Opinion-makers: Who to read (and watch) today.
Caution: Could make your life miserable.
Does being a parent make you miserable?
The short answer is yes. It’s not just your imagination or the lore passed down from American sit-coms and cheeky chain emails detailing amusing anecdotes about parental exhaustion: As New York Magazine writer Jennifer Senior reported, parenting really does make you miserable. This weekend, the magazine published Senior’s piece making the case that parenting, especially in countries like the US that lack a widespread system of subsidized childcare, is miserable. While part of Senior’s argument seems to mired in the expectations that middle and upper-class parents put on both themselves and their children – pushing their children toward piano lessons, ballet class, and SAT prep, coupled with the parents’ own, totally justified, need for self-fulfillment outside the parenting sphere – she also manages to find a whole host of studies to bolster her claim. She ended the piece by throwing a bit of an existential bone to harried and miserable parents, pointing to studies that show that though parents can be stressed, frustrated and unhappy in the moment-to-moment, they’re aren’t generally as depressed. They just don’t have the time.
But freelance writer Sady Doyle, blogging at TheAtlantic.com, doesn’t buy all of Senior’s arguments, particularly Senior’s claim that today’s parents are more miserable than, well, their parents because parenting itself has fundamentally changed. “In some important ways, it has,” wrote Doyle. “But the complaints raised by the piece aren’t new at all; in fact, people—women, most notably—have been voicing them for the better part of the last 60 years.” Doyle admirably trotted out a host of examples, including feminist pioneer Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which even then found that mothers were easily annoyed and harassed by their children. The big difference is one of equity – where women were once expected to do all the child-rearing, now they do about half (sometimes a bit more): “Parenthood now is not more fun, but more fair.”
Republican infighting!
The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, spent the Fourth of July weekend fighting for his job after some ill-advised comments on President Barack Obama’s handling of the war in Afghanistan, calling it a “war of his choosing” and seemingly allying himself against the war. The Wall Street Journal‘s OpinionJournal.com columnist James Taranto doesn’t think Steele’s going to lose his job over what is just another in a string of outre comments from the chairman – but there are some cracks in the committee showing.
Talk radio hysteria!
In this “Special Unemployment Edition” of Bloggingheads.tv, David Weigel, of MSCNBC and, ahem, formerly of The Post, talks politics with David Frum of the FrumForum. On the docket: Is talk radio hysteria drowning out legitimate criticism of the Obama Administration?
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