Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety

Progressive, The, May, 2005 by Ruth Conniff

Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety By Judith Warner Riverhead Books. 336 pages. $23.95.

If only Judith Warner were funnier. I could imagine her as a Roz Chast cartoon of a harried, type-A mom driving herself crazy reading parenting books and taking them way too seriously. Early in Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, Warner describes her reaction to the advice that she read, sing, and talk to her baby: "I talked and sang and made up stories and did funny voices and narrated car rides and read at mealtimes until, when my daughter turned four and a half, I realized I had turned into a human television set, so filled with twenty-four-hour children's programming that I felt as though I had no thoughts left of my own."

Warner quickly departs from the personal and launches into an impassioned and rather harsh critique of motherhood in America, filled with italicized declarations about how bad things are. Alas, comic moments in Perfect Madness are few and far between. The book, a sort of report from the front lines of motherhood among well-heeled Washingtonians, is almost unrelentingly grim.

The gist of Perfect Madness is that we (Warner says "we" a lot)--mothers in our thirties and forties--are miserable, nervous wrecks. We've turned motherhood into a ferocious competitive sport. We're destroying our lives. Our marriages suck. We've downsized our career ambitions and are now stewing in anger and resentment. We're going out of our heads overcompensating for our low self-esteem and anxiety by overprotecting and overparenting our kids. Yada, yada, yada. Nary a word in 336 long, anguished pages hinting that having children is a joy, that spending time with them, in addition to being a lot of work, might actually be fun.

While most of the buzz about Warner's book (cover of Newsweek, segment on Nightline, major reviews, interwiews, and publicity courtesy of William Morris) has focused on her endorsement of laudable, and familiar, policy goals--affordable, high-quality preschool and more Family-friendly employment opportunities--the bulk of it is a scathing cultural critique of the way we are raising our kids today. Warner came back from a plum assignment in Paris and found herself bored, restless, and miserable, stuck at home with the kids in Washington, D.C. So she set about cataloging the foibles of a certain genus of uptight, neurotic professional wives in her neighborhood and similar environs. From the sufferings of this elite group she extrapolated to produce a critique of "all that is messed up in America."

Her best anecdote comparing the United States to France is her description of how, in France, they laughed at her "guilt" over sending her child to a part-day preschool. "Do you have a mini arts studio in your home?" a friend asked. "Do you have a playhouse and a variety of tricycles?" She quickly realized that preschool in France was both affordable and great for kids. Then she came back to America. "In Washington, everything was different. The homes around me were equipped like mini arts studios. Many people had backyard equipment that rivaled public parks. And there was a sense that whatever was done at home was best."

Her point--that the privatization of childrearing isolates stay-at-home mothers and working parents alike, leaving them, and their children, with no network of support--is well taken. But then she veers off into taking shots at the parenting practices of a minority of her upper-middle-class peers.

Warner acknowledges that her failure to include working class families among her interview subjects is a limitation. But she justifies herself with a wave at the upper-middle-class values that dominate our culture, saying "The ways of the upper middle class affect everyone--including, to their detriment, the working class and the poor.... Thus to understand the conflicts, and, I would say, the pathologies of upper-middle-class thinking is to understand the often perplexing state of family politics in America."

Not really. The big weakness of Warner's book is that it confuses the tics of a very specialized group of rich women with a broader critique of how we treat children in America. Because of this basic confusion, she gets some things exactly backwards: chiefly, that being too attached, too coddling, too "child-centered" is the American family's big problem. Just the opposite is true.

Warner herself acknowledges that 90 percent of Americans ignore mainstream advice not to spank their kids or let their toddlers watch too much TM. She notes that the day care where so many families are obliged to leave their very young children for many long hours each day is of horrendously low quality. Yet she is tireless in her attack on people who co-sleep, nurse, limit TV watching, and focus too much attention on their kids.

Of her return to America, and her observations of other mothers, she writes, "It all amounted to a great leap backward.... To see them make a fetish of hand-sewn Halloween costumes and homemade baby food. To see them subordinate their life's goals to the furtherance of their husbands' careers."