Editors of Babble.com. Dirt is Good for You: True Stories of Surviving Parenthood. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2009. 256 pages.
This book is intended for “urban, hipster” parents, which I’ve concluded is code for “since we pay $2500 a month for a 4th floor 800 square-foot walkup, we think we’re better than people who live in ranch homes and shop at Walmart.” Although the essays are by different authors, the tone is remarkably similar throughout—the unbearable smugness just won’t let up. Imagine the kids from high school who thought they were the coolest because they claimed to like bands that no one else had ever heard of. Okay, now imagine those kids raising kids, and telling you that since what they do goes “against the grain,” it’s totally hip. Annoying doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Generically, each essay says about the same thing: I’m a bad parent because I do x, but I’m not really a bad parent because it’s actually a good idea to breast-feed a 17-month old, demand a present from your husband just for giving birth, not use a baby monitor, warm your sons clothes in the dryer before they get dressed in the morning; not buy your kids toys; give your kid a pacifier; despise other new moms; yell at your kids; overspend on birthday parties; ad nauseum. I’m pretty sure every parent has had a moment that wouldn’t land them on the cover of Parenting magazine; it’s just that most of us don’t turn these mis-steps into virtues.
There’s an underlying tone of, “Wow, how cool, we are the first people to ever raise kids!” which is completely nonsensical, given that homo sapiens goes back about 200,000 years, and “urban” life at least 10,000. Being the first generation of parents who can pause and rewind live TV doesn’t make you any more special than being the first parents to use draft animals or gas lamps. Get back to me when you’re really pioneering by raising kids in zero-g or on the moon.
I actually like one of the nearly-fifty essays in the book: Madeline Holler’s reflections on being the parent of a “below average” child, which breaks through the usual hipster self-defense to offer the reader some of her vulnerability and uncertainty. The collection could have used more of that, and less of the approach Steven Johnson uses in “Street Walkers,” in which he gushes about how “children strengthen the connective tissue of urban streets” in ways that are doubtless inconceivable to parents doomed to live in rural, small town, or suburban America. News flash: people always talk more to people with children, probably because they think they’ve got something in common with them and they’re less likely to try to mug them. Walking around with a child is a marker saying that at least one person finds you tolerable enough to have sex with, and trustworthy enough to take care of his/her offspring. This isn’t an urban phenomenon.
Another writer concludes that it’s okay to take your kids to McDonald’s because the frou-frou coffee houses she went to before she had kids aren’t baby-friendly. That’s the problem with the entire collection right there: it’s based on extremes, with no middle ground. You either go to some sustainable, fair trade art gallery/independent coffee house, or you get in line for a Happy Meal. In fact, there are plenty of small restaurants who welcome children because they’re mom and pop places…and mom and pop usually have some empathy for other moms and pops, particularly those who are regular customers and good tippers. The whole essay is based on a flawed premise that the writer can’t see because she’s too busy trying to be unconventional.
In other words, this is a pretty bad book, at least by the standards of this non-Manhattanite parent. Outside of Holler, the writers just don’t take enough risks: they are too pre-occupied with trying to be cool. And if there’s one thing that kills memoirish writing for me, it’s an author who always has to be the hero of the piece. If you are writing about yourself, you can’t be the coolest person in the essay; it just rings false, like the entire piece is an exercise in self-gratification.
I honestly don’t like giving negative reviews, but this book was so awful that I can’t in good conscience recommend that anyone buy it. Maybe you have to be an urban hipster to get it, but I don’t.
Ha, your review actually has convinced me to read it (or at least some of the essays included)! Not that I’ll BUY it though… us out in the cow counties cain’t really afford books, but we gots an ok lieberry.
It seems that bad parenting books are legion, probably because they have a huge potential audience no matter what. I challenge you to find one or two good, well-written, emiprical-evidence-based parenting guides, and review them.
One that made a strong impression on me was “Bringing Up a Moral Child” by Michael Schulman. (You have to be pretty specific–there are so many books with similar titles out there.) I am doubtful that his approach is “new” as his subtitle claims, but it is a very well-written book, and almost made me want to have kids just so I could raise ‘em right!
“Teaching Your Children Values” by Linda and Richard Eyre is pretty good as well, with different value-inculcating exercises for all ages, so you can keep it throughout your child-rearing career, from pink drooling screaming thing all the way to tall geeky driving thing.
Both these books come from a secular (and pluralist) perspective as well.
RE: PARENTING BOOK
I remember lots of my Sixties hippie friends raising their kids in so-called ‘new ways’…basically trying to indocrinate their kids with strange (and even political thoughts). By the time kids are teens they usually reject most of their parents’ beliefs as being dated, stupid, etc.
One hippie friend of man named his boy ‘Stinson-Tin-Pony’. I’m sure that boy must have had his name changed to Joe or Jim by the time he became a teen.
Me and my mom raised my neice for her first nine years. I learned a lot about parenting along the way (and I probably have enough good parenting tips to fill a book).
One good bit of advice I read about was how to teach a child about safety. That’s a subject too often overlooked in many parents quest to only concentrate on raising a gifted and successful child.
The tip was to meet your child at their own eye-level when cautioning them about danger. Meaning…when you are trying to teach a toddler to be ‘safer’…a good method…instead of just yelling “Be careful!! You’re going to get hurt if you do that! Put That Down! Watch Out!, etc.
A better method is to kneel down to the child’s eye-level and simply talk eye-to-eye and say things like “WE want to make sure we don’t get hurt, so we need to do things this way”.
The point being that a child can relate to your ‘serious message’ best if you kneel down and talk in a calmer way at an eye-to-eye-level about the logic of your advice…instead of just screaming at your kid from five foot taller position.
That might seem like a small thing….but, with my neice, a lot of important advice was much better received (and acted upon) after she heard it from her own eye-level.
Okay. That’s my parenting tip of the day. Nothing too radical…but definitely something that can help parents and kids to communicate.
Later,
Funny review.
You should do negative more. You are quite good at it. I’ve known people like this and they truly get what they deserve in the end, which is usually a kid who turns out to be convict or drug addict.
It’s a lot easier to go negative, which is why I only do it when I feel I’ve got no option. Reviewing books I don’t like makes me feel a sick to my stomach. I usually put it off as long as I can.
The “push present” essay is what put it over the top for me. There’s no gift that anyone could give you that would match delivering another human being, filled with limitless possibility, into the world. Why even try? And why not take that money and start a college fund for the new baby–we’ve already borrowed so much from their generation that it seems only fair.