Three articles by Judith Warner
Dang, Judith Warner must have a good publicist. She has no less than three different articles out in major publications, all based on her new book Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety.
Her Valentine’s Day op-ed in the New York Times asks "Is our national romance with our children sucking the emotional life out of our marriages?" She concludes that it is, and urges readers to stop making construction paper cards for their children’s classmates and to go on a real date with their spouses. While she’s at it, she blames the family bed and extended co-sleeping for a decline in physical intimacy.
The second story is the cover article in Newsweek, entitled Mommy Madness. In this Warner describes a generation of miserable mothers, driven to desperation by their own high expectations and lack of societal support:
"Life was hard. It was stressful. It was expensive. Jobs—and children—were demanding. And the ambitious form of motherhood most of us wanted to practice was utterly incompatible with any kind of outside work, or friendship, or life, generally."
Warner then tries to tie this in to an argument that we need societal supports for parenting — tax incentives to promote family-friendly work, high quality day care for both full-time working parents and as occasional relief for at-home parents, more opportunities for part-time work. I generally think these are good things, but it’s not clear how they’re going to solve the problems of the women featured in the article, who can’t sleep at night because they’re worried about the preschool party they’re organizing. What they need is to get a grip.
As Jody at Raising WEG points out, this cult of the hyper-parent is very much a middle-class privilege, and far from the universal state. Most parents are plenty busy just from doing the basics — earning a living, keeping their kids clean and fed and the homework done — not from participating in a million afterschool activities or distressing store-bought pies to look homemade.
As I see it, the middle-class stress of extreme parenting is driven by several factors:
First, as Warner correctly points out, there’s been a decay of the parenting "commons." Organized sports with registration, and schedules and fees have replaced pick-up games. You can’t count on the local public school being good unless you deliberately pick a place to live based on the schools.
Second, as being an at-home parent has become a deliberate choice rather than the default position, some at-home parents feel the need to justify their decision by giving their kids every bit of attention and stimulation possible. This is how they prove that they’re not wasting their expensive educations.
Third, some working parents feel the need to justify their decision by making sure their kids aren’t suffering at all from their absence. They try to cram as much attention and activities into the weekends and evenings as an at-home parent might do all week, and give up sleep instead.
And finally, as Laura points out, there’s a natural tendency to measure what’s appropriate by looking at the people around you. Moreover, the standard of comparison is usually the "best" of those around you, not the average. So it just takes one family having a magician at their kid’s party for everyone in their social circle to start wondering whether they should be having a puppet show. And the expectations creep up as each family joins in. (My personal act of resistance against this madness is to respond "YOU DON’T NEED A GOODY BAG" every time someone posts on the DC Urban Moms list asking what items are good for a goody bag for a 3-year-olds party.)
Third article is from Elle, and it mostly emphasizes the differences between American and French attitudes towards parenting. It’s by far the most interesting of the three articles, making the point that the whole culture of intense parenting is a uniquely American phenomenon. Warner concludes that the problem is an ideology that is so widespread that it’s hardly ever questioned:
"[It] tell us that we are the luckiest women in the world, with the most wealth, the most choices. It says we have the know-how to make “informed decisions” that will guarantee our children’s success. It tells us that if we choose badly, our children will fall prey to countless dangers—from insecure attachment to drugs to a third-rate college. And if our children do stray from the right path, we’ll have no one but ourselves to blame. To point fingers at society is to shirk “personal responsibility.”"
I’m intrigued enough to put Warner’s book on hold at the library. I’ll report back when I’ve read it. I’m wondering if there’s not an overlap with some of the arguments that Schwartz makes in The Paradox of Choice.
February 16th, 2005 at 10:43 pm
Did you see the interview with Judith Warner at the American Prospect ..?
