Motherload

I had a most compelling conversation the other night with a close girlfriend. A term swam into the discussion that I haven't heard used in years: Bohemian. It cristallized a thought that has been bubbling away at the back of my mind for the past few years: that it has become impossible to raise a family in a creative, bohemian, or eccentric way. There seems to be no alternative, or middle ground, between hyper-commercialized, preternaturally childcentric helicopter parenting, or fundamental neglect amounting to child abuse. I think one of the (many) reasons why I question parenting at the moment is that it is so suffocatingly dull, not because children are dull, but because what's expected of mothers is. I was in the school playground giving my children their daily snack of nuts the other day, and another mother, usually very friendly, barked at me: "Nuts? Did I hear the word nuts? Don't you know that you are not allowed to bring nuts onto school premises?" I had ...

I recently went to the Continent, to the Netherlands, to be precise. My Dutch nephew was getting married. I ended up having to go sans husband, whose passport is currently with the Home Office awaiting a stamp of indefinite leave to remain in the UK (he's Australian). Charmingly, they have had it since the end of January, and have just informed him airily that it might take 'up to six months' to lift a wrist and put a stamp in the document. Meanwhile, husband carries on working day in, day out for a British organization, and paying UK tax. This is less of a digression than it seems. What I encountered while acting the single mother in the land of Spinoza, Grotius, tolerance and liberalism reminded me that parenting is a cultural, not a natural, phenomenon all over again. As if I needed reminding. My two children are, by British lights, fairly well-behaved, heard more than seen upon occasion, but not thugs. Not to my knowledge, anyway. But in the house of my decent and c...

I've just listened, twice, to Between Ourselves , which asked the question: "How Should We Raise Our Children?". A subject close to my heart. It was structured thusly: first, a spiel about the psychologists' own childhoods (James's was rather lacking in nurture, he told us, while Antrobus's was blessed with a very present mother). Secondly, an excursion into what children need (love, from one continuous source, a parent or another, until they are 3, then love and more love, with a few more people thrown in for good measure). Thirdly, a critique of the Supernanny style of intervention ('thinking step' only good in extreme situations according to James; 'thinking step' good for irate mummies who need to calm down, for Antrobus). Finally, an answer to what needs to change in society for us to be better parents. For James, it's simple: we need to be Scandinavian. We need to move to a society in which everything is set up for the wellbeing of ...

Over the past few weeks I have been astonished at the number of people who have referred me to an article by journalist and writer Lucy Cavendish, which appeared at the end of March 2010 in the Observer . I read it with interest the first time it was mentioned, but felt that it was all old news, that we all know the story of the 'Mummy Wars', the stay-at-homes v. the working mums, the power of Mumsnet, and the playground antagonism. I wasn't sure what the article contributed to the debate, or how it took the debate forward, other than to re-present the normalizing perspective of the self-confessed 'Slacker Mum', speaking from the position of non-hothouser, non-combatant, mild-mannered raiser of kids. This, it seemed to me, was a very appealing position to take (supine), which was bound to solicit a lot of empathy, sympathy, and further first-person accounts of unwarranted sniping by mothers on mothers. Except that it didn't: the comments at the foot of Cavendish...

Having spent my time recently haring about to interview men and women for the book I'm working on, I felt like sitting back with a glass of wine and some good TV the other night. I had taped the current series running on BBC4 entitled Women , and lo and behold, our Lovefilm account spat Enchanted through our letterbox. I ended up glutting on a programme about who really does the UK's domestic work, followed swiftly by Enchanted , Disney's deconstruction of the very figure it has itself created: the cartoon version of the fairytale princess. The Women doc was about how men and women divide up domestic labour, and whether it has become equally shared -- posited as 'one of feminism's central goals' (I'm not sure it really was a goal, more an object of critique). Enchanted is about how A. N. Fairytale Heroine comes to question her faith in the ideal of 'Happy Ever After With A Prince'. She learns to value reason, and to listen to her own emotions, ra...

A Good Childhood is a report for the Children's Society. I'd never heard of it, but my husband got it for work. I think he was in part inspired to buy it by the terrible UN report back in around 2006, which put the UK at the bottom of the heap for good places to raise kids. The report's been put together by Richard Layard and Judy Dunn, although they are really only the final adjusters, synthesizing an absolutely huge amount of research, that has been done on the state of childhood and all that contributes to it (ie the whole of British society, saturated in consumerist capitalist ideology). Richard Layard is the economist who wrote Happiness , and the report is written in a delightful avuncular style, which just makes my heart melt. It's very tough: we hear about the dreadful state of the UK education system, about mental ill-health in children and young people, and the terrible impact of consumerism, substance abuse, violent games, and overworked parents. Yet because ...

Mommy Wars (edited by Leslie Morgan Steiner (Random House, 2006)) is billed as a ‘face-off’ between ‘career’ and ‘stay-at-home moms’. My heart began to sink immediately. Another attack on women, another simplistic polarization of the choices women make and the choices that are open to them once they have children. In fact, however, this collection of essays isn’t nearly as bad as its own cover makes it sound. It’s not a ‘face-off’ at all, but a collection of essays about motherhood written by highly literate women, many of them already well-established writers and journalists. I really enjoyed the experience of reading about so many women’s lives (even though I had a guilty twinge at the realization that pretty much all of them exactly shared my profile, so that all that was really going on was a huge moan-fest). Some essays have clearly been taken from other sources and re-published for the purposes of this book. In that sense there is an element of professional performance here: man...