In Spite of Everything

by Susan Gregory Thomas

  No news flash here. Over the past several years, it has become well established in the popular press that X parents are overprotective, overinvolved—overattached, some might say. In 2005, journalist Judith Warner’s bestselling polemic Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety skewered the rise of upper-middle-class, postfeminist mothering for its obsessive perfectionism about raising developmentally correct children (as well as American public policy for neglecting to support families). Part of what inspired me to write my own first book, Buy, Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds, was having investigated in an article the marketing industry’s exploitation of Generation X’s attachment neuroses. Further reporting for the book on my generation’s mania as I was raising two children under the age of three made for a mind-blowing revelation, compelling me to look more deeply at what was triggering my consumer behavior as well as my parenting decisions. Not that I could change the instincts, though I thought it was important to look more analytically at the consumption reflexes. Even established advocates of attachment parenting have started saying “Enough already.” In 2007, less than a decade after publishing the seminal book on the advantages of attachment parenting, the author Katie Allison Granju wrote an invective for the hip parenting site Babble.com arguing that Gen X mothers had supplanted postwar homemaker concerns with postfeminist neuroses about child development. She called this phenomenon an “over-parenting crisis,” going so far as to characterize its reach as “epidemic.” It’s not that Granju had changed her mind about attachment parenting. Rather, the issue had become, in a way, one of quantity, not quality. “In our hyperfocus on all things parenting,” she wrote, “are we bungling the very thing we seek to perfect?”

  It’s a ridiculously complicated question for us to answer. But it’s pretty clear what everyone else thinks. When it got to the point, as it did in 2005, that a local barkeep felt compelled to post a “Stroller Manifesto”—the now infamous public remonstrance of overattached parents in Park Slope, begging them to get a freaking babysitter instead of rolling up, en masse, to happy hour with their howling infants and toddlers—clearly the weight of the zeitgeist had gotten to the bone-crushing stage. Even those who vowed to revile X’s “the-world-is-my-changing-table” philosophy when their baby time came, now find themselves somehow insidiously absorbed into the machine. The New York magazine sex columnist turned wife and mother Amy Sohn bemoaned her own et tu? moment a few years ago. Who is it we’re afraid to leave alone—the babies or ourselves? In spite of vowing never to be one of those annoying Stroller Manifesto addressees, she found herself with fellow infant-strapped parents making a family-style nuisance out of herself at a trendy Brooklyn restaurant. “We had,” she wrote, “become Them.”

  But X seems to take special pleasure in cataloging in epic detail the ways in which we suck. Remember that scene in 8 Mile where Eminem wins the battle before the other guy even gets onstage, by preemptively using the competition’s ammunition against himself? We’re all like that. We’re all the real Slim Shady. We’ll tell you all about our legion faults and shortcomings—more than, perhaps, you cared to know—well before your finger curls around the trigger. (Contrast with Baby Boomers’ protest-era megaphone-style self-promotion: The Whole World Is Watching! The Revolution Will Be Televised! Stand and Deliver! Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow!) You would think that such excruciating self-analysis would count for something psychologically, and it does, so far as our generation’s contributions to entertainment and media are concerned. But where parenting is concerned, excruciating self-analysis seems to get you only so far. It certainly doesn’t seem to keep you from acting like an asshole, any more than knowing about his whole prophecy kept Oedipus from killing his father and schtupping his mother. For one thing, our attempts to reconcile our own childhood wounds in parenthood yields some very odd, pop-culty results that peg us as sandwich-board-wearing chumps.

  Indeed, we’re such obvious targets that you can see us from the Washington desk of the New York Times columnist, smug Bobo Boomer, and self-described “comic sociologist” David Brooks, who observed back in 2007 that Park Slope mothers—by making minime’s of their infants, dressing them in Ramones onesies and skull-and-crossbones booties—were offending those who understood that babies had a right to be babies. Say what you will about Brooks, but he was totally right. Please. We could all add enough of our own weird, sorry examples to pack what’s left of the Staten Island landfill. For instance, what did I do when I wanted to talk to my children about racism? I blasted Public Enemy’s “911’s a Joke.” My children and I then discussed how justifiably upset and angry the people singing the song were when the police wouldn’t come because they weren’t considered important enough to help, which spurred a fascinating conversation. I can hear Brooks clearing his throat contemptuously. My six-year-old’s favorite song, at last check, was “Spanish Bombs”; my nine-year-old’s is “Life on Mars?” and just the other day I caught myself cooing the bing-bong part of “Satellite of Love” to my newborn son. I know, Brooks, I know who I am, and I’m not proud. But I’ll see you and I’ll raise you. My sandwich board reads ALL APOLOGIES! You can see it from the numbing, frigid desert of deep space.

