Being too child-centric

[Judy1234]

Making a career out of the children, always putting them first, never saying no to them.... very different from where I am and how I am but certainly is how some parents operate.

Being laisser faire, letting them learn how to be board, letting them understand they don't always come first is good.

On another mumsnet thread I said we shouldn't always give children what they want and a few people were surprised I said it but I think it's true. Just because they want something doesn't mean they should get it.

women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article4212440.ece

I was always bored as a child. Why I didn't think of taking the doors of their hinges and unscrewing the locks to keep myself occupied I don't know. Fruit tennis is another one my ds's indulge in to while away the hours.

odd that it's written in the first person but was obviously a phoner with Fleur Britten. why didn't she just write it herself?
i Just Don't Know any of these totally child-centred people, tbh, not in RL. i think that one woman has one pal who she finds a bit neurotic and makes a lot of assumptions from there about how they are living their lives.

lol cornsilk, i taught a boy on the asperger's spectrum who did this with the school furniture. maybe an indication of what he thought of the lessons. one day i heard the doorknob gently rattling to turn around and see him dismantling it.

I know a fair few women whose lives I would describe as "child-centred." And it doesn't surprise me that Roiphe knows them too.

She's just written a book.
It's about marriages.
She isn't married (& presumably isn't interested in commenting on relationships/lack of etc.).
She needs some PR for book-placement.

.... er, so, parenting? Sort of? Will that do?

It's a pity, actually, because her book seems to be quite good; and she herself is a not uninteresting person, with stuff to say (I came across her once, 20 years ago). I suspect whatever she might have had to say has been purposely blanded by The Times.

She's divorced and she's already written about that.

Written about her divorce recently? - so since her new book came out? I haven't seen that.

Yes. Or rather there was an interview with her and she talked about the separation.

Clearly this woman isn't childcentric, but egocentric? Oh yes...I think so.

Any woman who stays at home is clearly going to be obsessed with winter coats and baby food. (Oh yeah...that was top of my priority list as a parent...NOT) Their children will grow up totally reliant upon them (DD has always gone with the flow and will happily sleep over/stay with friends) and the mother in question will lose the relationship with her baby's daddy because she's too dim even to hold onto that (dd's dad and I are still blissfully in love and totally adore being parents...didn't realise the two were mutually exclusive).

This woman is judging people like me, SAHMs, whilst she's sitting in her ivory tower with her nanny! I think, as earlier posters have said, it's probably based on oner or two neurotic friends she has, rather than a wide selection of women who have given up work to take care of their kids.

Sorry...not a great article imo and certainly not great for feminism.

Why did she remark that being a SAHM was the same as being turned on at being dominated by a man for a while. Like life is some great psychological gameplan.

Aren't we all (mums and dads) just trying to muddle through?

What a joke!

I love the way how she has written an entire article about herself and seems to think that she is an accurate representation of every single family in UK today.

Maybe some children are over indulged today, who knows because she sure couldn't be arsed to research the subject properly. money for old rope.

Apparently her new book has sold less that 1000 units. If the book is as babdly written as this article then it is not exactly surprising.

"I don?t so much see a deterioration, with brilliant women who give it all up, as an increase in obsessions and concerns about things that I don?t think are worthy of them"

I think there is a point about some previously uber achieving women who become housewives and then make rearing children some kind of career which it just isn't and then they become very dull and become interested in things no one could possibly really be interested in and I've met them so they do exist as a category.

Obviously it appeals to women like I am who work full time and have children and had a nanny.

But I do thnk she has a point that in some homes the whole life revolves around the child - the parent becomes the "indentured servant" of the child.

Motherhood is not a worthy pursuit for brilliant women -- that's what she actually says!!

Aack. Surely there's room in the world for all sorts of people, to make all sorts of choices that suit them best??

I don't know about what Xenia said, whether I would be judged as not saying no enough to DC (how is that relevant, exactly?), etc., but anyone who starts saying that my choices are "unworthy" is not worth listening much to, I reckon.

How many homes do you know like that, Xenia, the mother as indentured servant? Either I am living in one (& in denial in general), or I have never met any, really.

Must go away & try to think of anyone I know who totally dotes only on their role as mum. To the contrary, seems like most every mum I know brags about how selfish she is, how tough she is on them, how important her time away from the kids is, what great things she's done without the kids recently, etc.

The fact that her lifestyle is unrecogniseable to some people doesn't make her points invalid. You might not recognise women like that but it doesn't mean they don't exist.

Of course she is speaking out of her own experience. And of course she is egocentric. She's a writer. And probably part of a pretty rarefied group of high earning, highly literate, East Coast professional writers etc.

And she's written a book and got something to plug and so The Times commissioons her. But it's not a bad piece. It's not a "I can't stand women who don't have jobs" piece at all. It's more nuanced than that.

she didn't write it, though.

poorly written.

Doesn't flow well, like a stunted school essay that does not what it is trying to say.

Therefore I disagree with it, and dislike the writer.....

But I agree with the OP that children should not always get what they want, and unfortunately I do agree with the author of the article on some level, in that children should live experiences through their parents lives to some extent, ie the spending weekends/holidays doing adulty things too, a bit of culture etc... and not always be taken to the zoo/soft play centre etc....

Didn't she? Who did?

it says under the photo 'kR talks to fleur britten'. she's done a phoner and it's been written up.

oh. x-post. Okay.

Well, she must be a reee-ally bad writer then if her own efforts would have been worse...

basically they've needed a first person families piece and looked at who's got a book out and made a call.

Can't relate to the lovely journalist. Perhaps her attention-starved kids would have done a better job with a big page of black crayon scribbling.Wish I had a nanny and a cleaner though. COOL

I didn't particularly like the article but I like what Xenia would like to say iyswim.

I do think there is an impulse for women who are used to a life outside the home to professionalise their childcaring and sometimes I feel it is taken to extremes and it results in the child becoming like a client who must be at the centre of everything.

I think for some mothers the pressure to have the best birth, be the best breastfeeder, do the most caring sort of parenting, attend the right activities, provide the most stimulating environment, be the most supportive at school etc etc can result in the child being at the centre of a whole world of activity which is unnecessary and actually to do with the parent's issues rather than the child's.

There was even a thread (which may have been a joke) on MN a while back about how it is important to have a brightly decorated home in order to stimulate your child.

I think this is all part of the development of child-centric parenting and in some ways I think the way I was brought up (very benign, encouraging in terms of education and politeness, laissez faire to the point of absence in terms of everything else) is better. Or at least less precious.

I thought it was a confused piece.

I do agree generally with her idea that we are obsessed with child rearing these days and that our parents didn't hot house us and we turned out ok.

However her remark about it being beneath her to discuss division of domestic chores, made me chortle, as I would imagine it is easy enough to say that when you are divorced with a full time nanny and presumably a cleaner as well.

Also this chasmic divide that allegedly exists between the f/t empowered working women and those poor old downtrodden SAHMs seems to only exist in journalistic fiction.

Some vague ramblings about cup cakes that I don't believe for a nano second as she doesn't strike me as the type of person that
would even notice that sort of thing( and I speak as one who will definitely buy rather than bake)

I'd be much more interested in discussing why even women who work be it part time or full time still do the brunt of the childcare and household work and how that even vaguely equates to equality, but perhaps thats too dull to mention....

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