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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
I really appreciated this article, and most of the letters written in response. But I have a question: Where does Caitlin Flanagan and her kind get all these nannies? Where do they get the money to pay these nannies? Don't nannies have their own families to care for? And what the hell is a household organizer???????
Caitlin Flanagan is not living in most people's reality (thank you, Working Class Mom), so I don't think her "advice" (scolding) is very relevant to most people.
Not nearly as important as the discussion of working mothers (in our outside the home) and hypocrisy and cancer, but still...every time a "liberal" writer or commentator talks about the Dick-Cheney-Shot-An-Old-Lawyer event and talks about "buckshot" we look like the out-of-touch gun haters many of us are. I'm a vegetarian who doesn't get hunting *at all* - but I know the difference between buckshot and birdshot, and recognize that the Cheney story would be entirely different had he been shooting buckshot.
I've said it before and I'll say it again -- I am in complete agreement with the author that Flanagan, at her core is a hypocrite of the highest order. She peddles a worn-out 1950's image of motherhood that even she herself cannot live up to. Despite all her ramblings about how children need mother love and not nannies or other caregivers, her children were in fact, raised by a nanny.
The problem with Flannagan and her "there's no love like mother" movement is that it is utter baloney. First off, extra-parental childcare is not some new, post-femminist thing. Throughout history we have had wet nurses, nannies, villages, families and communities to assist mothers in raising their children so that mothers could work both in and out of the home. The idea that a mother should spend 24-7 trapped in her house with her infant child while daddy goes off and earns a living is a pure invention of the post-WWII era, when men came back from the European and Asain theatres and wanted Rosie the Riveter to go home. It was a sham then and it's an even bigger sham now.
Second, Flanagan's smug assertion that somehow a child misses out by not being immersed in "mother love" is a complete misunderstanding of what love is. Love is not a zero-sum game or a finite resource. A child only runs out of love to give if you teach him or her that love is a scarce commodity. The truth about love is that it is as infinite a commodity so long as we allow our hearts to produce it. What kind of idiot suggests that a person can't love BOTH a nanny AND a parent? And what kind of fool suggests that having more love in a child's life is a bad thing? I have an infant son, and I can tell you that I want him to experience as much love as he can, from his parents, his extended family, his chiildcare providers. The love he has for me is only diminished by the love he has for someone else if I teach him that love is a finite resource and that love is therefore a competition. And to teach him that would be to leave him open to a lifetime of insecurity, where he must always be worried if someone loves him "enough."
It's a pity that this is how Flanagan views the world, because it has obviously created all kinds of insecurities (as evident by her misgivings about her own childhood) that she probably can't help but inflict on her children. How sad for her, really.
The problem with how we raise families today is not that women have to rely on daycare providers, nannies and other extra-parental childcare, but that there isn't enough ADEQUATE and AVAILABLE childcare. And that is not a mother's fault. It's not a mother's fault that Congress doesn't want to fund Head Start, or that employers want employees to work more hours but are unwilling to provide on site childcare to employees, or that states don't properly enforce regulations that apply to childcare providers. Most women do not have the option to stay home.
And even if we did, the truth is that some women love to work outside the home, just as much as some women love to stay at home. Truth be told, most women would love to do a little of both if they could. Why sell women on a one-size-fits-all solution when every woman is different in her needs? THAT was what was wrong with the 1950's way of looking at the world. The whole point of femminism wasn't to push women into the workplace and out of the home, it was to give them the choice to pursue fulfillment wherever they could find it, whether in the home or out of it. Flanagan's characterizations of femminism fail to grasp this, and therefore result in stupid "straw man" charicatures of feminism, making her intellectually dishonest as well as hypocritical and pitiful.
I have to agree with kijjjis above: what a mean spirited article. So Flanagan says that mother love is important. Well, guess what, it is!
So, she finds the mommy wars confusing and contradictory; from the evidence of the letters above, so do we all.
I also agree with anonymous that this review sounds like a member of the inquisition calling out a heretic.
I am also amazed at how many of the letter writers who agree with Walsh, HAVE NEVER READ Flanagan. Go and read her; you'll see she is much more nuanced than jealous little (I mean "tough") Joan Walsh would suggest.
I loathe this kind of hatchet job.
I wonder what happens in Caitlin Flanagan's self-absorbed, fantasy world when both parents happen to be women? Or, God forbid, men!
No doubt she has some wacko homophobic reasoning for those families as well.
In fact, I'm pretty sure at her core she is every bit the homophobe, racist, and classist her privileged, one-sided June Cleaver dogma proves itself to be.
Signed,
Proud, gay, happy former latchkey kid with a very loving and supportive Mom.
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