I guess what struck a nerve is I do have something in common with these moms (and no, my child is not a superstar). I am like them, a single mom, human enough to do the occasional partying -- though I hardly drink and I don't smoke -- I try to raise my child as protectively as I can, but I am the unconventional mother. I urge my child to question, to fight back, I drill her with schoolwork but at play, I allow her to make mistakes. After all, children as well as mothers are just human. And the mistakes will happen, whether you're a fun-crazy mom or straight-laced tight-assed matriarch.
SOMETIMES MOTHERS CAN DO NO RIGHT
By KARA JESELLA
Published: July 29, 2007
“I FEEL bad for Lindsay. I feel very strongly it it her mother who is her worst enemy. She has planted that seed in her that the party crowd is the place to be.”
“i blame her mom. father wanted to do the wright thing.”
“her mom doesn’t even act like a mother figure, she acts more like a sister to lindsay!”
On Tuesday morning, just hours after Lindsay Lohan was arrested on charges of driving with a suspended license, driving under the influence and felony cocaine possession, the typically vituperative posts (also, typically, grammatically challenged and typo-ridden) showed up on celebrity gossip Web sites like TMZ and Us Weekly.
Dina Lohan, Lindsay’s mother, was their target — not her father, who has served time in prison, battled his own addictions and was mostly absent during Lindsay’s childhood. While some people may point fingers at him for her problems, most bloggers and celebrity-gawkers see him as a lost cause, and put the onus on her mother.
“People like to blame Dina Lohan,” said Janice Min, the editor in chief of Us Weekly. “I think there’s a belief that mothers will do anything for their kids, while fathers come and go.”
(Dina Lohan did not respond to requests for comment for this article; after her daughter’s arrest, she told the celebrity news TV show “Insider,” “We are doing everything in our power in support of Lindsay and I won’t give up. This is my daughter and we love her.”)
She is hardly the only mother of a high-profile daughter to be verbally tarred and feathered. Kathy Hilton, the mother of Paris and Nicky, and Lynne Spears, who is now estranged from Britney, have also been held publicly accountable for their daughters’ wild-child antics like homemade sex tapes and padding around public restrooms barefoot.
And though Dina Lohan told Harper’s Bazaar earlier this year, “You can’t blame parents for kids,” in the same interview she chastised Lynne Spears for not defending her daughter after Britney’s quickie first marriage fell apart.
What have Dina, Lynne and Kathy done wrong in raising their daughters? That’s what the media and bloggers want to know. Meanwhile, most of the public doesn’t even know the fathers’ names. (Michael, Jamie and Rick.)
Mother-daughter relationships have long been a topic of Hollywood and media fascination. And mothers have always been an easy target for public condemnation, said Devra Renner, an author of the book “Mommy Guilt: Learn to Worry Less, Focus on What Matters Most and Raise Happier Kids.”
“I think most people feel they can give a more informed opinion about someone’s parenting than about the Hollywood industrial complex,” she said. “And, of course, moms are still seen as the primary parent.”
Indeed, though statistics show that fathers are now more involved than ever in their children’s lives, the perception remains that mothers are ultimately responsible for their children’s behavior. Not to mention that experts say that since the 1980s, expectations of what a so-called “good mother” should do have grown.
“We have a long history in this culture of mother blame,” said Susan J. Douglas, an author of “The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined Women.” In World War II, women whose sons wouldn’t fight were condemned for tying them too closely with their apron strings. A host of illnesses, including autism, were once traced to mothers, often with dubious scientific proof.
And without mother blame, where would Freud be? “An ideal was set in place by pop psychologists and Freud that the big problems in American society could be traced to excessive mothering,” said Beryl Satter, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, Newark. “Mothers who smothered their children with affection created unstable characters,” she said, and yet mothers who were withholding were perceived to have created problems as well.
To be sure, it’s not as if some celebrity mothers haven’t brought an extra level of scrutiny upon themselves by seeking the spotlight. Ms. Hilton was the host of a reality TV show, “I Want to Be a Hilton.” Ms. Lohan, Lindsay’s mother/manager, or “momager,” is not exactly a shrinking violet when it comes to media coverage.
Most mothers don’t ask for that kind of attention. And media images of the “bad mother” serve to police all mothers, said Professor Douglas, who is the chairwoman of the department of communication studies at the University of Michigan.
By portraying Lynne Spears, Kathy Hilton and Dina Lohan, who was essentially a single mother raising four children, as bad mothers, “we get these class stereotypes about bad mothering that are meant to flatter middle-class mothers,” she added. “What Britney Spears evokes is this whole down-market, ‘trailer trash’ upbringing. Paris evokes the opposite — very rich parents who spoil their kids rotten and set no boundaries.” It’s as if these “bad mothers” couldn’t achieve the balance that middle-class motherhood prizes. They did everything for their children — but maybe too much. They became their friends — but maybe to an extreme.
Worse, perhaps, is that they refuse to apologize for their unconventional behavior. Ms. Lohan freely admits to partying with Lindsay at clubs when her daughter wasn’t old enough to drink.
No one is saying that parents are blameless when it comes to their children’s risky behavior. “Parents are the strongest influence, positively or negatively, in decisions by a young person to engage in drinking, smoking or drug use,” said Susan Foster, the director of policy research and analysis at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.
But the amount of derision directed at mothers seems out of proportion.
“We still have a virgin-whore binary in American pop culture, and this governs motherhood as well,” Professor Douglas said. The same way in which girls are labeled either good or bad, so are mothers. The same level of censure does not seem to apply to sons, whose risky behavior is often seen as merely a rite of passage.
Professor Douglas thinks the reproach directed at some celebrities’ mothers speaks to the particular kinds of lessons that mothers are supposed to teach their daughters — lessons Lindsay, Britney and Paris seem not to have learned. “It’s supposed to be a mother’s job to train her daughter into how to domesticate her various desires,” she said. “If we see a young woman who hasn’t done that, the mother has failed her tutorial.”
Part of the anger toward seemingly bad mothers may be an outgrowth of the fact that the mother-daughter tie is the strongest of all intergenerational relationships, said Karen L. Fingerman, an associate professor of child development and family studies at Purdue, noting that research shows that this is because both parties are women, and women are the ones who are taught to nurture relationships.
Mothers are now seen as responsible for their children well into adulthood, Professor Fingerman said. Ms. Lohan’s detractors are “not just saying that the mother screwed her up but that the mother should still be there — that’s a societal shift,” she said.
From the mid 19th century until the 1920s, Professor Satter noted, middle-class mothers were held up as some kind of ideal, one that working-class mothers were supposed to aspire to. But she noted that many women realized this wasn’t a good strategy. “The more politically minded and savvy understood that blaming other women for not being good mothers was ridiculous,” she said.
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