So why do mainstream parents need support, anyway?

Some APers are incensed when they come across this blog. Not only for the AP heresies it espouses (OMG She thinks CIO is OK!!!), but because the idea that mainstream parents need, or more likely deserve, support for their parenting practices really irks them for some reason. This comment (culled from a mommyboard) is typical:

Thank god those mainstream parents have you estherar. Its so difficult doing what everyone else is doing. They really need your support. (rolleyes smilie)

Your blog comes off pretty douchey.

How to win friends and influence people

Not:

Is overparenting becoming passé?

The NYT’s Lisa Belkin thinks it might be:

The E word

The word “Empowerment” is such an overused word these days. As the Onion notes sardonically, women now feel empowered by just about everything they do. Yeah, I know the Onion is satire. But it really does seem that anything that makes a woman feel better about herself or boosts her confidence is now “empowering”. Even more often, at least in the context of parenting – making a specific, fashionable choice (like “natural” birth, crafting a special vaccine schedule for your special snowflake child, etc.) is considered the empowering one, whereas those who make another choice are sheeple who mindlessly follow whatever those ‘in charge’ tell them to do.

They say this about every generation.

But are today’s kids, perhaps, the rudest, most spoiled generation in history – all thanks to parents’ Gen-Xer tendency to AP?

Babies at work?

Bring your Child to Work Day happens quite often in my child-centered society. Given that the school and work year don’t always coincide, people who work in the evening can’t always find babysitter, and the school year, often as not, will start with a teachers’ strike, it’s not unheard for parents to bring their children to work once in a while. Most bosses are understanding, as long as it’s not disruptive to the workplace and it’s not on a regular basis.

As it happens, the kids are out of school today because it’s the eve of the Jewish holdiay Purim, but parents (like me and my hubby) are still expected to work our usual hours. Which means that my daughter played in my clinic all morning. It’s a small clinic, and along with the regular patients, it got just a leetle bit rowdy. At least she had the nurse’s 4-year-old to play with. While we can all cope for a session here and there, and from past experience, and the patients (most of whom are either parents to small children or children themselves) are very understanding – this probably wouldn’t go over quite as well if it happened every time I was at work.

More offline mainstream parenting resources

Last year, I recommended a few books I felt mainstream parents would enjoy and learn from. Since then, I’ve found several more books that I feel have much to offer the mainstream parent.

I take it all back about Penelope Leach

I noted in a previous comment that I’d heard she’d mellowed over the years regarding her stance on childcare. But I really, really didn’t expect something quite as sensible as this from her:

The AP ideal meets mainstream parenthood

I made a comment on Angela’s excellent blog, Cerebral Parenting, in which I stated that

While we all laugh at the women on MDC who take the “natural living” aspects to extremes (some would say, their logical extreme), almost all of modern parenting discourse, even the supposed mainstream, is informed by the AP/NFL ideal.

You’ve already heard my $0.02, now…

Here’s Nancy’s take on the Motrin ad affair.

Something very important she’s pointed out that I neglected (emphasis mine):

The problem is not what we do or don’t do with our babies. The problem is that as a society we are becoming obsessed with the minutiae of what we do with our infants, as if it might hold the key to solving broader issues. It is not surprising, then, that when parents buy into the lifestyle movements that promote this view it often backfires, isolating them from other parents and adults who don’t share the same philosophy.