Smartmom has just discovered that it’s very cool to be a bad parent right now.
And she’s not talking about run-of-the-mill bad parenting. You know
the kind of bad parents you read about in the Daily News and the Post
who commit horrendous crimes like murder, incest, neglect and all the
other cruel and awful things that parents (some parents!) do to their children.
Nope. Smartmom is talking best-seller bad: the kind of bad parenting
that sells books; makes parenting blogs tick and convinces ordinary
parents that they’re doing a pretty good job just by virtue of not
being that horrifically bad.
It’s the kind of bad that means money. And as everyone
knows, Smartmom has an agent, a book proposal and dreams of publishing
her genius insights into the maternal condition. So all of these
best-selling bad parenting books are making her mighty jealous and
quite sure that she may have missed the boat on yet another parenting
trend.
Today, there are many flavors of bad parents (soon, they will need
their own special section at the Community Bookstore). First, there are
the hipster bad parents. You know, the groovy bad parents who rebel
against the status quo of perfect parenting, like that alone is their
badge of honor: “I’m a bad parent and proud of it.”
On babble.com, which calls itself the community for a new generation
of parents, there’s even a popular column called Bad Parent (soon to be
a book collection) with story after story about all the bad things
parents do.
OK. How bad is bad?
Smartmom knows from bad. Really. And while she doesn’t really like
to broadcast it unless she’s on deadline and has nothing else to write,
she might be willing to spill the means if it means a coveted book
contract. So here goes:
• Smartmom lets the Oh So Feisty One order out Chinese when Hepcat makes scallop risotto.
• Smartmom and Hepcat only require Teen Spirit to text them if he’s
going to be home after 4 am in the morning on Saturday night.
• Sometimes they forget to make breakfast. OK. That’s pretty awful,
except that there are usually some English muffins in the fridge and a
couple of boxes of Raisin Bran in the cabinet. Can’t the kids just do
it themselves?
Smartmom isn’t sure she’s really bad enough to sell a bad parenting
book or pen a Bad Parent column for babble (if the Web site would even
have her!). But the truth is, the stuff on babble’s Bad Parent isn’t
really all that bad. There’s the parent who lets her baby watch six
hours of television a day (can you imagine?) The one about the parents
who walk around naked all the time (how naked?). The dad who is forcing
his kids to play soccer (is that like forcing OSFO to take piano
lessons?).
But here’s a whopper: the dad who makes his kids wait in the car while he gets a lap dance?
Now that’s bad.
Years from now you can be sure there will be loads of memoirs
written by the children of those parents who wrote for the Bad Parent
column. There are already a plethora of memoirs about bad parents,
written by people who survived terrible childhoods. Heck, half of
English literature is about children surviving rotten childhoods.
Certainly one of best bad parenting memoirs is “The Glass Castle,”
Jeannette Walls’s look at her dysfunctional, nomadic parents. It’s like
she was raised by wolves and she goes into excruciating detail about
being uprooted constantly from one town to another, not being fed,
wearing shoes held together with safety pins; and using magic markers
to camouflage holes in her pants.
But somehow she survived it all and still has compassion for her
parents, who were clearly mentally ill. And she wrote a best-selling
book about it, which you can put on your shelf with all the others:
“Running with Scissors,” “Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy
Childhood,” “A Child Called ‘It,” “Mockingbird Days,” and on and on.
Dang. Smartmom’s parents may not have been perfect, but they’d never
qualify for the bad parenting Olympics, that’s for sure. Scratch that
idea for a memoir.
And look at Lenore Skenazy. All she did was let her 10-year-old son ride the subway by himself.
Why didn’t Smartmom think of that? Think of the media frenzy could have
incited if she’d only told OSFO to take the train all by herself to
Manhattan Granny’s. Like Skenazy, she could have been the talk of the
town and the proud recipient of a book contract.
Yup, Skenazy has written a book called “Free Range Kids,” where she
writes about “giving our kids the freedom we had without going nuts
with worry.” Since the publication of her book, she’s been driving
Smartmom crazy with her Twitter tweets about ridiculous examples of
overcautious parenting like “A school just outlawed all human contact
including — hugs, high fives — lest someone get hurt. Sheesh.”
You don’t need the full 140 Twitter characters to spell self-promotion!
Skenazy is not alone. Smartmom just heard about another new book
called, “True Mom Confessions,” a compilation of bad parenting
confessions that originally appeared on a blog with that very name. The
Web site received something like 500,000 confessions!
And there’s at least one more bad parenting book to look forward to:
“Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and
Occasional Moments of Grace” by Ayalet Waldman, who caused a stir when
she admitted that she loves her husband, hottie author Michael Chabon,
more than her children (Dumb Editor note: So do I).
So what gives? Is this bad parenting fad just a swinging of the
pendulum? A healthy reaction to the emphasis on pitch perfect parenting
and over control or the conspiracy to make Smartmom feel like she’s
missed yet another publishing boat.
Oh, it’s clearly the latter!
Damn.
I
