Americans probably analyze the nature of good parenting and their own skills (or lack thereof) more than other nation. There may be as many books on raising children as there are on dieting — enough said. This prompts many other Americans to throw up their hands and declare: “Just do it.” Joining the discussion are three more authors, with distinctive touches of introspection and feistiness.
In American Parent, Sam Apple takes a journalistic and historical approach, inviting the reader on a tour of “parenting phenomena.” He interweaves genuine humor (sometimes self-deprecating), extensive research, and a sense of perennial surprise in his exploration of expensive strollers, birthing classes, water birth, colic, breast-feeding, attachment to parents, baby names — after consideration of a number of exotic choices, he and his wife end up with “Isaac” — and circumcision.
Apple reads books and questions experts, thinking they would lead him to “find order in the chaos that new parents face in the months before and after the birth of a child,” as he writes in the preface. He also concludes in that same preface: “Now I know better.” I love the way American Parent ends but don’t want to spoil that surprise. If the author, by virtue of his gender, attracts more males to the ranks of involved (neurotic?) parents, he’ll have done a further service.
Free-Range Kids will probably have you either clucking with agreement or feeling your blood pressure boil with annoyance. Lenore Skenazy’s point that American parents tend to be overprotective, judgmental, and intrusive in the lives of other parents may be well taken. Maybe the notoriety she gained for letting her nine-year-old ride the subway alone was undeserved; the world isn’t more dangerous than it used to be, and the previous generation was raised with more permissiveness.
But there is, I believe, an underlying fallacy here. If “only” ten children are kidnapped and killed each year and only three are hit by cars, to exaggerate the author’s data, maybe that’s because of the precautions parents have been taking for years. For better or for worse, statistics are unlikely to win this battle anyway. Crime may be down, but people may still perceive urban areas as more dangerous than the rural or suburban ones they grew up in. Schools may be safe, but Columbine had its effect. Moreover, sarcastic dismissal of other people’s fears won’t necessarily persuade them either. (A more-reasoned consideration, quoting Skenazy, appeared in the September 13, 2001 The New York Times.)
Hell Is Other Parents is something of a misnomer, since only a few of the essays in this well-written book by Deborah Copaken Kogan relate to Mommy (or Daddy) Wars. They rightly convey the difficulties of parenting — especially in Manhattan with a third child born during its parents’ midlives. Many will relate to the author’s experiences as “stage mom” when her son gets cast in a “Star Trek” movie, and to the foreseeable conclusion when she takes her toddler on a trip of several hours to see that son perform in camp.
In the funniest essay, Copaken Kogan shares a hospital room post-delivery with a 16-year-old unwed mother, who is visited by loud, drinking friends with no respect for visiting hours. The author’s formidable storytelling abilities are most in evidence here, and least self-consciously. The breakup of a friendship between her daughter and another child because of the other mother is movingly true to the title — borrowed from Sartre’s sentiment about other people in the play “No Exit.” In the essays directly about parenting, the writer demonstrates that parenting is riskier than her previous career — war photography.
If you’re looking for a Jewish angle on parenting, the book that provides the most (and then, only tangentially) is Apple’s. Amidst the more general observation of Americans as a “peniscutting people,” he discusses the Jewish tradition of circumcision as he and his wife search for a mohel. (They end up with a female OB-GYN. One of the lactation consultants they call happens to be an Orthodox Jew.)
Additional books appearing in this review:
