Category Archives: Parenting

Kate Gosselin’s ambition doesn’t make her a bad mom

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Kate Gosselin graces the cover of People Magazine and US Weekly again this week. She wants fame, she wants power, she wants money– she’s a bad mom!

John Gosselin, the father of Kate’s eight kids is a deadbeat father, still out of a job, and giving no indication that he’s the least bit interested in finding a career to support his family. But John’s not choosing to exploit his fame to get a gig on a hit show, he’s only using it to attract young co-eds and crash out in their houses.

Kate GosselinKate Gosselin 

I’m not saying Kate Gosselin is a model mom. From what I’ve read, she often seems selfish, angry, and narcisstic. I don’t understand why she had eight kids in the first place. But here they are, and she’s got to support them, otherwise your tax dollars will be. I suppose there are other jobs she could find, besides her stint on “Dancing with the Stars” and the continued money she’ll get from keeping herself in the spotlight. Kate was formerly a nurse, but her problem now is that you can’t support eight kids on a nurse’s salary. You can’t support eight kids without working your ass off, which is just what she’s choosing to do.

Past media coverage of contestants on “Dancing with the Stars” usually involves waxing effusively on their hard work, along with kudos for how their dedication transformed their bodies. For no other cast member, have I seen attacks about what monsterous parents they were for leaving their kids, or even much coverage about whether or not those contestants were parents at all. But in Kate’s case, Us Weekly reporters have become the mommy police, staking out Kate’s house and clocking the exact minutes she spends with her children. (I hope none of these reporters are moms, neglecting their kids while keeping vigil on Kate.) Certainly, people wouldn’t be directing this level of ire at John Gosselin if he were spending hours a day at rehearsals for the demanding show.

Kate Gosselin happens to be the breadwinner for her family; being a breadwinner is an essential part of being a good and present parent.

Yet, in the year 2010, our definitions of being a good mother and being a good father remain diametrically opposed. Today, when a father goes in for a job interview, his potential boss will usually think: “This guy has a family to support, he’ll be a good worker.” A mother interviewing for the same job is considered by different standards: she could be an unreliable worker, running off for school meetings or staying home if a kid is sick. Being a good mom is being a nurturer; being a good dad is being a breadwinner. But in reality, outside of the spotlight, plenty of moms work long hours to support their kids including lawyers, doctors, and CEOs. Sometimes I think we should take a break from these mom/ dad labels and just use “parent” to get across how differently we perceive these strikingly similar roles of raising and supporting our kids.

Kate Gosselin has eight kids so we think she ought to be “maternal” kind of like how Martha Stewart excelled at homemaking so she should be warm and fuzzy– it makes people dislike and distrust these women for their contradictions within the constrained cultural definitions of femininity. Clearly, Kate Gosselin is not a natural nurturer, but hopefully, she can still find some way to be a somewhat decent mom to her kids.

Are childless women happy?

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Best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert says childless women are just fine

The husband, the kids, the picket fence, you know this scene. Women’s biological clocks are desperately ticking. We’re on a quest to secure a man so we can reproduce, because becoming mothers will make us truly happy and fulfilled.

While childless men manage to find a respectable place in society, often with a few publicly recognized achievements under their belts, admired, or even envied, as the self-sufficient bachelors they are; childless women remain suspect, if not total freaks. They’re often pitied; people wonder at what point in their lives they veered off onto their unnatural, unfeminine paths, becoming lonely “spinsters” or crazy cat ladies.

Best-selling, childless author of Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert introduces a radically different theory in her new book Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. She writes that childless women have historically served a crucial role in society, not yet publicly recognized. These women should not be scorned but celebrated for their contributions to bettering the human race.

Gilbert writes:

“If you look across human populations of all varieties, in every culture and on every continent (even among the most enthusiastic breeders in history, like the nineteenth-century Irish, or the contemporary Amish), you will find that there is a constant 10 percent of women within any population who never have children at all. The percentage never gets any lower than that, in any population whatsoever. In fact, the percentage of women who never reproduce in most societies is usually much higher than 10 percent- and that’s not just today, in the developed Western world, where childless rates among women tend to hover around 50 percent.”

Gilbert speculates that female childlessness is an evolutionary adaption:

“Maybe it’s not only legitimate for certain women to never reproduce, it’s necessary. It’s as though, as as a species, we need an abundance of responsible, compassionate, childless women to support the wider community in various ways. Childbearing and child rearing consume so much energy that the women who do become mothers quickly become swallowed up by that daunting task- if not outright killed by it.”

Elizabeth GilbertElizabeth Gilbert

Gilbert points out that childless women have always taken on the tasks of nurturing children who are not their biological responsibilty as no other group in history has ever done, in such vocations as running schools, hospitals, and becoming midwives.

