Whenever I run the risk of appearing overly concerned with my role as a mother, my parents like to quote an old New Yorker cartoon at me. It shows a mother standing in the toy aisle of department store. A helpful salesperson is demonstrating a building-block set. As the bemused parent looks on, the salesman says, "This toy will prepare your child perfectly for modern life. No matter how he puts it together, it's wrong."
I was reminded of this can't-win attitude after reading several books and articles this past year on the so-called "Mommy Wars" (more, really, than is good for a person). This armchair battle between stay-at-home and work-for-pay mothers can hardly live up to its name--no lives are lost, no blood is spilled. Not counting paper cuts, the biggest risk in this war is a lot of hurt feelings. But judging by the amount of press it has received, as a paper war, it's a killer.
By the time you read this, the opening shot in the 2006 edition of the battle, Leslie Morgan Steiner's The Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families, will have been on bookshelves for the better part of a year. Steiner and her book have shown up in debates on The Today Show, on Fox, in the pages of Newsweek and BusinessWeek, and online, in Salon and on countless blogs. Every media outlet jumped on it because everybody likes a fight.
For the most part, though, this is a very pacifistic book. Most of the essayists in it--as one critic put it, a group of affluent women largely employed in media industries who "represent a roulette spin of the editor's Rolodex"--stick pretty closely to their own patches, talking about the deliberations that led them to decide either to stay home with their kids or to keep working (or often, it must be said, to do a little of each). Beth Brophy was a workaholic until she got cancer and decided she'd rather spend her time with her children than as an editor. Ann Sarnoff is a working mother in New York and happy about it. Molly Jong-Fast is a Gen Y writer who found having a famous and successful single working mother didn't prevent her from feeling conflicted about her own working status when she had her first child. Jane Juska describes getting pregnant in 1964, marrying the father of her child (whom she didn't love) and continuing to work afterwards, a decision she now feels may have been wrong for her son and yet the only viable one for herself.
In interviews, Steiner has denied trying to fuel a war between mothers. "The mommy wars are not really between different cliques of women over what kind of motherhood is superior," she writes. "The real battles rage inside each mother's head as she struggles to make peace with her choices."
If that's her thesis, though, a surprising number of reviewers missed it. Mommy Wars turns out to be one of those books that acts like a Rorschach test: What you think it says says more about you than it.
Sandra Tsing Loh, for instance, writing in The Atlantic in May, has nothing good to say about Mommy Wars. She sees it as another case of a bunch of spoiled women whining about their lives. Loh coins the term "afflufemza" to describe the nausea she feels reading about them. (The title of her review is "Rhymes With Rich.") She rains a hail of snark on Leslie Steiner, for instance, for airing her distress over the prospect of losing her career to follow her highly successful husband. She chastises essayists like Catherine Clifford and Sara Nelson for dropping designer label names into their essays. (Apparently, women who wear Anthropologie outfits don't have any problems worth mentioning.) She doesn't see why Page Evans should complain about being written off at a fancy party when she says she stays home with the kids.
To be fair, there is a certain amount of unself-conscious moaning about problems any less affluent person would kill to have, and a few of the writers seem too eager to universalize their situations. But Loh's critique goes off the rails when she comes to the conclusion that the problem with the women in Mommy Wars is really that … they don't send their kids to mixed-race public schools. "While these mothers tend to be, as indicated, top media professionals, the overwhelming preponderance of brown schoolchildren is something no one seems to particularly notice," she writes. "The troubles of the poor and the brown don't seem to lap up much around the ankles of any of these mothers, whether they're shod in Chanel slingbacks or Cole Haan loafers."
Wait, weren't we talking about mothers and work? The fact that women with the luxury to choose whether or not to work do in fact agonize about it--loudly and publicly--and sometimes feel guilty and judged by others for their choices seems like a separate issue from what their local public school looks like, race-wise, and how well they are or are not helping to address the problem there.
