The Madness of Modern Parenting E-Book

Zoe Williams

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 83

Beschreibung

Parenting in the modern world is an overwhelming concept. It seems to divide everyone from psychologists and politicians to scientists and salesmen, leaving the parents themselves with a terrible headache as a result. How can anyone live up to such expansive and conflicting expectations? As Zoe Williams explores, the madness begins before the baby has even arrived: hysteria is rife surrounding everything from drinking alcohol and eating cheese to using a new frying pan. And it only gets worse. The list of things you need to consider (as well as the things you never realised you needed to consider) is ever-increasing, and questions of breastfeeding, buggies, staying at home, schooling - and what your mother-in-law thinks you're doing wrong - take over completely. The task of raising a child has been turned into a circus of ludicrous proportions. Combining laugh-out-loud tales of parenthood with myth-busting facts and figures, Zoe provides the antithesis of all parenting discussions to date. After all, parents managed perfectly well for centuries before this modern madness, so why do today's mothers and fathers make such an almighty fuss about everything?

Leseprobe

PROVOCATIONS

THE MADNESS OF MODERN PARENTING

ZOE WILLIAMS

SERIES EDITOR: YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN

Contents

Title PagePreamblePart I: Advice, groupthink and the evidencePart II: The babyPart III: Children and the performance indexCopyright

Preamble

What it looks like from the outside…

FROM THE OUTSIDE, the madness looks like something modern parents do to themselves. It looks like martyrdom, self-righteousness, old-fashioned showing-off. They make such a big deal of it, from the minute they conceive. Immediately, they are repudiating cat faeces and mercury, things the rest of us hardly ever eat anyway. They can’t just abstain from alcohol, they have to tell you endlessly how much they are abstaining, how important it is for the future of their progeny, how sacrificial it is of them, and yet, at the same time, incredibly easy, of course. Their buggies cost more than a second-hand car, and they huff and glare at you if you get in their way. It’s impossible not to be in their way, because these buggies are also the size of a second-hand car. The world is in their way. They can’t just breastfeed because they like it: it has to be a matter of life and death.

Everything is undertaken with this declamatory defiance, as though it is only their superiority, their learning, their altruism, their strength, standing between their baby and the infinite threat the world wilfully presents to it. Who died and made them the keeper of the species? How has humanity managed to keep itself alive this long without people being so preening and uptight about it?

And then it gets worse. When junior has graduated to eating food and sleeping normally, as all animals are wont, his or her every waking hour has to be filled with education and improvement. His or her progress must be chanted constantly; the boasting is shameless. All considerations of modesty and simple manners are instantly jettisoned, in favour of telling near strangers that you think your five-year-old might have an aptitude for Mandarin. Every hour must be distended to contain more opportunities for growth. It looks weirdly unnatural, lightless, this kind of parenting; I imagine it producing etiolated children, their knowledge incredibly long and thin.

How is it that parents managed perfectly well before – for centuries before – without this laboured intonation of ‘It’s the most important job in the world’? It has never been anything more or less important than it is right now. The sowing of your genetic seed in the soil of the future has never felt less vital than it does today. Excepting a bracket of the English upper class, nobody has ever wanted anything less than the best for their children; nobody has ever just shrugged their children off and not been that bothered. How do parents in the developing world today manage to raise children who, if they make it past cholera, become rounded adults without all that expertise? Why do today’s parents have to make such an almighty fuss about everything?

What it feels like from the inside…

Then you get pregnant, and the first thing you realise, before – long before – you have any concept of ‘baby’, is this: the perfectionism and neurosis don’t come from you. They come from outside.

I got pregnant with my first child in 2007. It wasn’t a planned pregnancy – you’re not allowed to say that when you have children; unfortunately, I already said it before he was born, so it’s a matter of public record now. That being the case, I think it bears a bit of discussion. You’re not allowed to say you didn’t plan your pregnancy because people assume that means you love your child less than someone who did plan theirs. Everybody who has ever had a baby knows this is rubbish. An unplanned pregnancy is not the same as an unwanted pregnancy anyway. But even an unwanted pregnancy will, uninterrupted, turn into a wanted child. That’s why adoption isn’t the easy alternative to abortion: your pregnancy may have been an accident, but your baby is as desperately loved as anybody else’s. Some people can conceptualise their baby before they meet it – and even love it before they meet it – but many people can’t. I know I never did.

