Have no fear, I am not about to launch this post by saying that my two year-old is now able to read. She certainly enjoys books, and a combination of the pictures and (incredibly) repetitive reading means she can now reel off by heart the words in some of her books. But proper reading of unfamiliar words - in fact, of any words - is still a ways off yet.
No, the subject of this post, is books about child-bearing and child-rearing, more particularly, my antipathy towards them. I’m not the only one it seems. Novelist Rachel Cusk describes them in this way:
There are books about motherhood, as there are about most things. To reach them you must pass nearly everything, the civilised world of fiction and poetry, the suburbs of dictionaries and textbooks, on past books about how to mend your motorbike or plant begonias and books about doing your own tax return. Childcare manuals are situated at the far end of human experience, just past diet books and just before astrology.
It is possible, I sense, to make a specialism out of anything and hence unravel the native confidence of those you address. The more I read, the more my daughter recedes from me and becomes an object whose use I must relearn, whose conformity to other objects like her is a matter for liminal anxiety. (A Life’s Work, p 111)
I don’t want to totally slate these kind of books, nor criticise people for relying on them. At times, particularly in the first year of my baby’s life, I was as much in need of support and advice as anyone. I have talked with many people - other new mothers and fathers, experienced parents, health professionals - and I have read a few books, looked online and dipped into books and magazines. But my forays into child-bearing and rearing manuals - no matter how well-intentioned - have led me to conclude that Cusk, in her supercilious way, may be right: that they can work to undermine confidence even as they seek to reassure; that they can serve to distance a parent from their child - who becomes an object to be analysed or a problem to be solved - even as they emphasise responding sensitively to each child’s individuality and difference.
I’m not suggesting that this is necessarily a conscious agenda of disempowerment on the part of the writers - much as it isn’t on the part of self-help books that exhort you to ‘Love Yourself’ and then give you tips on how to get your hair and makeup just-right. Rather, it seems to me that these contradictions help drive a process that effectively polices parents, especially new parents, and especially mothers.
Recent research by historian Angela Davies has shown that childcare manuals by authors from Dr Spock to Gina Ford have been setting the bar too high and, for 50 years, mothers have felt more powerless, not less, after reading their words of wisdom. Davis carried out 160 interviews with women of all ages and from all backgrounds to explore their experiences of motherhood. In Modern Motherhood: Women and Family in England, 1945-2000, she says every manual designed to offer support and advice to women has had the opposite effect, leaving them dispirited and feeling inadequate. She says:
Despite all the differences in advice advocated by these childcare 'bibles' over the years, it is interesting that they all have striking similarities in terms of how the experts presented their advice. Whatever the message, the advice was given in the form of an order and the authors highlighted extreme consequences if mothers did not follow the methods of child-rearing that they advocated. Levels of behaviour these childcare manuals set for mothers and babies are often unattainably high, meaning women could be left feeling like failures when these targets were not achieved. So while women could find supportive messages, some also found the advice more troubling. (Davis quoted in the Guardian)
Ordinarily a lover of books, I haven’t immersed myself in these ones, not least because in the weary times I wasn’t caring for my new baby, the very last thing I wanted to do was read about caring for babies. In fact, one of the first books I read after leaving the hospital and figuring out which day of the week it was was not What to Expect in Your Baby’s First Year but Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk! I have dipped into them in times when I wasn’t sure about something - or done the online equivalent - but something stopped me from devouring them in pursuit of the secrets of good motherhood.
Now, as this blog attests, this didn’t stop me reading about experiences of motherhood itself. Far from it. I have read books by novelists exploring their own experiences of motherhood, whether fictional (Margaret Drabble) or non-fictional (Anne Enright, Rachel Cusk). I have read about the experiences of professional women who have combined the insights of their working lives with their personal experiences of mothering (Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Stephanie Coontz, Sue Kedgley). I have read the polemical works of feminist mothers (Adrienne Rich, Naomi Wolf, Elisabeth Badinter). And many more besides.
Where these books - of which, it sometimes seems there are numbers now to rival the What to Expect, Baby Whisperer and Contented Baby ilk - differ from the how-to manuals is that, where they move beyond the ground of personal experience (and not all of them do), they seek to empower rather than undermine, to foster solidarity rather than individually guilt-trip, to analyse and critique rather than simply accept. One could argue that some of these approaches may alienate mothers who don’t wish to engage with the more political aspects of mothering, rather than the day-to-day business of it. That may well be the case. But what they don’t do is tell you how to do it nor imply consciously or not that you could be doing it wrong and you should be thinking about how you will get it right or pay the consequences at all times.
Elsewhere, Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels trace the ways in which parental advice books have proliferated since the 1980s, as part of the ideology of what they call the ‘new momism.’ This has happened in parallel to the increasing dominance of neo-liberalism and the development of ‘turbo-capitalism’. As Susan Gregory Thomas outlines in Buy Baby Buy, this period also saw an explosion of toys and other materials aimed at parents. Similarly, the profusion of how-to books offer up the enticing proposition that good parenting can be bought and sold, that the secret to raising happy children is as simple as making the right purchase. And no matter how well the books of such high-profile feminists as Naomi Wolf might sell, they would be well below the sales figures and brand proliferation enjoyed by the likes of the What to Expect range.
When it comes to childcare books, it seems that making parents feel bad is pretty good for business.