  X parents also brook a lot of bad behavior in our children, even though we may not consciously think that we do. As an Xer, you may feel great sympathy for people’s complaints that our well-attached kids are, well, rude. You may hear outrageous stories, like the 2009 post I read on a New York Times blog recounting a preschooler’s purposely tripping a woman in a crowded restaurant and chortling, “ ‘Mommy, did you see me trip that woman? I tripped her!’ ” with no corrective measure from the mother. You may join a grandmother in her mortification when she asks for advice on Grandparents.com on how to handle her grandson’s relentless public insulting of his own mother, who seems unable—or unwilling—to stand up to such mistreatment. You can even understand that indulging this kind of rudeness can have more serious behavioral consequences for your young children down the line. As a 2005 Yale study revealed, preschool students are expelled at a rate more than three times that of children in grades K–12 because of behavioral problems. Preschoolers? God only knows how our kids will get jobs if they’re getting kicked out of preschool.

  But you don’t need to read that kind of stuff in studies or on blogs to know that it’s as true as it is crazy. Because you sense an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance in your own psyche, you know that you’re somehow part of the problem. You also really don’t need to ask child development experts for affirmation, but what the experts have to say is: Yes, today’s kids are ruder than ever, and it is the fault of the generation that’s raising them. Which is to say, us. The consensus is that we, in general, are so fixated on our children’s emotional well-being that we may be teaching them that everyone else’s feelings are comparatively unimportant—a poor etiquette twist on the Nirvana chorus “All alone is all we are.”

  What Brooks and his Boomer sympathizers dismiss as pathetic vanity is of course more than that. But it nonethless raises bizarre, vaguely troubling questions about us as parents. Why do we outfit our infants in “Koo-Koo for Cocoa Puffs” and “Silly Rabbit! Trix Are for Kids!” onesies, but feed them homemade organic baby food and breast-feed them way past their first birthdays? Why are we all so drawn to caustic parodies of the Saturday morning cartoons of our childhood on late-night TV? Why do we have such dissonant responses to wholesomeness and cheesiness? Are we trying as adults to normalize the icky, sexualized, psychedelic gestalt of the media and culture that came in through the front door while our parents weren’t watching?

  Yes, we are. Still, I’m not convinced that this is all bad. I know that I continually walk the line that divides attachment parenting and enmeshment parenting because of my childhood neuroses. But it can be instructive. Take, for instance, the Princess Game.

  When Zanny was three years old, the girls in her preschool developed a circle that revolved around the D
isney princesses. Anyone who wasn’t wearing a dress of the trademarked hue of the princess of the day wasn’t allowed to join in the game, so if you weren’t wearing powder blue on Cinderella day, you were out. For starters, my daughter had only the barest notion of who Cinderella, Snow White, and the rest of them were, even in their original fairy-tale configurations, since I had felt that she was far too young to hear such scary stories. I agree with Bruno Bettelheim and the raft of other child development experts who argue that these folk archetypes help little ones work through their primal fears of parental abandonment and so forth, but as they will tell you, children aren’t ready for this kind of psychic challenge until they are five or six. On the basis of such thinking, I’d decided to wait with the whole Brothers Grimm oeuvre until she reached kindergarten. Moreover, as you might expect from the author of a book on early childhood and consumerism, I had made our home a no-Disney zone, so my daughter was not acquainted with the princesses’ merchandising sorority. This meant that, faced with the Princess Game at the age of three, my little schmushkie was confused, excluded, scared by stories she didn’t understand, and hurt.

  By the time I had actually pieced together what was going on by picking up the fragments that Zanny offered, asking teachers what she might be talking about, and then running such patched-together snippets by the other mothers for their take, I was beside myself. My daughter’s tiny little self; her tender-lipped face! She had borne this thorny situation, alone, for at least two weeks. The teachers hadn’t tuned in to it, in part because my daughter’s modus operandi is to affect a poker face in public, particularly in the throes of stress. It didn’t seem as though anything was bothering her. But it was. It was my job to know what was bothering her, and it had taken me two weeks to figure it out. Dropping her off at school that morning, I was vibrating at such a high pitch of anxiety that when I let go of her hand as she walked into school, I felt my skin had slipped off with it, leaving the ragged meat of my fingers pulsing in full view of my daughter, of the children, the other mothers.

  I was crazed. I had to stop it. I had to stop it. What could I do? How could a Montessori school allow such social deviance and transparent marketing to intrude on early childhood education? I wanted to lecture the parents until I could feel smoke billowing from my ears: How can you let your daughters behave this way, and moreover, how can all you liberals countenance creating a new generation of sexist shopaholics? What the hell is wrong here when preschoolers are acting like queen bees and wannabes? I was racked with guilt: How could I allow my rarefied, navel-gazing notions of the walled garden of childhood to bar my little girl from simply making friends? I had done this. Then I started to despise the little girls: petty, small-minded, vicious little creatures. That’s when I knew I was really nuts. They were three years old.

  I finally summoned the courage to talk to the teachers, somehow managing to keep my shit together enough to couch my concerns diplomatically. They were not only wholly sympathetic but grateful that I had raised the issue; frankly, they hadn’t noticed that the game was having such an impact on the girls, much less on stoic little Zanny. As we progressed through a really thoughtful and rich conversation, it dawned on me that this might be one of those instances in which my hypersensitivity had the capacity to be useful, much in the same way that it had fueled my determination to probe the marketing industry’s targeting young children. Huh.

