One of the Mommy-wars I referred to in a recent post is the sleep war, in which CIO (Crying It Out) advocates sing the praises of leaving a baby or young child to cry until they fall asleep, while anti-CIO mothers think that this is psychologically damaging and offer a variety of alternatives, including the ritual chanting of ‘this too shall pass’.
“Mommies who drink: Sex, Drugs and other Distant Memories of an Ordinary Mom” reveals just how judgmental we can be can be when it comes to motherhood, how deeply the expectations run that women transform overnight when they become mothers, losing not only half their brains but all their previous adult tastes, becoming wholesome and somewhat childlike themselves.
The lesson that it is facilitative not to press others to disclose, and to communicate that lack of pressure explicitly, is a useful one in all kinds of relationships; mothers persistently asking their children to tell them what happened at school springs to mind, as does the situation in which the stereotypical wife ‘asks the husband to talk about his feelings’.
In “Mother- and Father-Reported Reactions to Children’s Negative Emotions: Relations to Young Children’s Emotional Understanding and Friendship Quality”, researchers led by Dr. Nancy L McElwain of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studied over 50 pre-school children, firstly assessing their emotional maturity, and then observing play sessions with a friend. In a situation designed to produce stress and conflict it turned out that the optimum situation for the child was one very involved parent and one much less so.
Psychology today reports on ‘permaparenting’, the phenomenon of young adults coming back to the nest for indefinite amounts of time, or never leaving it at all. It paints a fairly bleak picture of young adults who are not mature enough to leave, and parents who are not mature enough to let them.
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