Parenthood 101

Parenting is not an easy thing to do. The Sailor has 2 children, a sweet almost 17 year old girl and a 20 year old son, now completing his Army basic training. I can well remember many sleepless nights. Many trips to doctors, soccer games, band practices and the like.

I really cannot understand what it is that the likes of Judith Warner expect government to do. Perhaps she should not be a parent if it is that inconvenient for her to be one. The same holds true for many out there. Parenting is a labor of love, not a function of government. - Sailor

PARENTHOOD 101
John Podhoretz
New York Post


February 18, 2005 -- THERE are certainly more restful ways to live one's life than being the parent of an infant. You just seemed to have more time — time to eat, time to shower, time to dawdle.

And especially more time to sleep.

We parents of young children complain a lot about sleep, or the lack thereof. Actually, we parents complain a lot, period.

We do not live in a stoical time, where people are given credit for bearing discomfort in seemingly calm silence. We live in an emotive time, where we are given credit for expressing ourselves honestly.

But the problem with living in an emotive time is that negative emotions and unpleasant feelings seem to get the better of us. That's especially true when it comes to the way people these days talk and write about being a parent.

It has fast become a cliché among America's articulate class that being a parent is pretty much a horrible experience.



There are just too many demands. Children need to be fed and housed, so you need to make enough money to do both. They need round-the-clock care, but if moms provide that care themselves instead of workng, then housing themselves and the kids is financially more challenging.

Not to mention the intellectual competition — for toddler classes, for pre-school enrichment, for placement in magnet schools, for slots in private school.

It's an unmitigated horror show, or so we are told.

Allison Pearson's bestselling novel, "I Don't Know How She Does It," features nearly 500 pages of a successful, wealthy and happily married mother of two healthy kids complaining non-stop about how difficult her life is.

Now, this week's Newsweek cover story takes all of this to its logical conclusion. The author, Judith Warner, pulls no punches: In America, "motherhood" is an "awful burden" instead of "a joy."

Warner offers pop social-science evidence in the form of terrifying but highly dubious pseudo-studies: "Thirty percent of mothers of young children reportedly suffer from depression . . . 909 women in Texas recently told researchers they find taking care of their kids about as much fun as cleaning their house."

She interviews an articulate woman who is hurled into inarticulate despair as she tries to make sense of her life: "What I'm trying to remember . . . Is how I ended up raising this princess . . . How I got into . . . How to get out of . . . this, this, this, this mess.'"

This is not a woman living in Darfur, fearful that her children are about to be butchered by the Junjaweed. This is not a Sri Lankan woman trying to make sense of her life after the tsunami. She's a newspaper editor with a supportive husband — and someone in desperate need of some perspective.

Before her generation of mothers had kids beginning in the '80s, Warner writes, "when our sense of our potential as women was being formed, there was a general feeling of optimism." Then the kids came. And suddenly, shockingly, Warner and her peeps discovered a deeply unfair thing: "Life," she says breathlessly, "was hard. It was stressful. It was expensive. Jobs — and children — were demanding."

There was a time when people were told to count their blessings. Warner and other social critics do the opposite. They tally their dissatisfactions, and by doing so, those dissatisfactions deepen and become infected.

Warner's solution to the problem of parenting today is to make the job of raising children a general public responsibility — an obligation of the state.

Today's women, she actually says, really ought to be "blaming society." Instead, she notes disapprovingly, "moms today tend to blame themselves." They "privatize their problems" instead of demanding help from Washington.

Because they don't unite to fight for the right, they have taken on "the Herculean task of being absolutely everything to their children, simply because no one else is doing anything at all to help them."

Yes, well, when it comes down to it, that's what being a parent means. All the affordable child care in the world can't fix this existential problem, no matter how much Warner and others might dream it would.

It's pretty simple. When you're a parent, you're the only mother, the only father, your child will (God willing) ever have. Every minute, every hour, every day, forever.

Those of us who have young children were all raised to be self-actualizing, self-possessed, self-supporting. It's safe to say we think more, and more deeply, about ourselves and our own needs than any other people at any other time in the history of the world. But at 3:30 in the morning, a crying baby or a sick child doesn't care about your needs. She needs you. You have to put somebody else first.

For some of us, being a parent is a liberation from the tyranny of the self. Others seem to cling to the shackles of their solipsism. Tragically, they have been unable to wrest free from a worldview more suitable to childhood, and therefore sadly denied themselves the particular satisfactions that come from embracing adulthood in all its glorious mundanity.

E-mail:podhoretz@nypost.com