Mommy madness

Many people point to parenting experts, to magazines and manuals, that have encouraged this intensive mothering style. But you argue that their advice wouldn't have much effect if mothers weren't already primed to accept it.

I'm resistant to arguments that there's this sort of top-down pressure from the media. That doesn't make sense. These things exist in our marketplace. If they didn't resonate with people, people wouldn't buy the books and the magazines. They wouldn't take in these messages and run with them the way they do. Frequently what we do with the stuff we read is we push it even further in the way we apply it. The media isn't shoving some conspiracy down our throats. We're not passive consumers.

What do you mean?

Let me give you an example. My older daughter was born in 1997, just at the moment when brain research in children was getting a lot the coverage. There was all this talk about what you could do to optimally stimulate your child and help your child's development. And wherever you looked, the message was that you needed to talk to your child as much as possible, read to your child as much as possible, sing, play games. So I did this during my child's every waking moment. Until years went by and I was really, really depleted. I felt like I was losing an inner life. I also realized that my child was dependent on me for stimulation, kind of like the way kids can get dependent on television, and that I needed to wean her off it. And that's been a difficult process, frankly, with both my kids ever since.

Both my kids were born at about that same time, and there was this sense that if you stopped the stimulation for even a few minutes, then the synapses would start withering away.

The funny thing is that when, in the course of writing this book, I went back to the same articles that I had read then, I realized that they weren't so very over the top. There were little sentences embedded along with all the rest: "Don't overdo it." "You don't have to do this 24 hours a day." But that's not what most of us, I think, took away. We took away the same message that people always take away [in the United States] when it's a question of diet or anything else: that if a little bit is good, a lot has got to be better.

There is, obviously, a certain amount of sacrifice that parents do have to make on behalf of their children, financially and in terms of time and labor. Yet it seems like mothers are taking on most of the burden, as opposed to sharing it with fathers. A lot of women wonder, how can they get fathers to do their share?

I don't know. I think at this point it's largely a lost cause for our generation. It's too late.

Wow.

It just plain hasn't happened. The statistics overall will tell you that there's a grotesque inequality of who does what. When you have families where the mother is at home full time, she does almost everything.

So men figure, as long as she's home, why can't she just toss in a load of laundry?

This isn't necessarily a Stepford wives situation where the men are fantasizing about turning their wives into these perfect housewives so they can rule over them. You see a lot of wives caught up in this desire to be this perfect mother and this perfectly functioning creature, and the husbands are kind of shunted off to the side and often made to feel like impediments to the smoothly functioning household. I don't think they're necessarily getting a whole lot out of this, easy though it is to get enraged with them.

In terms of what's going to happen long term and what can we do, I don't know. An earlier generation would have said go on strike, get divorced -- right? But we're a generation that was deeply scarred by divorce. It's a little bit hard to imagine someone cavalierly deciding that she's going to get divorced because her husband doesn't help out enough around the house.

But resentment and conflicts over this issue put huge pressure on marriages.

The pressure is huge. The divorce rate is down, but the percentage of couples saying that they're living in less-than-happy marriages is up. I think that there's a lot of long-simmering resentment and a lot of unhappiness in marriages. And I think it's quite toxic and very sad and I wonder what will happen 10 years from now, in terms of the divorce rate, if things go on like this. What's going to happen when the kids are older?

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