I suppose what Loh is saying is that rich white women could avoid feeling judged for their choices if they would only scatter themselves, geographically, so that they weren't co-located with other rich white women with the same kind of angst. Perhaps she's right. But I do find it ironic that Loh touts the "mix it up" approach as the solution to the mommy wars when she admits that she and the other mothers in her local school district in Los Angeles don't actually interact at all. "I've never smarted at catty remarks from other moms, partly because those catty remarks, if made … would have been in Armenian. Which I do not speak," she writes (her emphasis). "I find it quite refreshing not to know what nanothoughts the other mothers are thinking at every nanosecond." So, that's the solution? We just should stop speaking with one another? More to her point, that's how we'll become more sensitive to the plight of the less fortunate?
Even when a writer suggests, as Susan Cheever does, that all mothers would benefit from measures like universal daycare, Loh cries foul: Cheever's too well off to ever consider public school for her kid (Loh assumes); she must be a hypocrite.
If Sandra Tsing Loh is determined to read Mommy Wars as a tale of class warfare, James Wolcott, writing in The New Republic, can't see past his disappointment that the book isn't the mudslinging fracas its title implies. "Gone are the days when Norman Mailer could compliment feminist authors for writing like 'tough faggots' with the electrical-cord lash of their fuck-you prose," Wolcott writes. "The mommy warriors here abound in compassion and solicitude, an empathy and self-empathy that packs their prose in cotton balls." Empathy, bad!
Dying for a sneaky Mary McCarthy uppercut, a caffeinated jolt of Fran Leibowitz, I held out hope for Leslie Lehr's "I Hate Everybody," its surly title winging like Cupid's arrow to my charcoaled heart. Imagine my letdown when Lehr lapsed into standard operating rock-a-bye mode … This refrain of happy-happy-happy begins to sound like the jingle of an ice-cream truck moseying down the street.
Yes, where are the naked Jello fights? Give the man his money back. I wonder if the editors of The New Republic could really find no one else to review Steiner's book. You don't have to be a mother to review books about motherhood any more than you have to be Catholic to write about the Pope, but wouldn't it have helped, even a little, if the reviewer were at least a parent? Wolcott makes it plain at the outset that he's got no dog in this fight; he's just there for the spectacle. His essay reminds us again that, when motherhood is the topic under review, nobody seems to feel the need to stick to the subject.
But if this is a Rorschach test, I must see something in the inkblots too, right? After going through Mommy Wars a couple of times, I find it hard not to conclude that this is less a fight about mothers' working status than it is about personality differences. There are women in this book who, judging by their essays, I'd love to be friends with and others I'd wade into the sea to avoid. If Iris Krasnow, for instance, were to appear at my local PTA to cheerfully boast (as she does in the book) that she "helped start the ongoing battle between professional women who buy Twix for school parties and stay-at-home mothers who bring butterscotch bars, wearing thermal mitts to handle the still-hot pans," well, let's just say she'd be wise to trade her thermal mitts for a flameproof suit. If, on the other hand, Monica Buckley Price were in my book club and the conversation turned to her tortured decision to stay home with her autistic son, I'd be patting the sofa cushion next to me and pouring her a second glass of Carmenere.
Speaking for myself, I find this revelation reassuring. Isn't it better to be judged not on some broad category--otherwise known as prejudice--like working status, but on the particulars of our character? Though it may be small comfort, isn't it better to think, "She doesn't dislike me because I work. It's just me she can't stand"?
Some mothers seem to sail through their early motherhood years unscathed by the judgment of others. They're like those Silpat baking sheets; nothing sticks. Other women seem, through no fault of their own, to attract nasty comments and rash judgments. They go through life as though with an invisible magnet on their foreheads begging to be called on their least parenting mistake.
