And The Madeleines Made Him, Like, Remember Things, and Stuff!

Further comments:

Is the nice, liberal father who has just this Saturday carted his kids to soccer practice, play dates, piano lessons, made sunflower-butter sandwiches, and read Goodnight Moon three times seething with quiet desperation?

Probably, yeh, why should he be any different from the rest of us?

[spoiler alert: it turns out he’s queer.]

Thanks! I think I might be able to pass A-level English on the basis of this.

(looks down the front page of CT, notes a prevalence of “by JOHN HOLBO”s and a “by BELLE WARING” up at the top, thinks “Excellent! John and Belle once again have a Blog!”)

Any chance that Michael Bérubé (né Berube) could be persuaded to guest post here now and then?

I have never read Goodnight Moon to a child with anything other than quiet joy.

And unlike my parents, my children, however problematic at times, have never made me seethe.

Pretentious over-thinking gets its come-uppance.

I don’t suppose it ever occurred to the culture warriors that some books are funny, not because it is indicative of liberal’s letting down their end, but just because it has curse words in it.

Once again the intrepid Belle Waring is on patrol, looking out for anything in the over-traveled precincts of the Internet (e.g. Slate, Yglesias, etc etc) that might be unfairly blaming women for stuff that is really the fault of men.

In re JRoth above:

Trillin’s comment, which I’m about to butcher, seems relevant: “When it comes to parenting, once you’ve answered whether your are children are the center of your life, all else is commentary.”

It is worth keeping in mind, however, that babies and toddlers do make good accessories for young men.

(Preview suggests that this comment may be eaten alive, so be ready for multiple posting)

The concept is great, but I thought not quite there in the execution. It needed that relentless Dr. Seuss rhythm to make it really funny. Was it Orwell who said that most of us have given up on ambition by our thirties? Most of the time the children seem like a fair swap for the unrealised dreams, but surely we all wonder sometimes.

Watch out in that A-level answer Dsquared! I agree with the rest of this post, but in the world of the novels, it turns out the narrator’s one of the only characters who isn’t queer

LP @16
Yes, Gawker is funny.

I’ve never read Roiphe before and I believe I was happier then. Does she think “yuppie” and “liberal” are somehow interchangeable? I don’t understand the connection between these groups. Perhaps somebody else wrote the sub-head.

Then in the Sunday Times piece we learn (in paragraph 15) that she has a full-time nanny and:

I have a full-time nanny, shared with my sister. During the week, I spend an hour with her in the morning before school and , bathing dolls and all that.

I suppose that if I could afford full-time domestic staff I might get my kicks by taking jabs at the proles who can’t afford to outsource their child-rearing.

I never said anything about parental involvement. Roiphe’s latest column is about (from the first paragraph):

the nice, liberal father who has just this Saturday carted his kids to soccer practice, play dates, piano lessons, made sunflower-butter sandwiches, and read Goodnight Moon three times

It’s my understanding that all of these duties would and could reasonably be performed by a full-time nanny, in fact, you appealed to one of the items on the list (driving to soccer practice) yourself.

I haven’t yet met a conservative yuppie. Everyone who frequents my favourite coffee-shop (one of those indie, artisan places) seem either to be liberals or libertarians.

Why do you consider them “yuppies”? Their conspicuous consumption and social climbing?

Well, the conspicuous consumption certainly.

I’ll grant that the percentage of liberals (and libertarians) is higher in the under-40-or-so crowd than the population generally, so from that perspective expect somewhat more liberal yuppies. But it seems very odd that you haven’t noticed any conservatives.

Certainly I would think the term ‘yuppie’ would be inclusive of a lot of lawyer/stockbroker/young executive types, and I would think a lot of them might have political opinions I’d label conservative.

Of course, an “indie/artisan” coffee shop probably isn’t the natural habitat for conservative yuppies, so that would explain a lot of it.

My point was that even with a nanny, your parents would still likely be going to the soccer practice, because their being at the soccer, avec ou sans une nounou, is part of parenting.

I think a distinction between soccer practice and actual games could be in order here . It’s probably still in the realm of at least marginally-acceptable parenting to skip a few of the former. And even if sports and young children is a special case, there are a lot of other similarly time consuming after school activities where parental attendance might not be as mandatory at practices (drama, dance, music, martial arts, swimming, etc.).

And of course there could still be substantial time savings involved with the nanny even if you go to every practice – for example, you would be able to head to the field straight after work (or other adult engagement), instead of having to detour somewhere else to round up the kids first.

I was raised substantially by a nanny

Why am I not surprised?

To discourage this thread from becoming another “All about Myles”-thread, here’s why her critique misses the mark.

Children need to sleep every night of the week. Some children have a hard time doing so and it requires lots of effort to get them to sleep (parents of children who sleep easily aren’t the subject here). As far as I know, somebody needs to make that effort.

Roiphe pivots from criticism of he book — which is “not that funny” — to criticism and insults directed at its intended audience.

Nowhere does she acknowledge the underlying fact that the child does need to sleep in order to be healthy or the fact that it can be a challenge to do that, and the author’s personal situation shows why: It’s not her problem. She can afford to outsource the frustrating parts of child-rearing.

Despite the conspiratorial tone in:

We are, after all, to blame for our own self-sacrifice, and if we are being honest and precise, it’s not exactly self-sacrifice, tinged as it is with vanity, with pride in our good behavior, with a certain showiness in our parenting, with self-congratulation.

