the wonder-room, march (oops!) 2025

Dear fellow wonderer,

Welcome to this slightly tardy cabinet of curiosities.¹ Recall that this month we were chatting about the mid-’90s rise of the “parenting expert” and how that shift is still messing with parenthood today.

How to push back? Some links!

• How pushback is done: Jenny Anderson of How to Be Brave questions Jonathan Haidt’s ubiquitous The Anxious Generation and his claims that Gen Z is “damaged.” In “Stop Calling the Smartphone Generation Damaged Goods,” Anderson writes, “Taking their phones away is helpful, but does not fill the gap left by the disengagement crisis and the world feeling broken and will not make them feel capable and motivated. For that they need more time in Explorer mode – when they are engaged in a learning activity that sparks real interest and feels authentic.” Amen, sister!
• If you’re still on TikTok, my own little Haidt takedown.
• Emily Edlynn of Parent Smarter, Not Harder takes on gentle parenting in “Gentle Parenting: Proceed with Caution”: “In how I see parents interpret gentle parenting, they (mostly mothers) feel intense pressure on each and every interaction. A child’s behavior becomes a reflection of whether the parent has a positive enough relationship with their child. Guess what? Sometimes kids are jerks. Sometimes we are jerks. We all have our moments. Every challenging behavior or meltdown does not need to be a referendum on our parenting or our relationship.” Sing it!
• “Once a month, you can ‘treat yourself to something terribly wicked: a slice of cake or pie; an ice cream sundae; a candy bar.’ In what circles is a slice of pie considered ‘terribly wicked’? And why couldn’t I be wicked a little more often?” Holy shit, the advice in the original What to Expect books! Are they still like this? This oldie but goodie from Salon’s “Mothers Who Think” days, “Expecting the Worst,” by Jennifer Reese, eviscerates (humorously!) the books, and the terribly wicked advice we were given. I cringe to admit how much of it I fell for.
• Here’s a fun little overview of what the “experts” were shilling from the ’70s on. Blame the Book: Parenting by Decade by Laura Lambert. “If you were born in the ‘70s [ or, like your trusty curator, the ’60s, ahem]  … you drank from garden hoses and piled four-deep into the back of station wagons, sans seatbelts — and you survived! And did your parents learn all that in a book? Likely not. Most moms of this era asked real live people for advice — their own mothers, their peers, or a doctor.” Yup.
• Writer Edan Lepucki is constantly pushing back on parenting norms in delightful ways. She writes about her kids’ fabulous, fantastical play (knife-fashioning, sitcom-writing, jetpacks) and why she makes time for it; why she doesn’t play with them (NY Times gift link) ; and speaks up about not tracking her kids on their phones.
• Ooh, ooh, ooh, look at this! “Story Time” for Caregivers is a reading series that Nicole Haroutunian started up in Queens–a chance for caregivers with toddlers and babes-in-arms to attend morning readings, to hear books aimed at them. This sort of in-person community-building is exactly what parents need to push back against “experts” and create their own vision of parenthood. I’m so excited about this brilliant reading series idea–I want to start one here in the Bay Area! And I know Nicole! I’ll be chatting with her for tips on starting up a series. And you should absolutely read her incredible novel-in-stories Choose This Now, which includes motherhood themes. Sample it via her first “Story Time,” in which she reads from the book. Or listen to the audiobook, delightfully narrated by another writing friend, Apryl Lee.
• I’ve been musing on my own pushback, not on parenting expertise but social media, specifically instagram (which has done its own number on parenting norms via momfluencing culture, the most recent form of “expertise”–more on that to come). Anyhoo, I finally came to the decision to stick around there, despite my longing to boycott the broligarchs. This may not be true for everyone, but the community I’ve built there feeds me and still feels like a means for good.

Treasure of the month: My girl has made a runner of herself, joining a club in Brooklyn, running races. Inspired by her ardor, I decided, after over a decade of not doing it, that I wanted to run again. Note that by “running” I mean moving faster than a walk around my neighborhood. I have never run in a race. The girl made a plan to come home and run the half in the Oakland Marathon. “You should do the 5k, Mama!” And so I signed up, bought myself some running clothes–which coincidentally matched the girl’s running clothes–and even trained a bit in the five weeks before the race. Since the girl’s 13+ miles happened first, I got to watch her whiz by on Piedmont Avenue, got to flash my sign: You’re my hero! And then I did my 3.1 miles around Lake Merritt, listening to ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky” on repeat–Runnin’ down the avenue, see how the sun shines brightly in the city, on the streets where once was pity, Mr. Blue Sky is living here today, hey–grinning and waving at all the folks cheering us on, at little kids running alongside, and near the finish at my girl as she held my sign for me and it was just so fun. Imagine my astonishment when my girl checked the rankings and saw that in my age group, out of 83 women, I’d placed second.

Truly,
Patricia

This letter was cross-published on Substack