The Over-Parenting Crisis
A leading attachment parenting writer says, enough already.
by Katie Allison Granju
April 16, 2007
Recently, a coworker and I were looking at some old family photos she had lying on her desk. Several of them were of her grandmother, tending to various household chores for the camera.
The photos looked to be from sometime in the 1950s, or possibly the early '60s. There she was, dressed in her June Cleaver-fresh, shirtwaist dress, standing at her spotless formica kitchen counter, preparing a meal. In another shot, she was perfectly coiffed, and dressed in pressed capris as she weeded the front garden.
"That's how I remember her," my friend said. "She was obsessed with having a perfect house and yard. Her casseroles looked better than they tasted, and I don't recall ever seeing a speck of dust or dirt anywhere in their house."
She went on.
"God, it's so ironic. She was so consumed with being the perfect homemaker that she didn't realize no one was actually comfortable in her home."
Those of us with pre-women's lib mothers and grandmothers remember women like this. They were the obsessive, vaguely dissatisfied homemakers Betty Friedan wrote about in The Feminine Mystique. They were the women whose worlds had become so narrowly focused on one facet of their lives — homemaking — that all the joy had been sucked right out of them.
Thank God we aren't those women. Right? Right?
Or are we? In recent years, I've encountered a disturbing trend among my current mothering peers. While we no longerWe may not stay up nights worrying about how to keep our whites whiter, but you can bet we're losing sleep over why little Jasper isn't yet out of diapers. pore endlessly over the grout-cleaning tips and curtain-sewing patterns in Ladies Home Journal, we've replaced this pre-feminist housewifery-porn with postmodern parenting-porn in the form of Fit Pregnancy and PARENTS magazines.
We may not stay up nights worrying about how to keep our whites whiter, but you can bet we're losing sleep over why little Jasper isn't yet out of diapers. We may no longer feel the need to compare the firmness of our jello salad with that of the other women at the church potluck, but we're not-so-secretly frantic over why little Ella from playgroup can already tie her shoes when our own five-year-old Ruby can't yet do the same.
In other words, we may no longer be "professional homemakers," but whether we stay home with our kids, or work outside the home, we've turned parenting into its own, highly stressful, endlessly demanding, often joyless undertaking. In fact, a recent study by research group Public Agenda found that seventy-six percent of American parents describe raising kids today as "much harder" than it was during their own childhoods.
But are we making it a lot harder than it has to be? I think so.
Last week, I was eating a meal with the parents of a lovely one-year-old child, their first. As the very cute baby played with her food, I noticed she was managing to get quite a bit of her mashed peas into her rosebud mouth with her small spoon.
©2007 Katie Allison Granju and Nerve Media
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