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=9164
February 17th, 2005 at 7:33 am
Excellent post. I read the NYT piece, but not the Elle one and I found the American prospect one, but haven’t had time to read it. I think there’s got to be an overlap between what’s happening to moms and some of the issues in Paradox of Choice. Of course, one of Warner’s arguments is that there aren’t that many choices to begin with. Maybe we create them?
February 17th, 2005 at 9:47 am
It’s true that Warner’s Newsweek article (I haven’t read the others) is about a narrow slice of moms – basically, the middle/upper-middle class moms, most of whom have college or post-grad degrees, most of whom are part of the mobile society, many of whom live in major urban centers, most of whose families can survive on one parent’s salary if they choose to do that. However, despite its failure to speak to other slices of our society, because I’m one of those moms, it REALLY spoke to me.
And, because the moms that Warner writes about do have the most choices of all the moms out there – I heard someone say, once, that affluence brings a person the luxury of choices, or something like that – I would submit that if parenting is complicated, difficult, results in constant compromise, etc for these families, then it is only more difficult for families with fewer resources and fewer choices, notwithstanding the Paradox of Choice stuff. Sure, maybe the less-affluent families don’t agonize about whether someone should stay home or not, because that’s not an option, but they sure as heck have to deal with the lack of any system of quality childcare.
Also, I saw the article as less about intense parenting itself, and more about intense parenting as a symptom, a reaction to the way the world is right now vis-a-vis parents and kids. I saw an analogy to disordered eating, actually – some parents go to the intense parenting extreme to cope with the lack of support for parenting in society at large similar to the way that some adolescents go to extremes to control their eating to cope with what feels like a lack of control in the rest of their lives.
Anyway, I thought that the Warner article was great. And some of the friends that I forwarded it to responded by saying that it made them want to scream or cry, it so echoed what they were feeling in their own lives. It made them feel like they weren’t alone out there. This is useful, and perhaps a necessary step in the revolution? I hope?
February 17th, 2005 at 9:57 am
My point about the Paradox of Choice wasn’t so much that we have lots of choices about whether — and how much — to work, but that we have so many choices about how to raise our children, what preschools and schools to send them to, etc. And it’s really hard for us to “satisfice” rather than maximize — to pick something that’s good enough, but not necessarily the best — when it comes to our kids. I’ll try to elaborate later.
I’ve heard several people say that the article brought them to tears as well.
February 17th, 2005 at 2:45 pm
Have you read The Hurried Child by David Elkind? I thought of this book while reading Warner’s article. Frankly, I don’t plan on driving myself crazy trying to create the perfect childhood, so I can’t really relate to the women in the article. The RIE maxim is my guideline: do less, observe more. (http://www.rie.org/)
February 17th, 2005 at 7:19 pm
Hi – Just googled Judith Warner after reading her Newsweek article and came across your blog. Interesting comments (both hers and yours!). I thought her article was both thought-provoking and insightful. Looking forward to reading the book.
February 17th, 2005 at 10:30 pm
I think the popularity of this article has nothing to do with Judith Warner’s publicist, it has to do with the middle class supporting all of the United States and going insane in the process. You can’t honestly expect for things to be the socially “ideal” situations that existed thirty years ago by trying to solve our problems with “pick up” games in the local neighborhoods. I hate to inform you, but activities like that don’t exist anymore. You can’t take your eyes off of your children since if one of the neighborhood parents isn’t trying to molest your child, a known sex offender or kidnapper who has more rights than we do is. We DO need help. Our country is turning into a joke. Everyone has their hands out and soon the middle class is going to be sucked absolutely bone dry between supporting all of the mentally and able bodied people on welfare (generations of them), paying thousands a year in child care and medical expenses (insurance premiums), having our jobs sent overseas to people who will never spend a dime in or for our country, LIVING EXPENSES, ridiculous fees for ridiculous reasons…bascially we are dying and no one cares. As long as the taxes are being taken out of our checks and the money keeps rolling in, nothing matters about what happens to us. I’ve been told that seventy percent of middle class America is living paycheck to paycheck. When is this going to stop?
