A few months ago, there was a newspaper article about an East coast woman who was being arraigned for child neglect. It seems that last year, just before Christmas, her two preteen daughters had spent the afternoon going around their neighborhood collecting change for the Salvation Army. Later that evening she drove them and their two-year-old sister down to the local Wal-Mart so that they could pour the money into a collection kettle, whereupon she was promptly cited for both child neglect and endangerment. My first thought upon reading this story was Boy, and I thought I had a thing about Wal-Mart. However, after a closer reading I discovered that she wasn’t actually being cited for exposing her children to a culture of Everyday Low Wages (she never set foot in the store), but for leaving her sleeping two-year-old inside her car while she walked her older children to the collection kettle–a car that was locked, had its alarm system engaged, and was parked within her line of site in the nearby loading zone–with the hazard lights flashing. Oh, and did I mention that it was December, and that it was sleeting outside?
For this she is facing not only a $2000 fine, but also the wrath of the internet, where posts are being made daily denigrating her both for her unfitness as a mother and for her criminal lack of common sense (or, as most posters put it, for not understanding “how the world is today”–this from people who probably couldn’t find Darfur on a map if you spotted them the latitude and the longitude.) As you have probably guessed, I feel nothing but sympathy for this mother, as I would for any mother who is unfortunate enough to be pilloried in the fickle courts of public opinion.
President, pop star, and parent: are there any jobs to which people feel more entitled to comment upon the job holder’s shortcomings than these? At least in the case of Presidents and pop stars the argument can be made that they must have seen it coming: after all, even the most Nepotically-elected President or stage-managed starlet had to undergo some kind of an audition–with parenting, however, there is no preparation at all before you are thrust into the public’s (very critical) eye; from the first moment you and your newborn appear in the world there is somebody there trying to tell you that you are doing it wrong. (Ironically, the first criticism many new parents receive is for taking their baby out in public too soon; in other words, they are criticized for exposing the baby to people just like the critic.)
And it’s not as if the criticism stops there. People feel extraordinarily free to comment on the things you are feeding (or not feeding) your child, the clothes they are wearing (or are not wearing), the pediatrician you visit–even the manner in which you decide to deal with their poop. (I’ll always remember the woman who peered at my infant son and sadly announced: “You know, that type of diaper isn’t very good for his testicles.”)
And yet, being chastised by all the grandmothers in the world must pale in comparison with being slammed in countless internet blogs as an “unfit mother,” simply because you took two steps away from you car on a snowy night.
The real issue here, I believe, is control–or at least the illusion of it. We’d like to think that if we could only control everything–if we could only do everything “right”–then nothing bad will ever happen to our children; the bad things will be reserved for the mother who left a sleeping toddler in a car, or let her six-year-old eat an unwashed apple. Or maybe, even, exhibited criminal indifference when confronted with the potentially dire future of her young son’s nether regions.