Good Parent or Smother Mother? It's a Fine Line

Sandra Tsing Loh's article on motherhood in this month's Atlantic has kicked off quite a discussion among my colleagues, Melinda, Lynn, Delia and Lizzie, about what makes a good parent. But, if we could set aside questions of parental quality for just a moment, I want to talk about something a little easier to measure: quantity -- namely, too much parenting.

Loh references Ayelet Waldman's book on motherhood, "Bad Mother," early on, mostly to complain that Waldman, as a mother, is too good, with far too model a family to deserve the moniker. But it was a quote from the book written by the other half of the Waldman family parenting duo, Michael Chabon's "Manhood for Amateurs," that I kept thinking of:

"I grew up with a freedom, a liberty that now seems breathtaking and almost impossible. Recently my younger daughter, after the usual struggle and exhilaration, learned to ride her bicycle. Her joy at her achievement was rapidly followed by a creeping sense of puzzlement and disappointment as it became clear to both of us that there was nowhere for her to ride it -- nowhere that I was willing to let her go."

Loh does express some concerns over the eventual result of parenting hypervigilence. But, it's hard to feel much sympathy for a woman who frets (facetiously, but still . . . ) over letting her children play in her neighborhood because it would mean "going over to the Mexican-gardener neighbor's house and jumping on an illegal trampoline with 11 children, five chihuahuas, and three chickens, as we did often enough when my kids were toddlers. But the gardener's children were English learners, who would gradually (I was told) leach the vocabulary from my English-speaking children -- and then my daughters would never test gifted, never have academically motivated peers, never get into the good college-prep classes."

Of course, by Chabon's own acknowledgement, the expectations of the involvement of fathers with their children and the involvement of mothers -- who are often expected to shoulder the majority of the daily work of raising children -- are not quite equal. That much is clear, as Chabon details early on, how merely grabbing a box of Cheerios with his toddler in tow resulted in strangers' admiring exclamations that he certainly was a "good father." Like some George Clooney of parenthood, not even a trip to the grocery store was free of fans.

And, I don't particularly want to demand, as one of Loh's friends did (and all in caps, too -- so you know she was very, very serious), that she "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" But, I suspect that ceaselessly fretting over how to be the perfect parent is not really about the children, who may very well find the whole thing a little claustrophobic, but about the parent.