I know I don’t live an extravagant lifestyle and not so long ago, my salary today would have gone a long way. I am head of household and a single mother and I am going to have to pay taxes this year even though I have a child and pay child care. How is this fair? There are people that don’t work that are getting free housing, free food, free utilities (bascially free everything) and will be receiving thousands back in a tax return. Where is our break? When is our ship coming in? Honestly I’m tired of supporting everyone. I work. I pay my taxes. Why do I have to struggle so much? I’m doing everything right….or at least what I’ve been taught is right. I personally know several people in my situation. Is this ever going to end…this fast paced life? We need SOMEONE to take control now. The price on everything continues to skyrocket, but we do not receive the salaries, benefits or tax breaks to equal these skyward demands. What Judith Warner stated in her article hit too close to home with me. There are parents at my child’s school that could care less what happens with their children. It is alwawys left up to the same SMALL group of people to plan and pay for all of the extra activities that occur. NO ONE CARES!! I have people tell me how they will participate in activities that will benefit our children and never bother to follow through on their promises. As long as someone else is doing the work, they don’t CARE. That is our problem, we are raising (and have raised) a generation of people who don’t care. As long as they aren’t inconvenienced, they don’t CARE. The schools are struggling because these same parents expect the schools to raise their children. They expect the schools to feed their children for free, educate them for free since that is THEIR God given right. The government doesn’t care because they get our tax money if we like it or not. It’s sad to say but in our country as long as someone else is struggling, or is picking up the tab, or is out on the street and it isn’t in our face, we have become a nation that doesn’t care. We use to pride ourselves on being Americans. We had dignity. Now we are too worried about what “we” as individuals can get. I won’t lie, I’m guilty of this at times too. We use to actually stand for something. Now we don’t stand for anything unless there is a kick back or a personal agenda. We use to be respected, now we are bullied and a laughing stock in our own land. We use to actually care about what happened to our neighbors. Now we don’t even know our neighbors, let alone have time to get to know them. Everyone goes home and stays cooped up in their houses and their own selfish worlds. What has happened to us? It sounds like we need to get a grip alright…a grip on our money, our lives and our future.
February 17th, 2005 at 10:32 pm
Interesting thoughtful post. I also found you through googling. I have been engrossed in a conversation on the subject at Chezmiscarriage.com.
Jen, I had to laugh (with great respect) about your RIE comment. I just wrote about my experience with the very moms that are Warner talks about, but these mothers even twist RIE into a high pressure experience. Go have a look -the title is HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE.
February 18th, 2005 at 12:15 pm
Madness, All Madness
Elizabeth at Half-Changed Life analyzes the independent forces that drive SAHM and WOHM moms to ramp up their “parenting,” and what happens when the groups collide. My personal “ouch” moment: “Some at-home parents feel the need to justify their decis…
February 18th, 2005 at 6:34 pm
Mieke, that post was incredibly funny. And incredibly sad.
And I also want to know – what does it mean to have an “authentic” child?
February 18th, 2005 at 10:34 pm
What I took exception to with Warner’s article (I read the one that was on MSN.com – I think it was the Newsweek one) was her assumption that all moms fall victim to the desire to be perfect moms and have perfect children. She didn’t give women credit for being intelligent enough to realize that that’s not the way to be happy or well-adjusted, or raise happy and well-adjusted kids.
I’m a busy mom – I work full-time, I go to grad school part-time, my husband works full-time and runs a small business on the side. We have a 23-month-old daughter who goes to day care (and has since she was 7 weeks old). She is happy and well-adjusted, and although my husband and I are definitely tired, we are all very content. Our house is usually a mess, my party planning skills are terrible (I have to start planning my 30th birthday party and my daughter’s 2nd birthday party and we’ll see how that turns out), and there is absolutely nothing “perfect” about our lives. But we are happy and we are normal!
