VALERIE SCHULTZ: Not Your Mother's Parenting style -- and that's OK
| Wednesday, Jan 20 2010 03:57 PM
Last Updated Wednesday, Jan 20 2010 03:57 PM
My oldest daughter surprised me by saying how much she enjoys using her slow cooker, which is a kitchen appliance I associate with my mother, who called it her crock pot. My mother used to load up the crock pot with meat and vegetables and canned soup, and let the whole lot cook to death all day. I, on the other hand, have mostly used the crock pot I got as a wedding gift to keep food or drinks warm at parties. A slow cooker has never seemed of much use to a vegetarian family. My daughter is now a meat-eater, though. She works full-time for a foster care agency in San Diego, and she says it is a warm feeling, after working all day and then fighting freeway traffic, to come home to a kitchen that already smells like a healthy, home-cooked meal. (I guess she really is a grown-up.)
So it shouldn't have surprised me to come across a cookbook titled "Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook," by Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann, while I was browsing for a birthday present for her. There is actually a series of books offering hundreds of recipes for "Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker," for entertaining, for two, and so on. Who knew that this throwback kitchen appliance was making itself indispensable to a whole new generation?
The cookbook title made me laugh about how the next generation is always full of suckers for anything that begins with the words "Not Your Mother's . . ." You can fill in the blank: Not Your Mother's Hairstyle. Not Your Mother's Eye Shadow. A casual Google search offered 23 million hits, including such favorites as Not Your Mother's Book Club, PTA, Handbag, Mammogram, Menopause, and even Bible. An additional universal topic was recently brought home to me when talking with a friend, which I'll call Not Your Mother's Parenting Style.
My anonymous friend has young children and was blowing off a little steam about her mother-in-law's not-so-subtle way of undermining my friend's parental authority with contradictory suggestions in front of the children. She felt disrespected by the older woman, and unsupported. She felt that she was being treated as a child herself, rather than as the rightful mother, and it frustrated her that her mother-in-law didn't even listen to her. The older woman was simply convinced that her entrenched ways of child rearing were superior. And I could only nod in sympathy, because it seems it was ever thus between the generations. I am not yet a grandmother, but I imagine my daughters, when or if they are mothers, will encounter the same difficulty with me as I did with my mother.
I remember disagreeing with my mother about everything, even before my first baby was born: about natural childbirth, about breastfeeding, about immunizations, about co-sleeping, about not spanking, about not letting my children "cry it out." Just about every parenting decision I made seemed to be at odds with the way I had been raised, and hadn't I turned out fine? Wouldn't I be smart to reap the benefit of my mother's experience and expertise? She couldn't understand my stubborn insistence on doing things wrong.
Of course I thought I knew better: I'd read an armload of parenting books and had a college education. I was young and proud and headstrong. But I must say that I still stand by most of my decisions. Somehow, in spite of all my newfangled ideas, my girls have also turned out fine. But projecting into the future, how will I react if one of my daughters decides to have an epidural and feed her baby formula and use plastic, disposable diapers and spank her kids into submission? I confess that my blood pressure rises just thinking about these poor choices that my daughters have not even made!
Just as I lived by Not My Mother's Parenting Style, my daughters will, too. After all, it's already started with the slow cooker. But perhaps the most important thing to remember is what mothers throughout the centuries have in common, and that is the fact that mothering is not about the mother. Mothering is about the child. As mothers we have a job to do, and that is to produce a well-adjusted, well-rounded human being. We hope that our offspring will be happy, both as children and as adults, and we do our best to help them reach their goals. But we will fail in our mission the moment we let mothering be about anything other than our children. Becoming a mother to fulfill some need in ourselves is a recipe for disaster. In a society where we are encouraged to put ourselves first, mothering remains at heart a sacrificial act. No matter how we change or update our parenting styles, that fundamental principle will always guide thoughtful mothers.
So whatever my daughters decide to do as mothers, it will be my job to be supportive and loving and respectful. Most of all, it will fall to me to bite my tongue. Because as long as they are acting out of conscious, selfless love, their children will also turn out fine, even if their grandmother inwardly has a cow over the parenting choices their mothers make. Indeed, it was ever thus.
