365 moms and dads, served fresh daily!
What do today's families look like? How do they make it through their day? Who's home taking care of the kids? Who works?
If you believe the negative media storm of the last few years, American families are a mess.
The kids are fat, unmotivated, short-attention-spanned brats, incapable of IRL relationships and over-reliant on spell-check and Google. Or they are overachieving zombies, racing from pre-school to graduate degrees that lead nowhere but to their parent's basement.
Contemporary moms are either opting-out of corporate life to helicopter into their children's lives, abandoning their hard-won titles and promotions, to shout Good job! Good job! at a soccer game—or they are frigid, all-business shrews, relegating childcare to undocumented strangers.
Oh, and the husbands! The hapless fathers! They are either at-home and emasculated, dishonorably discharged from the long-held rank of breadwinner, making endless bowls of macaroni-n-cheese —or they are stressed-out, over-worked, overextended and feeling enormous pressure to, like their female counterparts "do it all", be income producer and caring nurturer, and they are failing at both.
To this we say, nuts.
We call bullshit on every recent article in The Atlantic and New York Magazine and The New York Sunday Times magazine citing Study Number 243a, which offers new proof of the decline of the American family.
We know lots of families.
They don't resemble the folks in those studies and articles.
We are lots of those families.
We are: multi-cultural, multi-racial, inter-faith, adoptive and gay, we are blended, educated, hard-working, optimistic, realistic, resilient, skeptical, informed, active, loving, and happy.
Not always. But more often than not.
Don't take our word for it. Come see for yourself —at The Parent du Jour. Launched July 18, our mission is to present the stories of 365 parents from around the world in their own words—the good and the bad, the best and the worst. To go beyond the studies and the statistics, and listen to what real parents have to say.
The kids are alright. Really. And so are their moms and dads.
Lisa Duggan and Steve Berger
Co-founders
Co-founders
—August 2011
Well hallelujah for that! Looking forward to reading it (even though I may qualify as a helicopter over-achiever mom - the one who dropped out of the corporate rat race to cheer everybody on!) - hopefully I can learn something. (-:
ReplyDeleteCheering is good! And doesn't our life dictate that we helicopter - when we have to drive our kids to see friends? I hate the myth of the 'unwatched child' - those who claim that they played freely on the streets for hours without their moms knowing where they were. Yeah, me too, but I had EVERYONE'S mom watching me when my mother couldn't.
ReplyDeleteSo funny and true!
ReplyDeleteVery funny! It is very sad when SitComs paste a more accurate picture of family life rather than news media.
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