I read a post once on DotMoms by a woman whose husband camped out to get tickets to their daughter’s dance recital. !!!!!!! I will never do anything like that! I’m just trying to be normal and raise a normal kid. I felt like Judith Warner assumed that everyone wanted to be the camping out kind of mom and no one had any sense of balance or normalcy.
February 19th, 2005 at 9:14 am
I think the Elle article is really the one to read, to understand the kind of assumptions Elise is talking about. Apparently Warner herself started falling victim to the mommy madness track, and she couldn’t figure out why, since she had been so much more laidback when her family lived in France.
I thought it was very telling that Warner started out interviewing middle-class women, but then ended up focusing on uppper-middle-class women, because she (Warner) decided that we are an aspirational culture and that everyone is looking to have what the upper middle class have. If I understand her correctly, what she’s saying is that both WOHM and SAHM aspire to a certain kind of Martha-Stewart gracious living motherhood that upper middle class women are probably achieving (a) at great effort regardless of income and (b) with the assistance of nannies, housekeepers, personal trainers, etc.
I see Warner’s point here: I had to give up my subscription to Vanity Fair back in 1995 because I was depressed every time I read another article about the perfect hostess, gracious lady who just happened to have the right pedigree and an aging trust fund at her disposal. The failure of aspiration is painful, no matter how much it’s also a luxury.
But if _that_ ended up being the ultimate subject of Warner’s book, then her ‘solutions’ (enlist the state to change society) seem even _more_ out of whack. If you look at Elizabeth’s experience with a child in the hospital, those types of stresses _DO_ seem like the appropriate place to ask, what does our society value and how will we achieve (and pay) for it? But aspiring to upper middle class luxuries? Not so much. There, the “personal effort” culture that Warner rejects probably _should_ come into play: Just Say No.
It’s incredibly HARD to say no, of course. The peer pressure around birthdays, school activities, crafts, etc., is remarkable. And Warner does hint at why so many parents are doing their kids’ homework projects: because they fear that their kids won’t get the grades (and teacher attention) that the parents think are essential for continued success in school. I think this sells teachers short (duh, of course they know the parents have done the projects) but on the other hand, those parent projects do frequently get the best grades. (My MIL is a teacher, albeit in high school, and she says that she’s NEVER EVER dealt with demanding entitlement-minded hostile aggressive parents like the ones that started showing up at parent-teacher conferences in the last five to seven years. Every year she gets more miserable, and she blames the parents for most of it. She thinks the kids are a mess, too.)
I wonder how much Warner discusses not just government differences between France and the US but also cultural differences. The types of homes people expect/demand, the types of neighborhoods they live in, the standard of living possible at a given wage. Did you notice that Warner could pay for her nanny at $10K in France? Did the French government subsidize the rest of this woman’s wages? At what level? Because even if they paid HALF her salary, Warner’s nanny would have been making only $20K, not very encouraging once you consider tax rates in France and not at all luxurious if the nanny was supporting family. But people in France do just make less money on average than people in the States, and somehow manage to live pretty comfortably. I wish I understood more about economics, but in any case, I would say that European aspirations are often different than American ones. Plus, Warner wasn’t “just” living in France–she was an American living in France, quite possibly living off an American-level salary. That affected her experience, too.
And on the issue of culture, Warner didn’t “just” leave France for the USA: she left Paris for Washington DC. Two more culturally, economically, and socially distinct (Western) capitals I can’t imagine. The Mommy shock must have been extreme.
All of which is just to say that in specific places, I find both Warner’s critique of a specific type of problem (aspirational pain) and her suggestion of a specific type of solution (government work to transform working life, resulting not just in more family-friendly but more human-friendly work) compelling, BUT when you bring them together, Warner looks really inept. The two issues were connected in HER experience–she lost the government support AND found herself on the aspirational madness track–but I disagree with her argument about causation. She’s really got the material for two different books here, based on what we’ve seen so far.
