It’s a Girl

A few years ago, a friend from elementary school who’s now pursuing a high-pressure career in medicine and public health started moaning about Atul Gawande. “He’s so perfect,” he complained. “He’s a successful surgeon, a popular writer for the New Yorker, and he’s apparently happily married with well-adjusted kids. I hate him.”

Much the same envious argument could be made about Jill Lepore, a female counterpart to Gawande. She’s a history professor (at Harvard, natch), another one of those New Yorker staff writers, and a mom.

Gawande doesn’t write about his family in his New Yorker pieces, but Lepore occasionally does. And in her most recent article for the magazine, “Baby Talk,” she essentially declares parents who worry about parenting to be — gasp! — navel-gazers.

Guilty as charged. But so what? If parents need to indulge in a little fretting now and then, it’s probably not harmful; on the contrary, doing a little meta-parenting, as it were, is probably beneficial.

Lepore, who naturally takes the historian’s long view, says that in the bad old days before birth control, everybody took kids for granted because they were always around. But nowadays — with the birth rate falling, the average age of the first-time mother rising, and a shrinking collective experience of child-raising — having kids has become precious, in every sense of the word. Too precious, according to Lepore:

A few years back, in “Confessions of a Slacker Mom,” Muffy Mead-Ferro admitted that during her pregnancy she did not actually buy a gizmo that was supposed to pipe Mozart into her belly; in “Dinner with Dad,” Cameron Stracher offered an account of his valiant year of getting home in time for supper. Frankly, I’d just as soon stipulate that most baby gear is worthless, stupid junk and that eating dinner with your kids is really important. Then I’d like to get back to reading the paper. But, hey, sure, amnesty, ovation, whatever gets you through the long, sleepless night.

Boo hoo for all you parents out there who are overwhelmed with, you know, parenting. Buck up already.

Lepore blames parenting blogs (all of which, she says, are nothing but confessionals), parenting magazines, and parenting memoirs for feeding the paranoic parenting monster. As for that newspaper she mentions preferring to read instead of worrying about being a parent, well, she really, really likes it — although she disses any parenting coverage associated with it, including Lisa Belkin’s popular New York Times parenting blog, Motherlode.

Sure, the concepts of parenting and childhood are, historically speaking, relatively recent concepts. But here’s the logistical leap that Lepore doesn’t mention: Just because most people had kids in the olden days, or at least grew up around plenty of them, didn’t necessarily make them better parents, or even parents at all. Familiarity, as the saying goes, can breed contempt, if not outright neglect. And it sure doesn’t breed skills.

In the first few days after Delphine was born, not a few friends stopped by who hadn’t the least idea how to hold a baby. But our knowing how — from having been around babies when we were little, and more recently, from having been around our friends’ babies — does not make us natural parents.

So we ask friends and family for parenting advice. We have several books on parenting, chosen for their moderate, practical tone. We even occasionally troll through parenting blogs, which are generally kicking with passionate comments and conversations.

Parenting magazines, on the other hand — with a few exceptions, such as Brain, Child and Hip Mama — usually feel frustratingly skimpy and annoyingly chipper. And yes, we like the newspaper, too — but we don’t subscribe to one anymore.

Maybe if we were Lepore’s age — not that much older than us, frankly — we’d still be taking parenting for granted, third on the list of activities behind pursuing a career and reading the newspaper. But we don’t, in part because we’re typically trying to do all three of those activities at once. We need all the help we can get.

Buried in Lepore’s article is a faint call to legislative arms, in which she stops pointing a finger at parenting publications and instead points it at society:

Employers are seldom asked to accommodate family life in any meaningful way; employees do all the accommodating, which mainly involves, especially for women, pretending that we don’t actually have families. Everyone has a story about how painful that is. It’s also crazy, and maddening, and unfair. We’ve all got stories to tell, but stories aren’t going to rewrite employment law.

So how are we supposed to reform society so that parenting is no longer weird, and we’re no longer struggling with it quite so much? Good question.