It's no secret that I'm poking around in the literature of parenting, looking for books that will support the path that we've tentatively chosen to take. I had high hopes for this one, as it was recommended by several friends in the Attachment Parenting (AP) movement. Unfortunately, those hopes quickly dissipated and it was a real struggle for me to finish this book, so infuriating did I find it.
Thevenin argues that families have problems with child-rearing because men have, for 200 years, written instruction manuals for parenting that take a male approach, which directly discredits the instinctive female approach that the mother knows is right. Had she chosen simply to amplify this thesis, with a look at the history of manuals for parents and a discussion of the cultural forces that put them in conflict with many parents' feelings, I would have found things to agree with. But she goes a good deal further than that to assert that men and women have basic inborn differences in their relation to their children: women value connectedness and are "nurturers", men value independence and are "encouragers". Despite some lip-service to the notion that there are variations among people, this clumsy biology-is-destiny view pervades the book. She assigns everyone their "gender characteristics" and expects us all to be in our places.
Ultimately, Thevenin leaps from these gender characteristics to a master plan for the family. Mother is meant to stay home, not go to work, and raise children. Father is meant to go out, earn money, come home, and encourage independence after a few years. The profoundly reactionary nature of her thought leads to words like these:
"Most women feel a great deal safer when there is a man in the house, or with a man beside them when they walk down a dark street. Also, tasks requiring physical strength -- moving furniture, bringing in bags of groceries, shoveling snow, taking out heavy cans of garbage -- will always be with us, and with the help of a man, they remain manageable tasks, rather than becoming insurmountable obstacles."
Frankly, none of my lesbian friends ever found carrying sacks of groceries or taking out the garbage to be an insurmountable obstacle. And I suspect none of them would have any more use for this book than I do. I reject categorically its simple-minded characterization of men. If this book describes men, I'm a space alien. I also have every intention of being a nurturing as well as an encouraging father to my children, who will also have an encouraging as well as a nurturing mother.