WHY WON'T THE UNWASHED LISTEN TO THEIR BETTERS?:

The 'Baby Bump' Is So Hot Right Now (Ellen Goodman, July 29, 2006, Truthdig)

So how did this fixation on celebrity babies, this upbeat bump beat, happen just as we are being told that parenthood is onerous and grueling and that parents are overworked and overwhelmed?

Readers of Star, In Touch, OK! and US Weekly probably did not pick up the latest lament about parenting at their supermarket checkout. It was offered by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project and still best known for siding with Dan Quayle in his spat over single motherhood with Murphy Brown. Now, she's painted a disheartening picture of parenthood as "a conspicuous source of anxiety and distress.'' She then points to a demographic and cultural culprit. (full report / summary)

Parenting, writes Whitehead, takes up a shorter amount of the expanding life cycle these days, somewhere between a child-free youth and a child-free empty nest. So the culture that once thought of adulthood and parenthood as synonymous now portrays child-raising as an unsatisfying timeout from the fun.

"If the popular culture were the only source of knowledge about American parenthood,'' she says, "one would quickly conclude that being a parent is one of the least esteemed and most undesirable roles in the society.'' She describes a society that is "indifferent at best, and hostile, at worst, to those who are caring for the next generation.''

But if the popular culture casts parenthood as grim, who's feeding the pro-natalist message to its audience?

Here's a better question: how can intellectuals still not grasp that America holds them and their ideas in contempt?

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 29, 2006 8:24 AM