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Driven to Distraction
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
It is hard to feel much sympathy for the 150 mothers, most of them affluent, whose unhappiness is probed by journalist Judith Warner in Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. Mothers (and fathers, too, for that matter) who view their role as giving their children the "perfect" childhood have only themselves to blame for feeling on edge. How many of them view their children as an extension of their own ambitions?
Here, for instance, is how Ms. Warner describes her own initiation into the oppressive world of anxious mothers. "It took very little time on the ground in America before I found myself becoming unrecognizable. I bought an SUV. I signed my unathletic elder daughter up for soccer. Other three-year-olds in her class were taking gymnastics, too, and art, and swimming and music. I signed her up for ballet. I bought a small library of pre-K skill books. I went around in a state of quiet panic." If anyone deserves sympathy here, it's the children.
Still, there is something in the air -- anxiety is as good a word as any -- and if Ms. Warner's interview subjects aren't exactly a representative sampling of North American mothers, many mothers know someone like them, and many others will recognize something of those women in themselves. Ms. Warner raises timely questions about the effect of all this crazed child-centredness. What is it doing to the cherished objects of all this attention? And what is it doing to marriages, whose stability children rely on?
These are not new questions. Five years ago, U.S. child psychiatrist Alvin Rosenfeld co-wrote (with journalist Nicole Wise) Hyper-Parenting: Are You Hurting Your Children By Trying Too Hard? His answer: "Childhood used to be a preparation -- now it's a performance. What kind of a childhood is that?" Well-meaning parents damage their children, he found in his practice, because children who are constantly pushed to excel begin to wonder: Why don't my parents like me as I am?
One sign of this damage is an epidemic of severe physical injuries among teenagers in the United States. The injuries are the product of an obsessive pursuit of excellence in sports as diverse as swimming and baseball. "They are overuse injuries pure and simple," The New York Times quoted Dr. James Andrews, a well-known sports orthopedist, as saying last month. "You get a kid on the operating table and you say to yourself, 'It's impossible for a 13-year-old to have this kind of wear and tear.' We've got an epidemic going on." One wonders what all that wear and tear is doing to their mental well-being, too.
As for adult life, Ms. Warner suggests all this focus on children is "sucking the emotional life out of our marriages." That is not reflected in the divorce rate, however, as unhappy couples are more likely today than in the recent past to stay together for -- you guessed it -- the children's sake. Wouldn't the children be better off if their parents stayed together and happy?
In Ms. Warner's world, women wonder what happened to all the choices that once lay before them. Strange. The most educated generation of women in history feels powerless in the face of the insidious social pressure to program their children for achievement. They have more choices than they realize.