Then you have your baby, and you love him so much that you basically think he’s the Messiah. Indeed, I think the whole nativity story – Jesus, the three kings, the donkeys, all of that – is just an extended metaphor for that moment of ‘dark magic’ (as the wonderful journalist Ariel Levy described it)1 when you’re hit by the force of maternity. I genuinely did think I’d just saved the world with my vagina. I was expecting the shepherds to arrive any minute.

1 ‘Thanksgiving in Mongolia’, Ariel Levy, New Yorker, 18 November 2013.

Part I

Advice, groupthink and the evidence

THERE’S NOTHING INCOMPATIBLE about being an ambivalent pregnant person and a devoted mother. But because society is often daft – and people won’t tell the truth about themselves for fear of society’s off-beam, idiotic judgments – you don’t often hear people say that they were ambivalent during gestation, in case the world thinks less of their bond with their babies. You can think of it as the parent trap, like a Chinese finger trap: inescapable even if you don’t believe in it. You hear experts comment on maternal ambivalence, you hear a lot about it on Woman’s Hour and you read beautiful novels about it; but you rarely hear people say it of themselves. So the minute you get up the duff, in other words, you feel as though you’re being policed inside out – not just inside your body, but inside your mind. And this, like any unwanted intrusion, leads to a lot of feelings of inadequacy, vulnerability, dissemblance and anger as you try to be the pregnant person the world wants you to be, where previously you were your own person who didn’t care what the world wanted.

Oh yeah, also: I was horribly afflicted during pregnancy by something that I only read about last month with both my children now at school. How I wish I could go back in time and read about this before it happened. Pregnancy is, basically, a hyperinsulinic state,2 which is to say your body deliberately lays down fat for the process and for the breastfeeding afterwards. The hormonal mechanism is that insulin interrupts your perception of the hormone leptin, which is what tells your brain that it’s safe to stop eating and you can burn energy. Orexogenesis, the energy storage state, is sluggish; anorexogenesis, the energy burning state is, as you would expect, lively. This is true for all humans, but, naturally, we’re also individuals; some people are hungrier and more sluggish in orexogenesis than others. Adolescence is another hyperinsulinic state, as you lay down fat for menstruation – become fertile, basically.

Now, I remember from adolescence that I am basically bovine in orexogenesis: all I can think about is food and sitting down. I remember one journey home from school when I bought a bar of chocolate at every sweet-shop I passed between Hammersmith and Wandsworth. For those who don’t know London, this is 6 miles of prime retail real estate. I mean, sure, I was on a bus for some of them, but it was not pretty, this behaviour.

Anyway, I was exactly the same in pregnancy, famished and lazy from the word go. I couldn’t walk past a Greggs. Every day, I ended up in tears of frustration about the crap I’d just eaten. Every other day, I’d hear some doctor, often a man but not always, pontificating about how you don’t need extra calories until the third trimester because baby doesn’t. The last thing baby needs is three sausage rolls and a slab of Tottenham cake. I remember the burning indignation at being told what to eat by somebody who had never been pregnant and had no idea how it felt. Couple that with burning indigestion and you can get some picture of my mood. I was in a terrible slough of despond – both times – for nine months. I put on 4 stone with my first child, didn’t properly lose it afterwards, got pregnant again, put on another 4 stone. It was grimly hilarious with my second child, hearing midwives say how great it would be when the baby was born and I wouldn’t feel so heavy: I was carrying 5.5 extra stone, of which my daughter composed only 9 pounds.

The short version of this story is that I was just not in the mood. I was not in the mood for cosy misinformation. I was not in the mood for being told what to do. I was definitely not in the mood for the patriarchy.

When did the world become so hazardous?

Risks during pregnancy are so overstated now that the British Pregnancy Advisory Service reports women requesting unnecessary abortions, which they don’t want to have,3 because they’re so anxious about their alcohol intake in the period before they realised they were pregnant. The nutritional intake of pregnant women is fixated over, by everyone from new-agers to governments. (While I was pregnant, we were given £190 cash as a ‘health in pregnancy grant’ to spend on vegetables. It was canned by the coalition which, unusually, I agreed with. I don’t know about you, but I certainly didn’t spend it on vegetables.) There is some dispute about how close to starvation you can get while pregnant before your foetus is adversely affected; two studies of wartime famines in Russia and the Netherlands found, respectively, ‘almost no effect’ and ‘some later-life effects’.4 These were babies born from mothers who were on the point of starvation. The idea that you can harm your baby by not eating enough carrots is just preposterous.

The prohibitions have a slightly more medical