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?
There's Patricia Krentcil, the Nutley, New Jersey resident recently anointed the "Tan Mom" for taking her five-year-old daughter to a tanning salon that gladly took her money even though her skin is roughly the color of a baseball mitt and which now wants nothing to do with her. Krentcil claims her daughter's sunburn was caused by the actual sun, not by time in a tanning bed. Nutley officials didn't believe her; they've charged her with child endangerment.
There's actress Alicia Silverstone, who after apparently graduating with honors from the Jenny McCarthy School of Disseminating Extremely Dubious Science, was shown on video pre-chewing her son's food for him.
There's Dara-Lynn Weiss, who chronicled her seven-year-old daughter's quest to lose weight in the pages of Vogue. After the little girl's pediatrician warned that she was overweight, her mom decided to publicly share the weight loss journey - not a surprise in a society where the televised boot camp model of weight loss reigns. Critics assailed Weiss for doing damage to her daughter's body-image.
There's Ruby Roth, whose children's book Vegan is Love sparked controversy thanks to what some believe is her overzealous advocacy of veganism and the book's graphic and some say oversimplified depictions of animals being used for product testing, food, and for our entertainment.
There's journalist and author Pamela Druckerman, who had to go to France to discover that slowly introducing kids to a variety of foods and permitting them to go off on their own and play using their imaginations and just a toy or two made life easier.
And let's not forget Yale Law School professor Amy Chua, author of the well-publicized and hotly debated book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Chua's stifling and draconian approach to parenting would make Mister Rogers shudder, but he'd still love Chua just the way she is. An NPR reporter speculated that Chua might be "nuts," but her no-nonsense, achieve at all costs treatment of her kids was nonetheless "mesmerizing."
Going back a bit, there's author Ayelet Waldman, who became a target for national scorn when she acknowledged in her wonderful book Bad Mother that at times she loved her husband more than her children. Waldman's assertion dismayed and displeased the "we cease to exist as a couple the second the baby comes into our lives" crowd.
And finally, this week, on the cover of Time magazine, we see a mother breast-feeding her four-year old son. Next to the image was the headline/challenge "Are You Mom Enough?"The mom is dressed as though she just came from a spin class, her hand defiantly on her hip as if to say "go ahead - just try and outfeed me," and her son is wearing fatigue pants, suggesting militaristic dedication to the cause.
You might think that by highlighting parents who make unconventional decisions the media are encouraging acceptance of less zealous, less boot camp-tinged parenting methods. I'm not so sure. We're shocked and stunned by these examples - a few mouths hang open, a few jaws hit the floor. But by treating these moms as performance art, their unconventionality and failure to recognize that life is totally situational, loses its ability to educate.
As New York Times blogger K.J. Dell'Antonia explained, "we are different parents at different times."
And sometimes that means a parent has to imitate Carol Brady.
Happy Mother's Day, Mom.
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