One Mother Says Its Time to Stop the Madness
You won’t catch Muffy Mead-Ferro at a toddler fitness class. When it comes to enriching after-school activities, she’s not ferrying her kids to traveling soccer or French lessons either. She lets them amuse themselves in a mud puddle in the backyard instead. This Salt Lake City mother of two says she isn’t feeling a shard of guilt about her choices. “We’ve raised the bar too high on parenting,” she says, “And squeezed out all the fun. Someone has to say, ‘Stop the Madness'.”
Last spring, Mead-Ferro published her manifesto, "Confessions of a Slacker Mom," which called on women everywhere to park the mini-van, bow out of the childrearing sweepstake and lighten up. With Confessions of a Slacker Wife (due out from DaCapo in April) she’s trying to bring some downtime to domestic life, too.
The problem, as Mead-Ferro sees it, is that too many well-heeled, well-educated and otherwise sensible women are driving themselves and each other crazy. After years of competing in the work force, they’re mistakenly bringing the same zeal to child rearing and housekeeping as they did to their jobs. Domestic standards popularized by women’s magazines and Madison Avenue, she argues, have gotten too high. It’s not enough to keep crumbs off the kitchen counters, these days you have to keep the counters bacteria free. “And you can’t just make a lemon pie like June Cleaver,” she says. “These days you have to use Meyer lemons.”
Mead-Ferro began searching for a better way seven years ago when she began her own family and found that her work life (she was a successful advertising copywriter) didn’t jibe with the idealized home life she thought she wanted. Instead of recreating herself as Supermom and Domestic Goddess, Mead-Ferro opted to become a woman like her own late mother, who raised three kids while running the haying machine and branding cattle on the family’s sprawling cattle ranch in Wyoming. “The floors weren’t spotless. Dinner wasn’t fancy,” she says. “My mother just didn’t have the time, the focus or the inclination to put on that kind of show.”
Mead-Ferro decided to keep her job and, ignoring all conventional wisdom, simply lowered her standards. She chucked out the books on intensive parenting along with the anti-bacterial soap. She hired babysitters and used local day care. She chose her kids’ pre-school based on which one was closer to her house. She refused to buy electronic toys—even the ones touted as “educational.” As her children Belle, now 7 and Joe, now 5, get older, she isn’t offering them a smorgasbord of activities but is letting them discover ways to keep themselves entertained. She whittled down the time she spends on housework and has given her kids chores. She also began reclaiming time for herself—what she calls the ultimate Supermom taboo. “A lot of woman call it selfish unless you’re constantly putting your kids’ needs first,” she says. “But I think that’s just bogus.”
Her children are thriving. Will denying them traveling soccer foreclose on their chances of getting an athletic scholarship to a prestigious college someday? Maybe, she concedes. But she’s schooling them for a broader kind of success. She wants her kids to tolerate frustration and setbacks, to be self-reliant and conscious of the needs of others, and above all to grow up to think for themselves. “Maybe they’ll initially feel deprived,” she says, but it’s a risk she’s willing to take. If it turns out that she’s right, then maybe a slacker mom will be the best kind of mom to have, after all.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6960732/site/newsweek/
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