Judith Warner has written an article about how mothers are letting the market dictate to them how they raise (or don’t raise) their own children:

I was proud of the fact that I could get in three full hours of high-intensity parenting before I left for work; prouder still that, when I came home in the evening, I could count on at least three more similarly intense hours to follow. It didn’t matter that, in my day job as a stringer for this magazine, I was often falling asleep at my desk. Nor that I’d lost the ability to write a coherent sentence. My brain might have been fried, but my baby’s was thriving. I’d seen the proof of that everywhere—in the newsweeklies and the New York Times, on TV, even in the official statements that issued forth from the White House, where First Lady Hillary Clinton herself had endorsed “singing, playing games, reading, storytelling, just talking and listening” as the best ways to enhance a child’s development.

This woman is miserable because she is listening to the wrong voices about what to do about the raising of her children. And the solutions she proposes at the end are State-, Market-, and Neighbor-based. Where is her husband in all this? Does she even understand what a church is, let alone what it is supposed to do? But John Podhoretz wonders [Note: this article has since slipped into the NY Post's paid archives] if women who try to live in such a way are really meeting the needs of their children or just trying to use the children to meet their own needs:

For some of us, being a parent is a liberation from the tyranny of the self. Others seem to cling to the shackles of their solipsism. Tragically, they have been unable to wrest free from a worldview more suitable to childhood, and therefore sadly denied themselves the particular satisfactions that come from embracing adulthood in all its glorious mundanity.

Grow up, Judith. You can’t have it all, parents have to give something up when they have children, or burn themselves out trying not to. And whose mold are you trying to fit your children into? The market will try to turn them into consumers and producers, with no thought to kindness, charity, or heart: Soulless mouths and grabbing hands. And the state is a willing accomplice: Another taxpayer without a thinking mind, ready to hand over the wallet and join the bureacracy. James Lileks gladly resists this mindset doing what it takes to raise his daughter despite the cultural tempest roaring about:

[Judith Warner's] article makes a point despite itself: the perfect is the enemy of the fun. Maybe I’m the wrong person to comment on this, since I am a guy in a rather unique position. But I’ve given up great acres of work time to be here with Gnat, and the amount of free time I used to have – time I spent recharging the daily batteries – has dwindled to zip. But it’s all a trade-off. So it’ll be a couple more years until I can wander downtown again; so it’ll be a while until she’s in school and my day is my own. So what. Nothing beats the time we spend together, the look on her face when she shows me a magic trick, the hug and kiss I get when I leave her at school. Today she beat me at UNO again and I explained how Barbie glitter cards are made and we looked at a website about the solar system and ooohed and ahhed at Saturn. And that matters more than anything because she is mine and I’m her Dad, and qualifying those definitions just seems petty.

When it comes to expectations about gender and roles and accomplishments and the latest theories about childrearing, I have a secret mantra: I don’t care. I know, I know. Easy for me to say. But shout it out loud! I DON’T CARE! Feels good, no?

His hero is the “Slacker Mom” written about in a companion article to the one that started this particular rant (Though she only gets one online page to the Crazy Mom’s seven):

You won’t catch Muffy Mead-Ferro at a toddler fitness class. When it comes to enriching after-school activities, she’s not ferrying her kids to traveling soccer or French lessons either. She lets them amuse themselves in a mud puddle in the backyard instead…. The problem, as Mead-Ferro sees it, is that too many well-heeled, well-educated and otherwise sensible women are driving themselves and each other crazy…. Instead of recreating herself as Supermom and Domestic Goddess, Mead-Ferro opted to become a woman like her own late mother, who raised three kids while running the haying machine and branding cattle on the family’s sprawling cattle ranch in Wyoming. “The floors weren’t spotless. Dinner wasn’t fancy,” she says.

Such nonconformity to societal norms is well and good when those norms have gone off the deep end, but what informs it? If it’s just a backlash against craziness, the backlash is at just as much risk to get crazy itself. What is profoundly ignored in all of these articles is the role of the church in this issue. I happened upon an interesting passage in the second chapter of Titus just a few weeks ago, and i’m still wondering what to do with it:

[1] But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine. [2] Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness. [3] Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, [4] and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, [5] to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled. [6] Likewise, urge the younger men to be self-controlled. [7] Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works, and in your teaching show integrity, dignity, [8] and sound speech that cannot be condemned, so that an opponent may be put to shame, having nothing evil to say about us.

This is a letter from the Apostle Paul, written to Titus, a pastor of a church, telling him how to equip the various congregants for their various roles to keep the movement movin’ on. I think it envisions a network in the church body in which all members can be fulfilled in their respective callings without burning out or feeling as though they lack the love that everyone of us needs. Every family member figures out what they can do to love the other members of the family, and each family in the church determines how they can love other families in the church.

In my church when a baby is baptized, the members present are asked “to undertake responsibility for the growth of the child in Christian nurture” and affirm that they will “in the name of the Church of Christ, undertake with these parents the Covenant responsibility for the Christian nurture of this child”. [ARP Book of Worship, Chapter VII.A, Section 2] There should be no “Lone Ranger” mothers and fathers in the church: it is our duty and privilege to assist one another in the nurture of children. This should be done in particular ways, and not just on Sunday in Sunday school: taking meals to brand-new parents, sharing meals in each others’ homes, watching each other’s children if the mother’s have to work to support the family, or to support the marriage of a couple by giving them time to be together. No church does this perfectly, including our church, but I am resolved to help my family behave in accordance with these affirmed duties, and depend on others we find who are also willing to do so when we need them.

Women like Judith Warner should not feel the need to abuse themselves in such burning and empty self-fulfillment. Husbands and church elders worth their salt should do every thing within their respective authorities to defend their families and churches against such fearful infiltrations by the market and the state.