When my mom would express her frustration at the disinclination of my brother and I to clean up after ourselves - and we invariably groused at her in response - she would speculate that we'd be more receptive if she was more like Carol Brady - always positive, always dressed up, sometimes singing, but never outwardly frustrated with her expanded brood.
The Brady Bunch's creators have over the years weathered a lot of criticism - much of it from folks in my line of work - for how relentlessly chipper the characters were and how easily they solved an unrealistically simple and narrow range of problems, often in song. Still, Carol Brady didn't "helicopter," didn't live in her kids' back pockets, didn't practice "attachment parenting," which according to some experts is the new "common sense" child-rearing technique.
Moms like mine who emulated - if only to make a point - television counterparts like Carol Brady are invisible today. Instead, we've recently harvested a bumper crop of media overreaction to moms who make curious, unconventional, questionable, and downright damaging child-rearing decisions. Moreover, these are the only moms who get attention. Moms who adopt a more nurturing, "love you unconditionally and work my way out a job" approach, who let their kids make more of their own decisions as they mature, who don't treat every issue as though it was an ascent on Mt. Everest and every accomplishment or failure by their children as life-defining, -ending, or -affirming, are not sufficiently compelling. Who do we see instead?
