Sorry for the interruption.
As I am still in the middle of my review of Hyper-Parenting (see my recent posts), I probably won’t get to my review of The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars by Miriam Peskowitz until next week. By then, the Washington Post article “Unleashing the Wrath of Stay-at-Home Moms” may no longer be available.
It is currently available here. I think you need to subscribe with free membership to be able to read it. It’s worth it. I’m angry, very angry. I will be saving the text to pick it apart right after my review of Peskowitz’s book.
Addendum: As The Washington Post is linking to this post, I feel that I must write at least a little of what made me so angry. What has upset me is not that Ms. Hirshman has “come out full blast for women who work” but that she has added fuel to the fire of the “Mommy Wars” without doing anything to help reduce the divisiveness perpetuated by today’s media and without offering some real solutions to mothers (and fathers) who wish for more varied opportunites to combine paid work and unpaid “care work”. Stating “You make me want to vomit too” is not going to help us get anywhere with this important social issue.
June 17th, 2006
Chapter Four of Hyper-Parenting: Are You Hurting Your Child by Trying Too Hard? by Alvin Rosenfeld, MD, and Nicole Wise is called “Listen to the Experts.”
“Excepting that parenting professionals can help us to get our children to behave the way we want or grow up to be the adults we want them to be is setting our hopes way to high.” I’d say that this applies to the homeschooling experts, too. I enjoy reading about how others approach homeschooling, and I certainly appreciate some guidlines, but how I chose to follow those guidlines is my choice, and I will not feel that by not following the expert advice to the letter I am not doing enough for my kids.
“We need to relax, to tune in to our intuition, to know our children and ourselves better.” I KNOW that homeschooling is helping us to know our children better. I still need to work on the “knowing ourselves beter” part, but I have an idea on that, which comes along with the post about Chapter Nine. Can you wait that long?
Shortcuts through the hard work of parenting can lead to superficial understanding of each other. We can train the children to do what we want them to do, but what do we lose by doing it? Moreover, the children need to see us make mistakes, make amends, try again.
As we always hear: “When it comes to your child, you are the expert. I am not suggesting however that parents should ignore everything an expert has to say. There are many things to be learned from them.
I have read far too many parenting books. I take what fits for us. I appreciate the insights that many have to offer regarding different behaviors and stages in development. Knowing that I am not alone and understanding possible causes has been quite useful. Moreover, having someone point out possible effects of my actions has helped me to consider how I want to parent.
What is some good advice that you have learned from an expert?
June 17th, 2006