Outrage: Very good for ratings.
15
Here’s a big secret: outrage is good for ratings. It’s true! I bet some of you might have even clicked on this very Salon to see just what we’re outraged about today.
I’m still not convinced that there is such a thing as a “mommy war” (I do not recall any formal presidential declarations or congressional votes) but it sure is the perfect subject for guaranteed viewership. It’s got a cute, ironic, ready-for-TV name. It’s inflammatory. It force people to pick sides, defend personal choices, and keep the outrage going.
That’s why it’s a topic that lazy television producers come back to time and again. And again. And again. Moms are such an easy target because we’re new at this. We want to do the right thing by our kids. We want the world to think we’re good parents making good choices, whatever they are. It’s only human.
Tell us we’re not, and we’re taking it right to Facebook, dammit! With lots of links back to your show’s website!
See how that works?
And so these talk shows, these journalists, these pathetically manipulative Dr. Lauras of the world pit us against each other, hoping we’ll pick a side and go on the attack: SAHMS vs working moms. Tiger Moms vs Beta Moms. Parents who let their sons go to school dances vs. small-minded local preachers. Or wait, that was Footloose.
Let’s just say I believe this so-called war has a happy ending: Our kids turn out fine, we make mom friends, we realize we have more in common than we don’t, and then we put on Kenny Loggins and go have a big dance-off in the barn.
-
Doesn’t it boil down to a zero sum end game? No one can have it all – the amazing, challenging interesting career AND the time with your family. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. So when we each make a choice about how to apportion those 24 hours between paid work and unpaid work, we make a sacrifice. Each point along that spectrum involves giving up something.
Perhaps there’s a bit of uncertainty in our individual choices that gets triggered when we see others making different choices. Perhaps we judge because we feel others judging us.
Every lifestyle choice involves a judgement – I am doing it THIS way because I believe it to be better than THAT way. But whether I make it a crusade to prove those “THAT way” people wrong is something different.
We are only one generation away from very very few women having that choice. And many today STILL do not have that choice – they may have to do more paid work than they’d like or be home more than they’d like. Perhaps it was easier when the range of choices was much narrower – we didn’t have to justify it to ourselves let alone others.
-
Except that my working mom neighbor has looked down her nose at me for years, despite our same level of education, and her current laid off status. I committed the ultimate crime in her eyes: chose to stay home, and had many more than 2 children. The fact that you can barely find any more at home mothers speaks to the pressure to get out of the house and do something, anything else with your time than raise, educate your children, and managing your household.
-
I’ve seen a lot of division between working and SAHM’s during my daughters’ childhoods. Now facing pregnancy with my third child, there are quite a few people who are shocked with the fact that I have no intention of staying at home with baby. As long as everything goes well, I will likely be back to work part time after 6 – 8 weeks and full time by 12 weeks.
Those same people are even more shocked to hear that my husband will be the stay-at-home parent.
At some point, hopefully people will become open-minded enough to recognize that each family finds a different way that somehow works for them.
-
Interesting topic that I wrote about actually today. Yes, it is a bit about ratings; people love to talk about this issue. It is also about people having unmet needs and denigrating others instead of dealing with their own feelings and perceptions. http://www.therippleeffect2009.wordpress.com
-
Love this conversation, many insightful points above. I have always suspected that there is disproportionate judgment around parenting styles because the judger can believe herself or himself to be doing the judging in a valiant effort to protect the innocent child. So it’s a field day — instead having to judge silently, as we do about fashion choices, car colors, tattoos, haircuts, people can suddenly shout their opinions from the mountain tops in the name of the innocent child. We are fundamentally judgmental creatures (indeed, the more insecure the individual, the more so, as noted above) … throw in the anonymity of the internet and full fury of our judgmental natures is on display.
There is another factor that’s relevant when it comes to the “mommy wars” — I believe (trouble alert: i am about to step in it) that there is nothing “natural” about either staying at home all day in white box (suburban home) with a child, or working 50 hours a week without one’s children. In our “natural” habitat, or the one in which we have spent most of the last 100,000 years anyway, we can safely guess that moms did lots of work critical to survival and no doubt tended kids in group environments. And it was probably pretty satisfying – less isolating from either ones kids or one’s peers. My guess is that today there is a good deal of dissatisfaction on both side of the ledger, and that results in people feeling defensive /angry / judgmental / and so on.
It’s our collective job to fix this problem — employers need to be more flexible, communities need to create more daycare collectives or whatever one wants to call the modern village parenting environment. I think given a few generations, less finger pointing and more collaboration we’ll have a range of options for future moms and dads rather than the two extremes.
Add your take:
Comments are delayed up to 15 minutes
