Friday 18 May 2012

Bad Mothers?


TIME magazine's recent cover depicts a woman breast-feeding her three year old son, along with the challenging question, "Are You Mom Enough?" I didn't bother to read it. If mothers want to continue breastfeeding their kids until kindergarten, that's their business. 

A problem arises when women who don't wish to breastfeed that long, or at all, are judged as lesser mothers. It's the superiority thing that gets me. After the birth of her first child, supermodel Gisele Bundchen said breastfeeding for the first six months should be mandated by law. 

Did she consider the women who would like to do it but cannot for reasons of health, including severe mastitis, or medication? What about the women who would walk through fire for their infants but just don't like breastfeeding for whatever reason? 

Does that make them all bad mothers?

Women should nurture in whatever way they feel is best for their child and stop judging the ones who don't do it their way. Mothers have enough to worry about without adding peer, or societal, pressure to the mix.

Let's take, for example, the subject of my last post, The French Way (April 12, 2012), in which I discussed the bestseller French Children Don't Throw Food by Pamela Druckerman. The book caused non-French mothers everywhere to fret about what they were doing wrong. Are French children really so perfect? I decided to go to an impeccable source: my half-French cousin, Elizabeth.

Parisians Elizabeth and her brother Bernard have six little kids between them, so they are well-acquainted with the nursery and kindergarten sets. I asked her what she thought of the book. "It strikes me as a pile of dog merde," she said, borrowing from another subject in my last post.

"Of course they won't keep quiet in restaurants because they're kids! Do they all sleep through the night at two months? Mine gave me six hours at that age, or I think they did (I'm a heavy sleeper), but I know some, including my goddaughter and nephew, who didn't sleep through the night until they were toddlers."

Did she know French children who never threw food?

"Well, I always did it myself, and it was French friends who taught me. I have fond memories of the 'test du camembert,' where you take it out of its wrapping, throw it up to the ceiling, and if it sticks just for a little beat before it falls back down, it's perfect. If it falls straight back, it's still not quite ripe, and if it sticks for any length of time, it's overdone."

Now that's a French method worth considering.