Telling mom who's mom
Tina Gladstone, Each week in our All About series, we introduce our subject on Tuesday, feature a first-person essay on Wednesday and open up the pages to our readers on Thursday. This week, hyper-parenting: Real phenomenon or fake word? When we were teenagers, my best friend Laura and I used to talk all the time about how our lives would turn out. The last thing we ever imagined was that 20 years down the line we'd have to defend ourselves for the kind of care we take raising our kids. But the tables have turned between us and our parents. The very ones we rebelled against now accuse us of coddling our children, of being overprotective. We find ourselves explaining to our mothers, fathers and in-laws (we see the exasperated looks on their faces) why our kids have to ride in car seats, why they can't eat certain foods when they're babies, why we don't let them "cry it out." It's not that my friends and I are neurotic fuss-budgets. It's that pediatricians, parenting experts, even lawmakers tell us that these measures make for happy kids, healthy kids -- alive kids. Hardly something to argue with. My friend from work, Jane, has been biting her tongue since the day her son was born. First were the arguments with her in-laws about how the baby sleeps (on his back -- Jane's doctor told her that the likelihood of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is lower that way). Then there were strange, tugging matches in the sunshine -- the doctor told Jane to keep the baby's fragile skin shaded, but when she turned her back, her mother would invariably uncover him, claiming a few rays were healthy. Another friend of mine, Catharine, is shocked at what her mother, a scientist, has to say about putting her two little boys in car seats. "It can't be good for a child to be restrained like that all the time," she insists. But back to Laura. On a spring day a while back, she left her kids at home with her very giving mother while she went to work. She came back to find her house looking spectacular. The winter carpet had been pulled up from the front hall, the living room furniture had been rearranged, the floors were gleaming. "Wow, mom, how did you get all that done with the kids around?" "Oh, it was easy" her mother said. "They spent the afternoon playing in the yard. Katy [who's seven] was keeping an eye on Thomas [not yet two]." It's true for many people of my generation: Sometimes we shudder when we leave our kids with our parents, we wonder if we're doing the right thing. We don't want to hurt their feelings, but in this world, you don't leave a seven-year-old to supervise a two-year-old in an unprotected backyard. My own delightful mother asks me in all seriousness as I walk out the door of my house in Toronto's Kensington Market (not the calmest of neighbourhoods), "Can Amelia [my daughter] go to the park on her own?" I pause, suppress the alarm in my voice and tell her, "The front porch, mom. That's as far as she goes. And only if you're on the first floor." |