Freaking Out About Madness

Here are some reactions I had more than once when reading Perfect Madness. I am glad I'm not a woman. I don't care about abortion. Even after getting through the fatherhood chapter, and having some of their problems acknowledged, I remain glad that I won't have these issues. However, I remain generally skeptical about the generality that Warner uses to describe mothering. There are so many examples of things that my parents didn't do, that I could write an entire post on that. And in general, my friends seemed just as well-adjusted. But I certainly knew people whose parents were perfectly mad. My high school girlfriend, for instance, really wanted to go to Stanford. She applied and got accepted by early action. But her mom insisted that she still apply to schools like Harvard, so she could brag to her friends that her daughter got accepted there. About abortion, I was surprised to read that it had been such an important issue for women. Warner was very insistent that it made women feel as if their bodies were not their own. Is this true? Personally, abortion seems so distant from my own life, like a choice that will never be considered, that I've never really thought about it. But apparently all women felt like they no longer controlled their bodies, and this was a dreadful thing.

Warner often implies that less parenting would be a good thing, but on page 192, as she lists the things parents won't allow, I wondered just how far she wanted this to go. She uses the example, "No TV, only a half hour of TV." My first impression was how is limiting a child's TV time at all equivalent to banning sugar. It seems to me that TV limits are a very good and responsible thing to do. This also got me thinking about all the talk about how kids had such a variety of thereapists to go to. I think some therapy is actually important. I think there is this middle ground before the extremes she is bemoaning that still involve doing some of the activities that she bemoans. Again, I'm sure she realizes this, but it doesn't come across in her writing.

Warner scared me with all her negative economy talk. I tend to do a very good job of being optimistic about my future. I had to struggle to keep that going in the face of her statistics and anecdotes about how the boom years really weren't a boom for very many people. If it was bad then, what's it like now?

I freaked out when I got to the passage on page 235 where Warner quotes John Rosemond saying, "Today's children whine more, are more disrespectful, and throw tantrums long past the age when yesterday's children were over them completely." Yes, John? Really? Your evidence? Forget to take your anti-crotchety-old-man pills when you were writing this? Get off my damn lawn and all that? But I suppose I'll assume that he does actually support this claim in his writing and Warner is just quoting a particularly salient sentence.

Warner finally hits her stride in the last chapter. She talks about the problems with France's system, which I'd been waiting for for 250 pages, so that was good. And she suggests solutions. I think that the structure of this book could have been different and better. Why hold back this until the end? Why not address solutions along the way? It could keep the book from getting overwhelming. I think that just reading that last chapter as a standalone essay would have been almost effective as reading the whole book.