Get ready to have your fantasies, beliefs, and perhaps your reality of motherhood challenged. Someone had to do it and Jessica Valenti, author of Why Have Kids? A New Mom Explores the Truth about Parenting and Happiness has taken on society’s glorification of parenthood.Valenti posits — and I have to agree with her: The assumption that being a parent (and a mother in particular) is as ingrained in our thinking as is how women are expected to care for their bodies in terms of parenthood long before they consider pregnancy or become pregnant. Valenti peels back the glamour most of us anticipate when we become parents to reveal the hard truths: Being a mother is not universally what it is advertised to be.
Why Have Kids?
A few months ago, Valenti explained Why Have Kids? to Rutgers University’s Focus Magazine: “It’s a cultural critique of the way parenthood is idealized and not supported in any way and how that affects people and their happiness. You’re taught that you’re just going to have children and it will make you happy and fulfilled.”
In regard to much of the thinking that is perpetuated on parents and would-be parents who are in pursuit of being the “perfect” parents, for example, she asks: Why are we shaming women who don’t breast-feed? Is breast scientifically best?
Valenti explores the imperative of giving up our lives to devote them solely to our children. One of her many examples of parental choice was new to me. “Elimination communication” (EC) or the no-diaper method of toilet training was new to me. Ardent followers of “EC” may balk, but infant demands are tough enough without watching your new baby’s face to see when he or she needs to be held over a toilet bowl or straddled between your legs to urinate. ”EC” demands a mother’s fulltime presence. I wonder how a woman who is tethered to her baby 24/7 in this way can possibly think motherhood is fun? I realize there are women who do and I admire them. But, for women who have to work or have other children to care for, “EC” seems daunting.
That extreme example aside, if you don’t follow expected norms be they co-sleeping, breast-feeding or “EC” for instance, does that make you a lesser parent? As Valenti suggests, “American parents need to support one another — especially those of us who don’t fit into the ‘good’ or ‘perfect’ mother model.” Even if your birthing experience was wonderful, soon the guilt about not being the “perfect” mother and exhaustion set in. The worry about parenting “right” and the second-guessing of friends and family (and self) leave many women feeling anxious, distressed, depressed, and fearful. Unsure and unhappy. For working women, the path to parental joy is even harder. The “Maternal Wall” raises glaring barriers and parenting obstacles for working mothers.
A Dose of Reality
Why Have Kids? is brutally honest in presenting what many women think, but fear saying out loud. To get motherhood “right,” it seems we have to buy into the current thinking that it is pure bliss. Jessica takes issue with the need to “measure up” in ways that don’t allow for a woman’s individual physical, emotional, or practical being.
Jessica, herself a mother of a young child, had a difficult and frightening delivery experience — which I suspect was the impetus for her book. Nonetheless, she exposes the truth about parenting and happiness today. It isn’t so much a feminist view as a reality check that offers sound ideas and, if followed, just might add more joy and happiness to parents right now and in the future.
Do Children Really Make You Happy?
Yes and no. Valenti points out that “Nearly every study done in the last ten years on parental happiness shows a marked decline in life satisfaction of those with kids.” And that applies to both working and stay-at-home mothers. Valenti found, “If you are a working mom who has unrealistic expectations about your ability to balance work and family responsibilities, your chances for unhappiness and depression also go up.”
Perhaps we all need to lower our expectations for motherhood and being the “perfect” parent until such time as social and political policies catch up to modern day parenting and women support each other without judgment. In “The Truth about Parenthood,” a piece for the Huffington Post, Aidan Donnelley Rowley, the mother of three, tells an imaginary pregnant, soon-to-be first time mom what to expect and how hard being a parent is in finite detail. The friend concludes, “Maybe this sounds kind of crazy, but I am looking forward to the struggle.”
Valenti argues that beyond the struggle, “The pursuit of perfection and the resultant guilt are sucking the joy out of motherhood.” Her candor, as she told Carrie Stetler, the journalist who wrote the Rutgers Focus story, “resulted in a lot of hate mail.” It is quite likely that her book, Why Have Kids?, and my agreement with the imperfections she boldly underscores will, too.
Resources: Rowley, Aidan Donnelley, “The Truth about Parenthood.” Huffington Post, August 14, 2012 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aidan-donnelley-rowley/parenthood_b_1721197.html?utm_campaign=081412&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Alert-parents&utm_content=FullStory
Stetler, Carrie. “Rutgers Alumna, Writer and Feminist, Asks ‘Why Have Kids?’“ Focus, June, 2012. http://news.rutgers.edu/focus/issue.2012-05-30.4224061348/article.2012-06-23.4350567183
Social psychologist Susan Newman, Ph.D. specializes in issues impacting your children and family life. She blogs for Psychology Today magazine and is the author of The Case for the Only Child: Your Essential Guide and Under One Roof Again: All Grown Up and (Re)learning to Live Together Happily, among others. Visit her: www.susannewmanphd.com.