Roiphe isn’t part of that “we” whose vain self-sacrifice she criticizes, and I don’t even fault her for that. But she steps over the line when she turns that into insult and superiority over other parents.

I was given a book by Katie Roiphe’s mother and will never be the same. I don’t know if she is a feminist as Gawker states. She is certainly a lefty: she moralizes about how vulgar it is for her relatives to wear expensive jewelry to weddings. The piece linked by the OP seems to me to be in the vein of books that tell you, you can’t be a good person if you can’t make a block of time for yourself to think. Not in control of your schedule? Hm.

And “hilarious,” “enthralling,” “hostility”? That’s Roiphe. It isn’t the book she’s reviewing. And it isn’t the reader.

There is nothing that fills me with joy like walking back into a two year old’s bedroom two minutes after naptime began, as the coffee I needed at 10 AM cools, and seeing her first bursts of real insolence express themselves, and wonder if I can bribe her to be quiet with more endless made-up verses of “Wheels on the Bus.”

As for Myles, there is some evidence that “yuppie” now means “half-embarrassed rich person.”

Yes, “yuppie” is like “hipster”. No one self labels as either.

He’s a yuppie. I’m comfortable.
She’s a hipster. I’m passionate about my indie rock.

The use of the word liberal seems a little ridiculous. I’m older than most or all of you, and my children are grown (sort of!), but Roiphe’s insults strike at my parenting style (forgive the awful term), although I was never a yuppie — and when I once called myself one as a joke I was in all seriousness told that I wasn’t by a very right wing guy who proclaimed that he and his wife were. (Good boss, in fact, compared to some of the others I had. Looking at my parents’ generation, or the parents I knew born between 1920 and 1940, most of them did not do it the way I did; in fact my attitude toward my children was quite upsetting to my mother, who repeatedly encouraged me to go away with my wife and leave the kids at home, which we never wanted to do.

There were, however, three men whom I looked up to as some sort of role models as fathers, although I never quite matched their balanced commitments to their children and their (quite successful) careers. Among them they had 22 children (and wives who were by no means beaten down); one of them was a member of Opus Dei, another was a Mormon bishop, a third, a key Silicon Valley pioneer, was a devout if not reactionary or traditionalist Roman Catholic. Not a “liberal” in the bunch I would say. Oh, and their children all had wonderful manners, which matters a lot to me — and were devoted to their parents.

“Nor did most Canadians.”

I’m pretty confident that for any nationality N, it is true that most of them did not have a nanny.

I’m pretty confident that for any nationality N, it is true that most of them did not have a nanny.

possibly Liechtenstein?

I think a distinction between soccer practice and actual games could be in order here . It’s probably still in the realm of at least marginally-acceptable parenting to skip a few of the former. And even if sports and young children is a special case, there are a lot of other similarly time consuming after school activities where parental attendance might not be as mandatory at practices (drama, dance, music, martial arts, swimming, etc.).

Wait, parents are supposed to turn up at practice, not just deliver their kids? For God’s sake, why? To give moral support as they run around traffic cones?

I have some teenagers who come to the sports class I teach. I have to insist their parents hang about all practice, as I’m not CRB checked and the body who license me to teach the sport aren’t an umbrella body who can CRB check me. So, in the UK at least, there might be practical reasons why parents be present.

Who could have thought. She sounds like a downmarket Caitlin Flanagan. Who also heaped calumny upon middle class parents (particularly women), while enjoying the benefit of servants, courtesy of her excutive husband.

Nannies aren’t servants. You would find yourself in serious trouble very quickly were you to try to treat them thus.

possibly Liechtenstein?

Depends on whether you count the transient workers of Dubai as a part of its population. But probably applies to Bermuda in any case.

As regards concern-troll responses to “Go the Fuck to Sleep”, Dr. David Arredondo of the Children’s Program in SF has a nice take.

Presumably time savings are the entire point of employing a nanny.

Umm. Yes?

jack @51

I didn’t think you had missed that particular point — clearly you had not. I only wanted to emphasize that this is the single most important and obvious fact about employing a nanny yet you still needed to explain it to our esteemed fellow-poster.

Any chance that Michael Bérubé (né Berube) could be persuaded to guest post here now and then?

I only blog for the money.

But yes, I will try to find a moment later this week. I have spent countless hours housepainting and would like to look at the Internet again for a change. But I cannot promise to write anything as sharp as a Belle Waring post, now. After she used up all the world’s strategic snark reserves with that OPPEC bit, the rest of us have been living on nuts and berries and the occasional squirrel.

Whatever other value this thread has, it has crystallized for me why I find Roiphe so annoying. It’s not the choices she’s made, or her defense of those choices, but her contempt for people who make different choices.

I’m sure she has a perfectly lovely life and I’m prepared to believe that she isn’t offensive in daily life, at least on days when she’s not writing.

Katie Roiphe’s article is tiresome, but not because it’s about blaming Mom, including especially Marcel’s Mom, but because she doesn’t seem to understand humor as a good thing, all but itself, to say nothing of humor in the venting of a parent’s frustration. And I can’t imagine any parent not recognizing that frustration, even a parent who gets lots of help, lots of sex, and who has a life. You’d have to never have had any real responsibility for a kid, or else be some kind of amazing saint, not to have experienced that frustration.

Sorry, Myles, but nannies are most definitely servants. Perhaps you can’t abuse them to your heart’s content the way you might a mere scullery maid (note to Myles: irony), but when you’re paying someone to rear your progeny for you, they most definitely fall into the broader ‘servant’ category.