Reading Hand-Wringing: Warner's "Domestic Disturbances

Last week, the New York Times published a story on expensive sleep-away camps and the lengths the staff go to to accomodate the questions, demands, and complaints of parents. One camp employs a full-time staff member to do nothing but handle parents' calls and to attempt to help parents overcome the need to be connected 24/7 to their children (some parents flaut the "no cell phone" rule at one camp by sending their children to camp with two cell phones so that when one is confiscated, they can still call their children).

Judith Warner responded recently in her weekly column in the Times, Domestic Disturbances, to this story. Warner analyzes the cause for such behaviors in the course of her column. But it's her conclusion at the end of the article that frustrates me. Warner ultimately advises that it's up to the institutions to rein in this behavior:

The buck has to stop somewhere. It's clearly not going to be stopped by this generation of befuddled parents. It's time that the professionals we entrust with our children stopped catering to their "clients" and started treating them like grown-ups.

I find Warner's shift in the last sentence (which is the last sentence of the column) interesting. Up to this point, she has written as a detached observer. However, in the last sentence, she lets herself, as much as the obsessive parents she's observing, off the hook. I conclude that, while Warner doesn't go so far as to consider herself "befuddled," she too, is incapable of "acting like a grownup," and must look to those professionals to do it for her. I have found this stance, alterntively obsessed and dismissive, typical of Warner's column. In the first column of Domestic Disturbances I read, Warner mulled over the problems of "supersized" birthday parties while making petits fours for her own daughter's party. In Warner's cloumn, you're likely to hear what the other obsessed parents think, her children think, and what outrageous thing the sadistic PTA requires now. There are sporadic forays into policy such as the occasional columns on birth control, behavioral drugs such as Ritalin, and parental leave. What's frustrating about reading Warner is that she's clearly a very intelligent woman unable to separate herself from her own neurotic, obsessive parental lens.

While Warner is quite good at pointing out the foibles of the helicopter parent set, she's less adept at confronting the consequences in ways that might lead to change at either a policy or individual level. Demanding that it's up to the professionals to set boundaries with parents ignores the negative results already taking place from this mindset. A brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education on teacher attrition quoted the 2005 Met-Life "Survey of the American Teacher" which stated that, among other things, new teachers were stressed by their ". . .relationships (or lack thereof) with parents." So much for the professionals being able to change the parents' behavior. Read some of the comments after Warner's columns and you'll find the same dreary arguments that surround modern parenting, especially the so-called "Mommy Wars," repeated ad infinitum. The sad thing is that some readers see only their own fears confirmed, rather than anything to challenge their assumptions. One respondent to the camp column admitted that she, as the parent of young children, would be a "neurotic overworried micromanaging mother" if that would get her children "a spot in a winner take all society." Her final comment is indicative of the problem Warner brings up but doesn't confront:

But regardless of how society is going, I will teach them human kindness and ethics and hope that these things will serve them well and don't backfire and place them somewhere on the loser heap.

So our choices are either to be demanding, difficult and successful or kind, ethical losers? Perfect Madness, indeed.