In a perfect world, we'd all know which material it's best to be made of, the magnet or the Teflon, the anxious or the impervious. Some definitive study would show us that all the worry we live through during our kids' tender years is a genuine measure of our devotion to their well-being and pays off in the long run in happy, productive offspring. Or else we'd be told that nonchalant mothers are more likely to produce hardy, high-achieving children.
According to Judith Rich Harris, the answer is neither. Harris, who made headlines in 1998 with The Nurture Assumption, her salvo in the nature v. nurture battle, argues that the effect on a child's personality of his mother's parenting style is so tiny as to be negligible. This year, she came back to sprinkle a little more sand in the lunches of those developmental psychologists who continue to argue the opposite.
Harris's new book, No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality, was spurred by an intriguingly simple yet nigglingly hard-to-answer question: Why aren't kids in the same family more alike?
The Nurture Assumption was my attempt to explain the puzzling findings turned up by researchers. I put together a lot of evidence showing that parents have no direct influence on how their children turn out and proposed that children are socialized by their peer groups. But socialization is a process that makes children more alike, more similar in behavior to others of their age and gender. If they're getting socialized, why do they continue to differ from one another in personality?
Harris, who likes to describe herself as a sixty-seven-year-old grandmother from New Jersey, suffers from an autoimmune disease that keeps her housebound. Her background is as a writer of psychology textbooks rather than as a university researcher. She was ejected from Harvard's psychology graduate program back in the 1960s because she didn't fit the mold of an academic. She rarely attends professional conferences and she receives most of her research materials through the mail or the Internet. As a result of all these things--being a shut-in, having been chucked out of the academy, having an arms-length association with colleagues--she has carved a place for herself as an outlaw. With no affiliation to any group, university, or professional association, she isn't subject to the divided loyalties or the temptation to pull punches that others might be. She's like an archer outside the castle walls, firing lighted arrows over the moat. When she finds any logical inconsistency or sloppy research, she goes for the kill.
In No Two Alike, Harris paints a picture of modern psychology as a battle between the developmental psychologists and the behavorial geneticists. Before she can make the case for her own theory of why children in the same family differ, however, she spends a good portion of the book shooting down the common arguments.
She's fairly gleeful in her attacks, too. "What I was saying [in The Nurture Assumption]--that parents have no power to mold their children's personalities--was heresy to [developmental psychologists'] ears," she reports triumphantly. "It was like giving them a wedgie."
Stephen Suomi, head of the Lab of Comparative Ethology at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, must be feeling the pain. Suomi made his name in the developmental psychology with experiments involving "cross-fostered" rhesus monkeys. Twenty years ago, in an attempt to determine the effect of parenting styles, he designed an experiment in which monkey babies born with a genetic predisposition toward anxiety were reared by monkey mothers from a calm strain and vice versa. His results showed that baby monkeys from the calm strain turned out fine, no matter which type of mother fostered them. The outcome for the anxious-strain babies, however, was highly dependent on their mothers' temperament: Fostered by anxious mothers, these monkeys turned into "social failures''; reared by calm mothers, they did well, ranking high in the dominance hierarchy of their peer group.
Suomi's findings, which seemed to provide strong evidence for the power of nurture, were published in an edited book in 1987. His work quickly became a touchstone for developmentalists, seized up and cited in myriad books, articles, and academic presentations. In subsequent publications, Suomi suggested that he had repeated his experiment with a larger contingent of monkeys, with the same result. Those findings eventually rippled out to the general public in newspaper and magazine articles and to the work of child advocates. They became the academic equivalent of accepted wisdom.
Not so fast, Harris says. In her meticulous and time-consuming fashion, Harris dug deep into Suomi's research, tracking footnotes and comparing data in various books and articles, trying to determine the soundness of his findings. What she found was disturbing to those of us who assume that the scientific process weeds out bad data. If Harris is correct, Suomi has built a body of work around the results of one single, unreplicated experiment involving a grand total of eight baby monkeys--far too few to sustain any sweeping claims about the power of good mothering to overcome personality deficits. His follow-up articles, it turns out, appeared in places where the standards of scientific proof were pretty loose (there was not the normal peer-review process) and his long-promised book on his corroborating findings has never been published. Down comes tumbling one major academic underpinning for things as various as attachment parenting theory and governmental early intervention programs.
