Ferocious Moms

...In the end, Warner has written a long book about motherhood that pretty much ignores the needs of children...

...They eat with all five of their senses...

...Our divorced, unhappy mothers-the feminists of the 1970s-are no models, she writes...

...But our country isn't likely to change its priorities, she writes...

...We grew up, some of us got married, had children, and, surprise, surprise, we're still a bunch of miserable control freaks...

...Our marriages suck...

...Alley's show is the latest subset of the dieting-as-acting school...

...Her best anecdote comparing the United States to France is her description of how, in France, they laughed at her "guilt" over sending her child to a part-day preschool...

...It does sound awful...

...23.95...

...These men and women-great parents and grandparents and child development experts and preschool teachers-take a keen interest in children...

...I never thought I'd miss Richard Simmons...

...To see them subordinate their life's goals to the furtherance of their husbands' careers...

...The already thin Daniel Day-Lewis is even thinner as Jack in The Ballad of Jack and Rose...

...We don't like second-class-status housewives...

...She serves it up cold...

...Of her return to America, and her observations of other mothers, she writes, "It all amounted to a great leap backward...

...When she finally gets to her policy recommendations, Warner belatedly takes up the cause of the working poor...

...Her audience, which is never going to be too rich, seems to be going for the too thin option, and can't take its eyes off her and how large she has gotten...

...Ugh...

...The big weakness of Warner's book is that it confuses the tics of a very specialized group of rich women with a broader critique of how we treat children in America...

...Early in Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, Warner describes her reaction to the advice that she read, sing, and talk to her baby: "I talked and sang and made up stories and did funny voices and narrated car rides and read at mealtimes until, when my daughter turned four and a half, I realized I had turned into a human television set, so filled with twenty-four-hour children's programming that I felt as though I had no thoughts left of my own...

...Do you have a playhouse and a variety of tricycles...

...Better to be in France, where the women look chic and the kids eat in the kitchen and play in their rooms, she suggests...

...But then she veers off into taking shots at the parenting practices of a minority of her upper-middle-class peers...

...We're destroying our lives...

...But her whole book up to that point is focused on the same group...

...The women she describes are anything but admirable...

...It struck me as bizarre the way she takes out after attachment parenting-the touchy-feely parenting style generally associated with earthy-crunchy co-op shoppers...

...She notes that the day care where so many families are obliged to leave their very young children for many long hours each day is of horrendous-ly low quality...

...Warner acknowledges that her failure to include working class families among her interview subjects is a limitation...

...Kate "at my fighting weight" Clinton is a humorist...

...No mention of the impact that has had on table settings or manners...

...But this sort of life, it must be said, is optional...

...We don't like our mothers or our grandmothers, or any other women, it seems...

...If Warner lacks the energy and optimism to push for her policy goals, all she leaves us with is her critique of parenting...

...We" women of Generation X were Reaganites, turned off by politics, neurotic narcissists, plagued by eating disorders, control freaks about food, exercise, work, and sex...

...That, more than her weight loss, is what is so fascinating...

...That's too bad, because her insistence that children should play a less central role in Americans' lives actually dovetails nicely with the neglectful nonsystem of child care we currently have...

...In the movies, it all started when Robert De Niro gained weight for his role as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull...

...In Washington, everything was different...

...Not really...

...Nielsen has not yet released any figures on the gender breakout of the declining viewership of Fat Actress, but I suspect a lot of desperate housewives are tuning in...

...Yet she is tireless in her attack on people who co-sleep, nurse, limit TV watching, and focus too much attention on their kids...

...There is probably no more important ingredient in good parenting than keeping your sense of humor...

...She derides "the self-flagellation, the guilt, and the utter idiocy of so much of The Mess" (her catchall phrase for the whole state of motherhood in America today...

...Her show is a sweet and sometimes sour revenge...

...When a beast is starved, it gets cranky and lashes out...

...We've downsized our career ambitions and are now stewing in anger and resentment...

...There's a certain arbitrariness to the way she globs together criticism of parenting styles and politics...

...Tom Hanks lost weight for his Oscar-winning part as a person with AIDS in Philadelphia and then as the marooned Federal Express man in Cast Away...

...I could imagine her as a Roz Chast cartoon of a harried, type-A mom driving herself crazy reading parenting books and taking them way too seriously...

...336 pages...

...Viewers are grimly invested in her weight loss...