February 19th, 2005 at 10:27 pm
Thanks to all the people who’ve commented. It’s really interesting reading all the different reactions to the articles, here, on other blogs, (Jody has a great list of links on her blog, as well as her own analysis) and on the DC Urban Moms email list. It’s clear that she hit the nail in capturing some moms’ experiences, but others didn’t see themselves in the description at all.
I agree with Jody about the gap between the problem Warner describes and the solutions she proposes. I wonder if there are ways to move our society towards being more supportive of parenting, without fighting for hugely expensive government programs. Things like more churches and synagogues sponsoring “parents night out” babysitting that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, more support for public parks and playgrounds rather than everyone building their own swing set, etc.
I
February 20th, 2005 at 4:22 pm
I was interested to note that all the comments on the Warner book were about mothering. Yet much of her book was about the (exclusively female) abandonment of interesting jobs, the loss to women of the society of the workplace, the death of hopes for any serious public accomplishments in their own names. Isn’t anyone on this site interested in anything except mothering?
February 20th, 2005 at 4:50 pm
Did anyone read The Time Divide: Work, Family and Gender Inequality by Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson (Harvard UP, 2004)? It speaks to the work/family balance side of these issues, from the perspective of working people generally.
February 20th, 2005 at 5:09 pm
Linda, that seems like an unfair comment. The book may discuss other things, but the articles that were published this week were focused on mothering. I don’t know anyone who has read the book yet — I have it on hold at the library, but haven’t gotten it yet.
Elizabeth2, I’ll add The Time Divide to my reading list.
February 21st, 2005 at 3:14 pm
Very interesting.
My one point though: It’s not an exclusively American phenomenon. I wish it were. Up here in Toronto, Canada the myth of the Perfect Mom is alive and well and driving us all batty. And I would be surprised if this were the only non-American country to experience this.
Like it or not, America is in the business of exporting culture. This seems to be one facet of it that is being imported in at least some locations.
February 22nd, 2005 at 10:45 am
Leaving Fathers, Poor
Out Is ‘Perfect Madness’
But author’s contention that American society is unfriendly to parenting is dead on.
Author Judith Warner is striking a nerve with women across the nation with her book “Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety” and a companion essay that recently ran in Newsweek. The premise: women are driving themselves nuts trying
February 24th, 2005 at 8:31 am
I agree; great post. Warner does have a great a good publicist because, aside from the French vs. American birdseye comparison, she basically repeats what a whole host of folks have said before. There’s little there there, although she does put her finger on a common problem. By far the most useful book I’ve read on the subject is “How To Avoid The Mommy Trap,” which starts out where Warner ends up. The Mommy Trap has some similar policy solutions, as does Ann Crittenden’s book, as do many others, but also gives personal solutions and helps women (and men) chart their own path, independent of where all of that stuff pushes us. The point is, even with all the pressures making things difficult for us, we do have choices and we can get out of the Mommy Trap, or better yet, avoid it all together.
December 29th, 2005 at 12:32 pm
I’ve come a year late to this discussion, but I just finished Warner’s book and I think she’s dead-on right. Our winner-take-all society is killing the middle-class. We can’t afford to live in the neighborhoods with the good public schools and can’t afford private schools. WE CAN’T AFFORD OUR HEALTH INSURANCE. I can’t get a job that pays enough to cover daycare. I can’t pay a babysitter the $10 an hour it costs here in Boston to even work part-time from home. My parenting anxiety is all about the financial impossibility of remaining in the middle-class. Because I can’t seem to do much about it (it now costs several hundred-thousand dollars to run for city council in Boston) I worry about all the minutiae Warner describes. I know it’s pathetic, but the anxiety is overwhelming and so the impulse is to try to control the pointless details.
Why aren’t we organizing?
