Modern 'parenting' insanity

Just one little word, but it was enough to jolt me up at 4 a.m. and send me racing to the kitchen in a cold sweat. I had forgotten -- how could I have forgotten? -- that I had volunteered to bring snack food for 30 children to my daughter's preschool at 8:30 a.m. And not just any snack food. It had to consist of fruit and/or vegetable plus protein and/or complex carbohydrate and be prepared in individual, child-sized servings.

Frantic, I searched the cupboards. Pasta, cereal -- who was I kidding?

Bad parent.

It's a feeling I suspect most parents -- particularly mothers -- get a lot these days.

Having kids is the simplest biological imperative there is. But, somehow, we let "having kids" get turned into "parenting," which is more or less a full-time job, with logistical challenges that would bring a CEO to his knees.

Modern parenting is wildly labor-intensive from Day 1. Modern babies, we're told, won't even sleep unless their parents camp out on the floor and stagger up blearily to provide reassurance every few hours. Then there's the infant feeding mantra "breast is best," which requires someone-who-just-happens-to-be-female to be physically attached either to a baby or to a milk-pumping machine every couple of hours for, oh . . . a year or so per child. Hey, no problem! It's not like you wanted to get any work done, right, ladies?

From there, we move smoothly (or not) to infant swim classes and play groups (miss those crucial early skills-building opportunities and your child may never catch up). Then there's preschool and the making of complex snacks and lunches. Next, there's soccer and ballet and tutoring and the endless chauffeuring of children to activities, a process that pretty much eliminates parental free time on the weekends, in addition to eliminating children's time for free, unstructured play.

But this doesn't matter because modern parenting also mandates nonstop paranoia, which means that a good parent must never, ever permit children to play freely and without adult supervision anyway. Leave children alone and they might drown in a half-full bucket of water, find and eat a poisonous plant, get hit by a car or wander off with the neighborhood pedophile. So you have to drive them to school and accompany them to the playground, and . . . and . . . and. ...

All this, of course, is insane.