...Running away-back to France-before high school starts, before the anorexia kicks in and the college-application-prep summer camps begin, and the robotic performance of community service begins to eat up weekends...

...Books Ferocious Moms Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety By Judith Warner Riverhead Books...

...Here's how she concludes: "Two years of talking and writing . . . living in the crucible of all that is messed up in America today . . . I find myself, when things get really tense (report card time, class mother duties), fantasizing about eventually Opting Out...

...From the sufferings of this elite group she extrapolated to produce a critique of "all that is messed up in America...

...While most of the buzz about Warner's book (cover of Newsweek, segment on Nightline, major reviews, interviews, and publicity courtesy of William Morris) has focused on her endorsement of laudable, and familiar, policy goals-affordable, high-quality preschool and more family-friendly employment opportunities-the bulk of it is a scathing cultural critique of the way we are raising our kids today...

...The most impressive fact in her book leaps out: "Even if America were proportionately to spend as much as France does on subsidized child care and paid leave-increasing our budget outlays by $85 billion a year-it would still cost less than the Bush tax cuts...

...Of the deranged fundamentalist Christian who drowned her five children in the bathtub, Warner writes, "At another time, in another culture, without this era's particular set of pressures, would Andrea Yates have become a supermom gone unhinged...

...The zaftig Ms...

...The Bush doctrine of cutting taxes to reduce revenue, with the goal of reducing the size and number of services offered by government, is what is known in the conservative mainstream as "starving the beast...

...And there was a sense that whatever was done at home was best...

...It's not just that I resent the imposition of this rather unflattering life story, though I do...

...In truth, this book is as much about yuppie life in Washington, D.C., where the playground is just another venue for social climbing, as it is about motherhood...

...I agree with Warner that sexism is alive and well...

...But the people I admire most have a different worldview from Warner...

...a friend asked...

...To see them make a fetish of hand-sewn Halloween costumes and homemade baby food...

...Then she came back to America...

...Yada, yada, yada...

...The book, a sort of report from the front lines of motherhood among well-heeled Washingtonians, is almost unrelentingly grim...

...Her point-that the privatization of childrearing isolates stay-at-home mothers and working parents alike, leaving them, and their children, with no network of support-is well taken...

...Likewise, out of an appreciation for what's hilarious and beautiful and wonderful about having children, it seems to me, a better society can grow...

...She quickly realized that preschool in France was both affordable and great for kids...

...Do you have a mini arts studio in your home...

...We've turned motherhood into a ferocious competitive sport...

...The life story Warner sketches out is a huge bummer...

...Kirstie Alley has...

...By Ruth Conniff If only Judith Warner were funnier...

...Nary a word in 336 long, anguished pages hinting that having children is a joy, that spending time with them, in addition to being a lot of work, might actually be fun...

...Warner came back from a plum assignment in Paris and found herself bored, restless, and miserable, stuck at home with the kids in Washington, D.C...

...At the end of a chapter devoted mainly to mothers with "a wonderful education, a wonderful husband, a nice big house, two children, and full-time help," who feel empty inside, she arrives at Andrea Yates...

...His "No Fat Child Left Behind Federal Nutritional Guidelines," however, are more daunting than helpful-fresh selections from the five vegetable subgroups, a variety of whole grains, and vigorous sixty-minute workouts...

...We don't like strident feminists...

...I found that I began to resent reading such a long and relentlessly joyless description of family life to get to Warner's perfectly reasonable and right-on policy suggestions...

...Our mothers] see us singing and rolling on the floor in our sweatpants, getting glitter glue and soy milk everywhere, and they think we're crazy," Warner writes...

...The gist of Perfect Madness is that we (Warner says "we" a lot)-mothers in our thirties and forties-are miserable, nervous wrecks...

...For there is, in addition to the sleep loss and the compromise of self and the hard physical and emotional work and rest of the mess of parenthood, the extreme joy and delight and satisfaction that it entails...

...Warner's heart of darkness is not most of America, where parents are working around the clock and corporate-chain day care centers are proliferating-treating their employees as badly as low-wage workers in any other industry and their "product" (American children) like cheap goods warehoused at discount prices...

...In that way it can be a window on a better and happier way of living...

...But she justifies herself with a wave at the upper-middle-class values that dominate our culture, saying "The ways of the upper middle class affect everyone-including, to their detriment, the working class and the poor...

...Aas, comic moments in Perfect Madness are few and far between...

