Alpha Dominance

Recently I stumbled across this article on mama drama spoiling kid’s “playgroups.”

Playgroups, the phenomenon of over-privileged suburban soccer mom helicopter parents have apparently become par for the course among the over-involved idle housewife set.  Like so many of the oh-so crucial activities we foist upon our offspring in lieu of actual parental emotional involvement these have apparently become an expression of status.  Consequently these coddled mommies who need not work, yet have a regiment of maids, cooks, nannies and housekeepers to take on the actual role of housewife and mother, seek these groups out to fill the void left by a life of utter lack of utility, ostensibly in the name of their precious junior’s early development.

Unsurprisingly such primadonnas can’t for the life of them get along with one another, much like so many women in the workplace.  I’m sure we all recognize that women are their own worst enemies in the workplace, being far more likely to undermine and squabble with one another than the men in the office are.  Elevating such a social engagement to a status symbol only exacerbates the Machiavellian courtier maneuvers which typically plague female society.

Here are some prime excerpts:

As a new mom hoping to feel less isolated in suburban Los Angeles, writer Helaine Olen joined a playgroup with her infant son. But instead of finding the support she craved, she was stunned to encounter junior-high-style gossip, cruelty and cliquishness.

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Of course, many new moms find that playgroups are an invaluable source of comfort during their initiation to the often-overwhelming world of modern motherhood. After all, where else could you find people willing to sit through two hours dissecting breast-feeding schedules or interpreting the meaning of baby bowel discolorations?

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Beyond the playgroup, moms often find that petty behavior can continue right through nursery and elementary school, with exclusionary e-mail messages for a moms’ night out or vicious playground rumors that one wealthy mother had hired a wet nurse for her newborn.

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Olen, who just published a piece about her playgroup meltdown called “Mean Moms” in the new anthology “The Maternal Is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change,” offers an intriguing theory for what’s really behind much of the drama. She suspects most new moms who reach out to a playgroup tend to be lonely and feeling the loss of societal status that can come with motherhood. But instead of addressing the issues they now share — like the need for quality day care and flexible work schedules — they claw at each other, diverting themselves with petty squabbles.

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“When we feel powerless, we turn on each other,” she adds. “In our desperation to get a leg up, we moms bring one another down.”

Reads like the script to “Mean Girls II: Cougar Trouble” doesn’t it?  This article of course highlights not merely issues with playgroups, but issues with women in general (yes I’m generalizing, save your breath/keystrokes).  Among any group of women there will be continual and subtle jockeying for position with shrouded attempts to increase one’s own status at the expense of others.  Often this is done covertly behind the others back and through ever shifting alliances and flank attacks.  I suspect that this issue is so much the greater with these women who largely have no other personal means of accruing status, no job, no effective dominance of the hearth and home.  They’ve ceded control of all other realms and so the perceived ability as mothers becomes all important, never mind that most are farming out the basics of motherhood to a contingent of illegal immigrant staff.

This article also highlights another interesting observation I’ve often made: that new mothers seem to inflate the difficulty of the task such that anything else must pale in comparison to caring for a child.  This attitude has been made prominent in the ludicrous suggestions that stay at home mothers be paid (by whom pray tell) the combined annual salaries of nurse, cook, accountant, housekeeper, social planner etc. merely because they perform some of these roles some of the time.  Gee, wouldn’t it be nice to be paid for each of the roles you play around the house on top of your actual job gents?  Let’s see, add the salaries mechanic, groundskeeper, plumber, contractor, electrician, cook, nurse, accountant, bodyguard, policeman etc. and bill your wife next time she suggests her mothering is worth $300k a year why don’t you?

Not that being a parent is always easy, nor is it unimportant, we need good parents today and most children sorely lack them, but its just part of life and should come somewhat naturally if you are doing it right.  If a chimp can mother her child and be in constant physical contact for four years without falling apart, I’m sure the godlike homo-sapiens female ought to be up to the task, no?  Our grandparents often raised 5-10 children on a shoestring and somehow managed without frequent psychiatric intervention, and without a phalanx of Consuela’s backing them at that.  Come off it already.  Whining for sympathy is not being a good role model for your children.

All of this seems to me to highlight the fact that women themselves are conflicted about what role has value and deserves respect.  Many women criticize stay at home mothers or question the value of their contribution.  Others expect the world to cater to them and feel entitled to do nothing yet secretly are insecure about the fact that they don’t have a role that is valuable.  Rather than taking pride in being a stay at home mother, embracing that role and taking personal responsibility for what comes with it (laundry, cleaning, diapers, cooking a real meal every night, etc.) they either abandon their children to the care of others, or purport to be a homemaker while doing as little as possible.

My personal opinion is that children benefit from being raised in their early years by an actual parent, one who engages them one on one and provides for their every need and creates a stable home so they can develop security and confidence in their early years, while having a safe and clean home and being fed real honest-to-god actual food prepared by a parent in the home and served hot, with the whole family in attendance each and every night.  It may sound traditional, but tried and true might be a better way to look at it.  Mommy’s personal fulfillment in the workplace and her interests and hobbies should take a backseat to the interests of the child in these formative years.  If a family lacks the means to provide this, then in my opinion, they are selfishly putting their own fulfillment ahead of that of the child by having them under less than ideal circumstances.  We should view having children as a privilege, not a right, not for our own fulfillment at their expense.

Children raised in such a home will not lack for interaction or security and the parents will probably not feel compelled to dump junior into some artificial “playgroup” so as to avoid the responsibility of interacting and playing with him themselves.  Friendships and playmates can be culled out of real relationships with friends in similar circumstances and later, with their schoolmates.  Who needs such artificiality as an organized playgroup with a passel of disinterested strangers?  Don’t you have actual friends?  Don’t you have a life?  If not, get one you dunderhead, your kids need well adjusted parents to become so themselves.