or judging or defending or sharing.

August 9, 2007 4:19 PM
 

Taste Like Crazy said:

"We are SUCH whiners."

Yep.  

We're a narcissistic society.

It would only follow that we would become narcissistic mommies.

www.TasteLikeCrazy.com

August 9, 2007 7:34 PM
 

Jane said:

The article is right. There is an aspect of narcissism and indulgence in this.  Most of us are blessed, and when you look at things in perspective, we have it good.  

That's not to say that we're bad people for over-analyzing our daily lives.  Eating chocolate is an indulgence too, but doing so doesn't make you a bad person. I don't think anyone should take the article as some sort of put down or assault.

It's one thing to engage in narcissism - we all do that to some extent.  It's another to be so narcisstic that you don't even know you are narcisstic.  Better to have the self-awareness.

The article quoted Paglia. I'll close with a quote from Katie Roiphe:  "Why should there be so much fury attached to the most insignificant drudgeries of domestic life? ... Why when women have so many choices, are we still as angry as gloved suffragettes hurling bricks through windows? What unmitigated bliss, one does wonder, were we expecting?"

August 10, 2007 2:27 PM
 

Strollerderby said:

Strollerderby rocked this week. From tips on picking a preschool , to laughable pregnancy tees , to mom

August 13, 2007 11:50 AM
 

Strollerderby said:

Had enough of the mommy wars? Despite the fact that many of us claim to be all done with the fighting, arguing, judgment, slings and arrows, there seems no way around the fact that motherhood is incendiary. Newsweek's article "Enough with the

August 13, 2007 1:53 PM
 

sprudel said:

i think a lot of parents of my generation (x) are narcissists.  our parents are the obnoxious and whiney ultra-narcissistic boomers.  narcissitic parents breed the same in their children, because no one gets her needs met and therefore becomes obsessed with her own needs.  i see this narcissitic entitlement in my generation of parents. we think that we had crap childhoods and we were latch-key kids and such, so we are determined to have happy childhoods- through our kids.  and since we were negelected and ignored by our parents we smother our kids and get our affection and attention needs through smothering parenting styles such as attachment parenting. and i'll prolly get slammed for saying this, too, but i think that's what this breastfeeding till your kid is 5 is about, too, because in our first-world country thats not about a kids nutritional needs, but about the parents need for affection which was unfullfilled in childhood.  

August 14, 2007 4:53 PM
 

drool.icio.us said:

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August 16, 2007 11:31 PM

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