Thought-Provoking Thursday: It's Okay to be an American Mom

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Parenting is a great mystery to me. It can be an overwhelming mystery. I think all the information women are bombarded with while they are pregnant is just the introduction into the sensory overload that comes as a parent. I find myself purposefully avoiding parenting conversations. I overhear women discussing parenting and I cringe. Just the thought of chatting it up about parenting practices wears me out enough to lock myself in the nearest bathroom stall. Don't even get me started on the blog posts about parenting... ironic, I know, being that this is one of those posts.

It's not the actual act of parenting that gets me so overwhelmed and wound up, but it's the chaos of opinions that tends to surround it. Grayson will be two years old next month. I have spent the past two years trying to get a sense of my son. What works for him, what does not. What is a standard developmental phase and attitude, and what is actually his personality. What are his strengths, what are his weaknesses. Getting to know a little human being, one who is completely raw and void of social masking, is a major task. For every observation we have made about Grayson,  John and I have given thought to our parenting style.

I wish parenting was simply figuring out your child and doing what is best for him or her. It's not that simple though. All the various thoughts and opinions on parenting make the job even tougher. Not only do you have to figure out your child, but you also have to sift through all the advice that circles around. One of the noises about parenting I have had to block out is the notion that American moms are lesser than other moms. There has been a surge in the media lately about the virtues of Asian and French mothers. At the risk of sounding like an obtuse American, I am perfectly pleased with being an American parent. I don't want to be a Tiger Mom and I don't need to be a French woman to raise my children well. Yes, our culture has some flat sides, and some of our children are not always up to par in certain situations, and there are absurd American parents out there, but I very much like being an American parent and I don't want to fix my parenting style to one that does not fit my children or our culture.

I was more than pleased, and I was extremely validated, when I read this article in the New York Times (and further discussed on Motherlode). Can you believe that the New York Times printed that it's okay to be an American mother? This is remarkable! Granted, it was an opinion column, but I'll take it. Not only did this article validate my ability to raise descent human beings, but it highlighted just how American I am. I am very American. I have known this about myself for a long time, but it is interesting to see that my nationality bleeds into my parenting as well. I have repeatedly joked that what I care about most for Grayson is that he exhibits social awareness. John and I turned down the opportunity for Lucy to go to a new state-of-the-art daycare facility because we felt like it focused too much on academia and not as much on independence and  socialization. It's not that I don't care about academia - our children are being raised by parents with a laundry list of degrees - but as a parent I feel like the academics will come in its own time. In effort to quickly excuse myself from conversations about education philosophies, I have made the statement that what I value most for my children is that enjoy what they are doing and have good social skills. In the past this statement has quickly ended the education conversation because it appears to be a completely different topic, but now I have come to find out it is just a method of American parenting.

Yes, our country has its faults and we are continually facing the facts of how we do not measure us to different parts of the world anymore, but at the end of the day I am very happy to be an American parent. My children may not be ever be world-ranked in anything, but hopefully they will be productive members of society and enjoy whatever it is that they do. If this is a weak form of parenting, oh well.