That’s all fine and good, but won’t these childless women be desperately unhappy in their old age?

Gilbert says no. Recent studies of happiness levels in America’s nursing homes show the indicators of contentment in later life are poverty and health. “Save your money, floss your teeth…you’ll be a perfectly happy old bird someday.”

Gilbert concedes that without descendants, childless women are often forgotten more quickly, but that the role they played when alive was vital. Gilbert calls these vibrant women the “Auntie Brigade.” Here are some examples she lists of their influences:

Jane Austen was a childless aunt.

Raised by childless aunts:

Leo Tolstoy

Truman Capote

the Bronte sisters

Edward Gibbon (famous historian raised by his Aunt Kitty)

John Lennon (Auntie Mimi– convinced him he would be an important artist)

F. Scott Fitzgerald (Aunt Annabel offered to pay for his college education)

Frank Lloyd Wright (first building commissioned by Aunts Jane and Nell who also ran a boarding school in Wisconsin)

Coco Chanel (Aunt Gabrielle taught her how to sew)

Virginia Woolf (muse was Aunt Coraline)

Marcel Proust (memory set off by Aunt Leonie’s madeleine)

Gilbert writes that when J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, was “asked what his creation looked like, replied his image, essence, and spirit of felicity can be found all over the world and hazily refelected ‘in the faces of many women who have no children.’ That is the Auntie brigade.”

Marcel ProustMarcel Proust

I’ve always wondered why people get in such a tizzy about gay people, justifying their bigotry because: “It’s just not natural.” How do we know what’s natural? Is everyone supposed to pop out babies like the Duggar family and their 20 kids? Is that “natural”? And is every “natural” thing good anyway? Death is natural. Cancer can be natural.

Women without children are perfectly capable of being happy; what they’re often missing isn’t kids, but a society and a culture that values and respects them.

To all the moms out there, thank you for working hard to continue the human race. And to the “Auntie Brigade,” thank you for working hard to continue the human race.

Read my post on New York Magazine’s biased coverage of childless women here.

More on girls and food

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I got so many comments on my earlier post on girls and food, many of them direct message or to my personal email account, that I wanted to add a little more public info.

To re-cap, I basically let my young kids eat what they want, when they want. They have food shelves they can access full of food they choose. The idea is they learn the skills to tune into their own hunger and how to satisfy it.

So first– buying organic. I think that’s great for your kids if you do that. (My father, by the way, worked for Safeway for years and thought the whole organic thing was overused– he’d say “Do they know what organic means? It’s all organic!”) I do buy organic with much of my food but not all, and I don’t go crazy. The reason is because I used to be an insane health nut and it was the most unhealthy time of my life. I was in my late teens/twenties; I smoked a  pack of Marlboros a day; my favorite liquid was a Bloody Mary (organic tomato juice); I often threw up after consuming my curried tofu and kale, but hey, I was vegetarian! I did yoga. I also carried around a book– I’m not kidding here– it was called The Sexual Politics of Meat. I don’t know if this book is still in print but it was all about how eating meat is anti-woman.

Basically, since I got healthy, I just can’t mix up food with ethics like that ever again. This is why I can’t get all worked up when my kids waste food (thank God for composting.) Some people with a different personal history can go all organic or vegetarian and I respect that, but its just not my personal cause in this lifetime.

As far as comments that I can’t control what will happen when my kids are teenagers, I totally agree. I haven’t go a clue what wll happen. But as far as the freedom they will be getting, I have tried to give them that freedom as much as possible right now– kind of like how God put the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden; he told them not to eat from it (which I don’t do) but it was there, because they had to have free choice in order to be truly free. Yes, my kids are only 3 and 6 (9 month old still eats what I feed her) and they don’t have their own money yet, but they are allowed to pick out whatever they want at Safeway or Whole Foods, in abundance. They do have sugary cereals etc but most of the time, really, they do not choose to eat those, but having it there gives them freedom and a feeling of being in control,  I think, I hope.

Before my kids eat I always ask them (book’s instructions) How does your tummy feel? Are you hungry? What deoes hungry feel like? I tell them their tummy is the boss, not me, not the food on their plate. Not their eyes and what they see. When they eat, sometimes I ask them to describe the foood: Is it chewy? salty? crunchy? The idea is that later they will be able to identfy if they feel like eating something warm or cold, sweet or savory etc.

And I think I wrote this in the last post, but its really important not to get the kid involved in anyone else’s eating, kid or grown up. A major origin of eating disorders is when kids are trained to feed/worry about the well being of other kids or adults. Kids have enough to worry about just focusing on learning how to take care of themselves.

Read my interview with www.fitwoman.com here.