"Stephen Suomi wasn't afraid of a little woman from New Jersey," Harris writes. "Maybe he should have been."
But Harris isn't writing merely to cut big men down to size, as pleasurable as she clearly finds it. No Two Alike launches Harris's own theories. She proposes three mental systems, built into every person, that work together to make even the most genetically and environmentally similar people different from one another. First is the relationship system, which allows even tiny babies to begin to distinguish mother from father, stranger from family member. Then there is the socialization system--otherwise known as peer pressure--that helps us absorb our culture's habits and ways. Finally, there is the status system, which prompts us to learn more about ourselves through comparison with others. This last system, for Harris, is the key: When we know where we stand in relation to others, we're likely to emphasize the things we're good at. We're driven by nature to be different. Even conjoined identical twins, like twenty-nine-year-old Iranian sisters Ladan and Laleh Bijani (who felt so strongly about their differences that they opted to undergo chancy separation surgery) were known by their signature assets; Ladan was the funny one.
Where do parents play into Harris's systems?
Parents do have some power to produce long-term effects on their children's behavior, but their power is indirect: it comes by way of the socialization system. It resides in their ability to determine where and by whom their children will be socialized. The parents decide which society to live in, which culture their children will grow up in, where they will go to school …
Parents do not, however, have the power to influence the personality development of their children via the status system. This system either discounts information obtained from close relatives or averages it together with so much other information that it doesn't have much impact. The way you are regarded by the "generalized other" is unlikely to be the same as the way you are regarded by your mother. Mother doesn't always know best.
Harris is a convincing writer. But as a non-scientist, it's hard to feel equipped to judge her theories. More importantly, as a parent, it's equally hard to know what to do with them. It's clear that Harris is not now arguing, and never has argued, that "parents don't matter." They just don't matter in the way most people think they do. Whether you're strict with bedtimes or not, whether or not you fight with your spouse in front of the kids, whether you carry your baby in a sling or push him in a stroller--these are the things Harris says are trivial. Your child's personality will be far more determined by the way his or her built-in predisposition rubs up against the larger world.
What does matter? Reading Harris, it's not always easy to know. It's not always clear what she considers "parenting." The parenting that can make a difference might be to move the family to a place where the peer pressure pushes in the right direction. Or to buy a piano and some lessons for the child with perfect pitch.
Harris talks candidly about how her own parents' actions influenced her personality:
I probably wouldn't have become a writer if I hadn't been rejected by my peers for a crucial four years of my childhood. Those years as a social outcast turned me into an introvert; previously I had been a boisterous, outgoing child. If my parents had decided to buy a house in some other community, perhaps my schoolmates wouldn't have rejected me. When, after four years, my family moved to a different part of the country, I stopped being an outcast. But by then the link had been forged; my personality had changed.
Emotional support is besides the point, she seems to be saying. Parenting isn't in the details. "Only highly abnormal conditions--conditions of severe deprivation--cause permanent deficits" to children, Harris writes. What matters are your choices on the macro level: where you live, what schools you send your children to, how you and your neighboring parents collectively construct your culture. (Harris is mostly silent on the question of whether maternal employment is one of those macro decisions. I'm guessing she'd say employment counts only if it affects how attuned a parent is to a child's schooling and other needs.)
If Harris were forced to give advice to parents (a practice she regards as morally suspect), it might be this: Put your children in an environment in which they can flourish--then get out of the way.
If Harris is right about the power of the "right schools" to shape a child, can it be that the parents profiled in Alan Eisenstock's book, The Kindergarten Wars, aren't as ridiculous as they seem?