...In her urgency, Warner has skipped over a few important distinctions...

...Charlize Theron gained weight and lost the makeup for her performance as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster...

...For example, the difference between being an upper-middle-class striver who wears herself out staging a birthday party, and a fundamentalist whose husband moves the whole family into a bus, where she home-schools her five kids all by herself It's not only mothers who are in for a rough ride in Perfect Madness, but women in general...

...No, Warner's nightmare America, her "crucible," is the Washington where, she writes, "four of my second-grader's girlfriends have told me they are 'on a diet.' " And, " 'It's hard to do homework after a 7 p.m...

...Just the opposite is true...

...Unlike Ann Crittenden's excellent book, The Price of Motherhood, which made a case for the tremendous economic, social, and human value of mothering, and included the stories of truly heroic mothers, Warner offers a lot of snide criticism...

...Because of this basic confusion, she gets some things exactly backwards: chiefly, that being too attached, too coddling, too "child-centered" is the American family's big problem...

...But then, I live in Madison, Wisconsin, where hanging out with your kids for fun, not competition, is considered normal...

...She impugns plus-size American women when she wearily opines that French women "have learned to manage and gratify their senses...

...For it turns out there's no one Warner can see as a model of decency happiness, or good health...

...So she set about cataloging the foibles of a certain genus of uptight, neurotic professional wives in her neighborhood and similar environs...

...Too many women are pulling a double shift...

...She even derides the media's obsessive focus on rich women...

...No act was too asinine," she writes of moms who quit their jobs to focus on their preschoolers' shoetying skills or who poured their energy and ambition into planning the perfect birthday party...

...Phil, who coached Oprah in her Texas Meat Disparagement Trial, was rewarded for his success with his own bossy, annoying show, another entrant in the Dieting Industrial Complex...

...On the eve of 2005, George Bush said that his New Year's resolution was-no, not ending the war and bringing the troops home, silly-to lose a few pounds and stay away from sugar...

...Best of all, having children makes us see the sweetness of life in the moment, and step outside ourselves...

...Ruth Conniff is Political Editor of The Progressive...

...Warner winds up her chapter entitled "Millennial Motherhood" by moving from the "asinine" to the tragic...

...Would she have killed her children...

...A new entr?e on the very full menu of weight loss books, Mireille Guiliano's bestselling French Women Don't Get Fat, is une autre bee-otch slap in the Franco-American wars...

...As single women, we were "self-belittling," desperate for dates, and yet "knew enough to hate ourselves for it...

...If only she didn't deride as pathological the delicious sensuality of mothering...

...But what if Warner had lived in Sweden, where women breastfeed for a year and have proportional representation in the government...

...Our society undervalues children and their caregivers-both paid and unpaid...

...I read the guidelines and wanted a big grab bag of Cheetos...

...If, as Warner argues, it's ridiculous to worry too much about brain development, secure emotional attachment to a caregiver, and the other bedrock concerns of child-development experts, why make a big push for quality care...

...If only the author hadn't alienated so many would-be allies with her condemning tone...

...Warner's number one point is that society should offer mothers more support...

...Ren?e Zellweger yo-yoed up and down for the role of the insipid Bridget Jones I and II...

...Fergie is a fat-free Uta Hagen-dazs...

...Weight Watchers is the new method acting...

...I'm hoping the beast we call democracy snaps back at its tormentors and takes back the zoo...

...But her book undermines them...

...The homes around me were equipped like mini arts studios...

...Thus to understand the conflicts, and, I would say, the pathologies of upper-middle-class thinking is to understand the often perplexing state of family politics in America...

...Warner herself acknowledges that 90 percent of Americans ignore mainstream advice not to spank their kids or let their toddlers watch too much TV...

...hockey game,' I hear...

...Their love and patience is a hopeful model, not just for parents, but for everyone, I think...

...Warner quickly departs from the personal and launches into an impassioned and rather harsh critique of motherhood in America, filled with italicized declarations about how bad things are...

...Many people had backyard equipment that rivaled public parks...

...Kirstie Alley-watching has replaced Oprah-watching since, to the secret disappointment of many Oprah's weight seems to have stabilized...

...The pessimism of Perfect Madness is so overwhelming, you are saved only by the fact that the misery she describes is happening mostly to people who are very well off and, you'd think, able to change their situation if they desire...

...We're going out of our heads overcompensating for our low self-esteem and anxiety by overprotecting and overparenting our kids...