February 9th, 2006 at 6:32 pm
I just read the book and it was too familiar. We don’t have choices in today’s society, but we are too prideful to see it. I have been in the military for almost 6 years (AF) and there is no doubt that my sucesses were threefold as a single woman. See, no one wants to hear that you can’t find a babysitter when you’ve been scheduled for a 13 hour midnight shift. No one cares that you’ve had only 3 hours of sleep for an entire month.
When my jaw finally locked shut for a week after months of sleep deprevation and relentless stress that comes with being a first time mom, it was a burden on the squadron that I was ordered by docs to home. When I was out partying and smoozing with my management, all was fine. When my responsibilities as a mom and wife took over my need or ability to hang out, I was suddenly not on the A list anymore. Now I find myself still working harder than my counterparts, as more is expected of me after performing at a higher level previously, with chronic back pain and insomnia. My health is in dire straits for nothing. I don’t get cudos for working myself to death and managing a marriage and toddler. I have no choice.
Sex roles have not changed on any meaningful level. My husband was programmed from birth with a mother who never worked and took care of his needs. Now I am supposed to take care of him and maintain perfection in the workplace, being the breadwinner. I am miserable. I can’t remember when I finally realized that the sexual revolution was a joke or when I came to understand that this world doesn’t have room for ambitious AND nuturing women on the go. They want the submissive single type rather than the one who has “problems”.
I feel betrayed by the thought that was presented to me over and over by my mother, that I could and would “do anything” I wanted. Thanks to Perfect Madness, I know that I am not the only one. It was like reading into my inner suspicions, now turned reality. Women need to get over the work or not work crap. We are still living in a sexist world that sustains itself by being just PC enough to not piss any one off and yet we kick each other. Yeah that makes sense ladies! I don’t care if you work or stay home, you are still second class and it is not your working/non working counter parts that are responsible for that one!
Gone are the days when you saw it coming. Arrived are the times that we kid ourselves into thinking that we are in control of ANYTHING. We won’t even admit to ourselves that we are being used because now it’s called “utilized”. Before we were objects, now we are “objectives”. I feel cheated as hell and want out.
April 20th, 2006 at 6:40 pm
I haven’t finished Perfect Madness yet, but I am a grad student doing research on Motherhood and so far this book has summed up what I have been searching for in countless journal articles and other popular books. I have a couple of questions because my research also looks at caregiving. Do you think mothers of today are setting ourselves up for Round 2 of not being enough when our parents are in need of caregiving? I argue in my research that the path and experience of mothers and caregivers are parallel. I think that we need to combine the efforts and issues of both groups as what will benefit one will benefit the other. What do you all think?
April 21st, 2006 at 10:46 pm
Lynn, a bunch of people in my office are suddenly dealing with aging and ill parents, and my sense is that the roles aren’t quite comparable. The people dealing with aging parents generally don’t have as many day-to-day responsibilities as parents of small children, but there are many more unpredictable crises. And it may be peculiar to DC, but almost no one’s parents are local, so there’s the additional problem of trying to deal with this stuff long-distance.
April 22nd, 2006 at 3:10 pm
Elizabeth, I agree that the tasks of caregiving and mothering are different especially when parents are living out of state, but what I am interested in are the roles on an identity level. Like the book talks about, as mothers we are always looking over our shoulder wondering if we are doing everything right. And the idea that anything “instiutional” is bad. I think that as we care for our parents we will face the same uncertainty about decisions that we ultimately end up making and the lack of choices that we find. I just think that if we keep up this idea that we can care for our own without help, we will end up even further down the food chain. While their are choices for childcare, although many are less that ideal, the choices are even fewer and more difficult to manange for elder care. It just seems to me that if we are on a common platform we may have more power to erase the stigmas and stereotypes that run rampant in a society that only recognizes work as something that comes with a paycheck and is all too willing to criticize the unpaid domestic labor that saves the economy billions of dollars annually.
June 2nd, 2007 at 7:21 am
I Love you girls
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