Eisenstock spent two years following the travails of a handful of families as they put themselves through hell to gain a slot in coveted private schools. His book has the feel of a glitzy shelter magazine, a sort of Architectural Digest effect: You can't help being sucked in by the shiny surfaces, by the implied wealth in every description, whether of the home and assets of the families that are applying, or the grounds and programs of the schools they're aiming for. Overlaid on this voyeurism is the frisson of watching people behaving foolishly.
Because, despite what Judith Harris says, isn't it silly to expend so much effort and angst on placing your four-year-old into the "right" kindergarten? Can so much really depend on it, especially when the options for these parents isn't top-tier school or nothing, but first-choice top-tier or second choice?
Eisenstock milks the drama for all it's worth. Unfortunately, his scenes are about as convincing as something out of Desperate Housewives. (To be fair, they're also the same campy fun.) Powerful men bully the admissions directors. One couple sends a five-foot self-standing cutout photograph of their child to the school. Several parents send fawning, mendacious letters to multiple admissions offices, claiming each school is their family's first choice. Everyone pulls whatever strings they have: They promise large donations to the capital campaign, they lean on colleagues with connections to the board of directors. When the mail brings their wait-list letters, disappointed mothers slump in the aisles of Whole Foods, cursing into their cell phones, or pour themselves three fingers of vodka and sink into their great-room sofas.
Eisenstock's parents (it's tempting to call them "characters") run the gamut all the way from A to B. After a while, we can't tell them apart, they're so much of a type: high achieving, wealthy, white families living in or near large cities, who feel their public schools are not up to snuff (or not desirable enough). Diversity is given a walk-on role in the form of the mixed-race gay couple, Howard and Lionel, who snap-snap their way into an advance meeting with the director of their chosen school--and who then are dropped by Eisenstock's narrative until nearly the end, when they are abruptly told their adopted son has been accepted nowhere and probably has learning disabilities.
I can't imagine, really, who the target audience for this book might be. Eisenstock (or his eye-on-the-prize editor, perhaps) makes several overt attempts at shifting this book from what would seem on the surface to be a cultural critique ("Look at our crazy world! Parents lining up to pay $20,000 for kindergarten!") to a handbook on how to grab a piece of the madness for yourself. "How do you get in?" he asks teasingly again and again. Given that the portraits of the schools, the admissions directors, the families, and (except in the case of New York) the cities are all pseudonymnous composites, what kind of useful information could he possibly provide? Some schools are impressed by bigwigs; in others, who you know is key. All of them (surprise!) claim to want only to match each child with the most appropriate school.
So where is the war in Kindergarten Wars? Not to sound too James Wolcott-ish here, but with that title, I was at least expecting a few parent-on-parent rumbles, some really drastic measures, or at least some snubbing of the van Pelts at the club. But the aspiring parents in this book, despite clearly being in competition with other applicant families, aren't really shown contemplating each other very much. They might be at war with the admissions directors, but they seem too busy trying to suck up to fight them.
What they are at war with, I guess, is a combination of their own inflated expectations and the haunting worry that they will let their children down. Sometimes, having fewer choices is easier than having too many. The parents in The Kindergarten Wars have oodles of choice. If they didn't have the money and the connections, they wouldn't have the agony of a year-long military campaign designed to capture a top spot. They'd make do. They'd probably sleep better at night.
But there's really no telling people, is there? No matter what war we're talking about--mommy war, nature/nurture, elite schools--we have to fight our way through all the propaganda. It's not easy. As Judith Rich Harris writes, "A good story--especially one that appears to confirm what people already believe--acquires a life of its own. Once it becomes folklore it is highly resistant to disproof."
She's talking about stories like Suomi's nurturing monkey mommies, but she could be talking about any of the mothering myths we contend with these days.
The stories, perhaps improved a bit by the journalists, get into the popular press … and then are repeated, with further improvements, by other writers. When you can no longer remember where you heard or read something, you are unlikely to question its accuracy. It's just something you know.