  At home, my daughter and I talked through her feelings, which ultimately inspired us to embark on an exploration of Cinderella stories from around the world; every culture has one, and we compared the Mexican, Chinese, Caribbean, and Disney versions. She was comforted when I assured her that her teachers knew about the Princess Game and were going to help all the girls, including her, work through it at school; and they did, in a loving and thoughtful way. The game sparked heartfelt and nuanced conversation among all the mothers; I was interested in, and learned a lot from, their insights. One day, nine months later, my daughter had a friend over for a playdate. I overheard the friend say: “Hey! I thought you said you had princess costumes!” My daughter replied: “I do have princess costumes—they just aren’t Disney princess costumes. Disney just wants you to buy all their stuff, and I just like making my own.” In addition to taking sheepish pleasure in her punk-rock resistance efforts, I felt a blossoming of peace and pride: Everyone had done so well.

  And, really, it would have been so easy to miss. The whole thing. Even I, in my enmeshment parenting craze, almost had. The parents I knew as a kid hadn’t particularly been looking out for these things. They were so small, barely discernible: No well-adjusted person would have taken notice of them. But how many times as a child had I found myself suddenly in the midst of confusing, scary circumstances, not understanding enough about the contours of my own feelings to know what they meant, much less the vocabulary required to speak up about them? I can’t say. For my friends and me, probably the outline of our childhoods could be traced via the sequence of such moments: wandering, confused, unsafe. I wanted my own babies to feel, from the start, that the adults around them were paying attention, were there to help untangle the bramble in front of them—that we might not be able to clear it entirely, but that we were unknitting it alongside and behind them. Not alone. I did not want my children to feel alone.

  But what if, in spite of our best efforts, we failed them anyway? Or, rather, what if I failed them? Cal, with his unalterable compass, wouldn’t be capable of it. And beyond his solid upbringing, part of the reason for this, I thought, was his sense of faith—as in a holy connection. I had, to be exact, less than zero. I remember with excruciating clarity the moment I asked my mother the Death question. I was four, and I was tucked into bed under my hippie patchwork quilt with my Snoopy. My mom laid out the standard secular humanist line: No one knows, but some people believe that you go to “Heaven” (oh); others think that you die for a little while but are reborn as some other kind of thing (wha?); others are pretty sure that’s that (what?!). And thus launched a lifetime of existential fear and nihilistic dread. What really happens? What really is God, if anything?

  My commitment to trying to cultivate some, any kind of, faith had started with a question posed by Zanny a few months after she turned two. She and I were stumping up to the park on an airless summer day. She spotted a dried-up earthworm on the sidewalk and wanted to know what had happened to it. The second I said that it had died—meaning, it was not alive anymore—I knew what was next: “What happens to things when they aren’t alive anymore?” Of course she wanted to know—who doesn’t? Standing there dumbly, I thought, (a) you should have been rehearsing this moment since she was in utero, and (b) you have the next ten seconds to get this right.

  Had I been of a different background or generation—the kind that has fixed ideas on what to say to kids—handling this perennial ontological riddle would have been a piece of cake. But I did not know how to handle it, and I didn’t know many people who did, either. It does seem funny that most people my age whom I know are dumbstruck by the whole God thing and what to tell their kids. For a crop of parents so dishy and analytical about everything from nursing in front of their fathers-in-law to whether to introduce toddlers to Star Wars to “red-shirting” kindergartners, it seems weird that this should leave us so stumped. Then again, we are the generation that felt that everything was essentially bullshit. Then we had kids, and everything became important again. And if there was ever a decidedly no-bullshit scenario, it’s talking to your little boo-boo-head about God, a Higher Power, the Afterlife—all that.

  It’s not that we don’t want to. At least according to my own unscientific survey, most of us do want to offer our kids spiritual undergirding. But that survey also says that the spiritually confused and/or dissatisfied generally fall into one of three camps. The first are those who grew up with religion but don’t feel particularly connected to the associated traditions and values. The second camp is conflicted about its religion of origin; the third never had one
to begin with and is lost. The bottom line seems to be that we want it, but it has to feel real, authentic. But how do you do that? What does that even mean?

  Take the case of my friend whom I’ll call Simone. Simone grew up a stone’s throw from the West Virginia mountains, and her hometown was traditional United Methodist. But because it was also a college town, and her dad was a professor, Simone always felt as though she got just the right mixture of skepticism and faith. She wanted the same experience for her two kids, six and four years old. But not only had her perspective broadened with adulthood, life was also different for her children than it had been for her. For one thing, she was troubled about the church split over gay marriage. For another, her kids were born in Dallas, Texas—a far cry from small-town Methodism. Moreover, Simone was divorced shortly after the birth of her second child; the women of the church were mostly married, traditional. Ditto when she moved to Jacksonville, Florida. There were uncomfortable moments, alienating periods. But Simone says that things worked themselves out because she and her church community were guided by what they’d been taught from childhood: love, tolerance, service. “It’s funny,” she wrote to me, “but when you’re raised on an idea or concept, all the answers to the thorny questions are answered when you need them to be.”