It's Hard Out There for a Parent

I checked out an interesting blog post by a woman named Stephanie Wilder-Taylor who is the author of Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay: And Other Things I Had to Learn as a New Mom.The post was about her appearance on the Today show to talk about moms who have cocktail playdates with other moms and their kids. Women are apparently up in arms about other women who dare (gasp!) to have a glass or two of wine with their friends. The cocktail-drinking women want to be with kids but they dare to have a good time as they do so. Apparently, for parents to have a lick of fun is an anomaly in our kid-centered society today.

I watched the video which is here and found the judgemental attitude of the expert a bit much . The "expert" is described as a psychiatrist who is a professor at Columbia University affiliated Harlem hospital and has four children. She seems a bit preachy in her tone, especially in the video where she acts as if parents drink a glass of beer or wine in front of their kids is somehow modeling irresponsible behavior to the kids that will start them on a lifelong path to alcoholism. I remember my kid coming home once from a Dare program at school and telling me that the class was told by an officer that their parents should not be drinking around them at all, that this was setting an example that drinking was acceptable. It is? I don't think so, unless you are a raging alcoholic and that is not what we are talking about here.

The heroine in our story here, Ms. Wilder-Taylor points out in the show that it is about morality--that people are so judgemental about what parents can do, that parents, especially moms are stressed out. And the worst part? It is women doing it to other women. The breast feeding dilemma, working versus non-working mothers, now women can't have wine with their kids around. Hell, my cardiologist told me to quit being such a tee-totaler and have a glass of wine with dinner for my heart! If a doctor is recommending it for health, what gives these busybodies like the uptight psychiatrist the right to be dissing women who dare to have a little fun and engage in grown-up activities, and that includes the grown-up activity of a glass or two of wine and a good time. Parenting in our society has become so stressful that people no longer want to have kids. My advice? Go back to the martinis and grown-up rituals of yesteryear, when adults acted like adults and kids were kids. With the build-up of the nanny state over the past decades, it seems we are all now being treated as children. But for adults it is even worse, all the responsiblity and none of the rights of being a grown-up. How utterly childish.