Parent Guilt

I have decided to make a very good friend of mine, Vicki Vila, my guest blogger. We had a long talk about "What do you give your kids for lunch?" and it inspired her to write this very insightful article for her daughter's daycare newsletter. I am proud to say there is a quote of mine that is used in the piece but most of all I'm proud that our conversation made her realize that we all do the best we can!

Parent Guilt

by Vicki Vila

How did I become the string cheese mother? You know, the one who puts a stick of Polly-O in her daughter's lunch bag and calls it good protein?

Like everyone else, I'm harried. I save the lunch preparation until the last minute. The last-last minute. And I feel pangs of guilt, though it's not as though I'm making grand efforts to change my slapdash ways.

Much of parenting is like that. We hold ourselves to high standards when our precious young are but babes, especially first-time parents. (They will get read to three times a day! They will think raisins are a divine snack and cookies evil! They will only watch educational TV for a half hour a day!). Then harsh reality sets in, and before you know it, cereal becomes a major food group and Noggin is your trusty substitute for “quality time” with your child. (“You know it's bad,” a good friend of mine said, “when your kid excitedly says 'Franklin's next!' before Moose A. Moose does.”) Such compromises must be made for the sake of sanity, you tell yourself, but a little something still gnaws at you.

I know that my mothers- and fathers-in-arms also feel this burden of guilt, often on a daily basis. But since the year is still fairly new, I would like to propose a resolution of sorts: let's stop feeling so badly about our parenting “sins” in 2009. I would argue that our crop of parents is doing quite an impressive job raising children. Consider:

More men have downsized their jobs or started working from home to spend more time with their children. The acronym SAHD (stay-at-home dad) is a recent coinage, and all it takes to find a father who is involved in the daily child-rearing (and schlepping) is a quick look around your house or your neighborhood. That alone is quite a change from when we were growing up.

Modern mothers, most of whom return to the workforce after having children, are giving as much of themselves as they can to their babies and young children. They agonize over the decision of who should care for their child while they are away. They engage in heated debates about breast vs. bottle to make sure they are choosing what will work best for their whole family. According to government data, the percentage of infants in the United States who were ever breastfed increased from 60% among infants who were born in 1993-1994 to 77% among infants born in 2005-2006. More babies are still being breastfed at the age of six months, too, which is significant if you consider that in the middle of the 20^th century, most American women were feeding their babies formula, according to the article “Baby Food,” by Jill Lepore in a recent New Yorker magazine article.

But more than that, all of us Kid's Korner parents, like the rest of our parenting peers, are making sacrifices small and large on a daily basis so that we can give our children the best WE have to give. The mother with a nursing infant at home, who takes the time to bring her older son on a class trip, then has to rush back home for the next feeding. The father who adds more than an hour to his daily commute through Manhattan traffic to take his child to school and pick her up. The mother who arrives late at work because she was putting on a presentation for her child's class.

And I do have to say that our school's parents put this string cheese mom's lunches to shame. I came in for a visit the other day, and was impressed at the variety of the foods being tucked into lunch bags. Macaroni and cheese with chicken fingers; meat, veggies and corn on the cob; a homemade noodle casserole. It inspired me to do better, that's for sure! (Though if I can't measure up, I won't worry. A good friend of mine, who has three children, one a baby, confided that she gives her older children the same thing for lunch every day. Sunflower nut butter and jelly sandwiches, with raisins on the side. It's fast and reliable, she said, and “In this economy, they should be glad they're not living on the street!”).

In case all this doesn't convince you that you're doing a pretty good job, consider this from a Danish sociologist named Lars Dencik, whose 1989 writing was quoted in the book “The Nurture Assumption:”

Until recently, he wrote, “Childhood was not the phase of a person's life to which we paid all that much attention, nor did it prompt the nagging anxiety which we see all around us today. On the contrary, children were liable to be neglected, abused and ill-treated....The guilty conscience, which accuses us of not paying sufficient attention to the interests of the child, and which nowadays so plagues parents and other caregivers, is in fact a very new and rather unique feeling in our modern epoch.”

So take heart, and remember this: the true supermoms and superdads are simply people trying to do their best despite countless daily frustrations. They don't look like anything special and blend in easily on a crowded street. But like parents immemorial, their eyes betray a certain kind of cagey haggardness and they look a little fragile, like people wearing their hearts on their sleeves are wont to look. Give one a seat on the subway next time you see one, or if you are one, please sit down.