Know a Parent Who Desperately Needs a Chuckle? Get My E-Book!

If you or someone you know is in the midst of raising kids, particularly young ones, and could use a big glass of wine and a belly laugh or two, I have a suggestion: A Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum freshly released in digital format.

If you have a Kindle, Nook or another kind of e-reader you can download my collection of 76 humor/parenting columns onto which I've added a new introduction reflecting on how much has changed in the past five years since the book was first published . . . like the fact that I don't write about potty training anymore, have ditched my minivan, haven't bought diapers since the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 and haven't had to call the nice Poison Control folks in many years to report that one of the kiddos has eaten something unspeakable, like cat vomit.

The book was described by my publisher, Wyatt-MacKenzie, thusly:

"A glimpse into the mind of a laid-back yet stressed-out, insecure, sleep-starved, TV-obsessed, news junkie, Generation X parent navigating the labyrinth of modern parenthood with three young children including a set of twins. From critiquing fashionistas who try to convince the pregnant public to buy maternity thongs and discussing whether at-home moms have sold out their feminist sisters, to tackling topics such as how to have a sex life while three kids are pounding on their parents' locked bedroom door, how to look cool while driving a minivan (a clue: you can't) and what happens when a toddler eats trash, O'Brien's collection of 76 columns illustrates how parents are living their lives in the real American suburbs, not in the white picket fenced world portrayed in fuzzy, honey-hued greeting card ads."

The web site Cool Mom Picks wrote about the book:

"O'Brien's writing is funny and real, whether she's questioning the practicality of certain maternity clothes (leopard print thongs?!); venting about the zillions of pieces of kids' toys that are constantly landing underfoot (like 'tiny plastic grenades'); or describing a game of Candy Land with her family (when NO ONE wants to land on Lord Licorice).

I found her book to be as effective as one of those marathon bitch-and-laugh sessions with another mom: it kept me laughing, even through the madness."

In a review on the web site Literary Mama, Heather Hudson wrote:

"With a healthy dose of pathos, she manages to capture the befuddlement that comes with trying to parent in the face of the opposing demands of children and lurid temptations like fast food and the veritable buffet of kids' television programming. Like many of us, she makes laborious, whole food dinners only to have them resounding rejected in favor of mac and cheese, and she takes a stab at cleaning the house despite the fact that it's routinely dismantled while she dashes to the bathroom. She and her husband even try that staple recommendation of women's magazines -- daytime sex -- while the kids are otherwise occupied. Awkward. And funny.

. . . A Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum is an easily digestible, worthy distraction from the chaos of our lives. It has just the right amount of validation that we're all feeling our way blindly through this motherhood gig. There's something about sharing another's experience as she botches it up too that makes us feel like we're all more or less qualified. Even when we find our child coated in blue marker."

The publication ForeWord said:

"This book's short essays will appeal to harried mothers looking for relief from the sometimes claustrophobic world of parenting young children. In A Suburban Mom, readers will find both humor and reprieve from the outside world's view on their daily lives."

Image credit: Barnes and Noble.

'Tiger Mom' is Back ... Because She's Selling Her Paperback

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I really didn’t want to leap onto the Tiger Mom bandwagon again, now that the Yale University Law Professor’s controversial book – The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother – is now out in paperback. But Amy Chua’s latest Wall Street Journal essay and her appearance on news programs -- where she says  that, despite all the time she’s had to reflect and all the negative reactions her book sparked, she wouldn’t change anything and that her methods are superior to the "soft" American style of child-rearing-- has pulled me back into this quagmire again. (The return of Chua’s somewhat tamer version of her Tiger Mother persona is the subject of my latest Pop Culture and Politics post.)

In her Journal essay, Chua tries to persuade readers that because her eldest daughter is now a college student (attending Harvard no less), she is “hands-off” and thinks of herself as pretty much done with child-rearing.

“When our kids go off to college, we want them to have the confidence, judgment and strength to take care of themselves,” Chua wrote in the Journal. “Even critics of my approach to parenting would probably concede that, after years of drilling and discipline, tiger cubs are good at focusing and getting their work done. If instilled early, these skills also help them to avoid the college-prep freak-out that traumatizes so many families.”

This is from the woman who wrote that when one of her daughters was 7, she made the child sit at the piano, with no breaks for food or the bathroom, for hours, until the kid mastered a piece. She was also the one who said that her kids weren’t allowed to “attend a sleepover, have a playdate, be in a school play . . . watch TV or play computer games, choose their own extracurricular activities, get any grade less than an A . . . play any instrument other than the piano or violin."

I, for one, don’t see a parent who had as much invested in her kids doing well and succeeding as Chua does, just turning that switch off if, for example, her daughter wanted to drop out of college, join the Peace Corps or start a rock band, and play the drums.

Author Urges Parents to Go Forth and Multiply . . . More Often

My latest pop culture column this week over on Modern Mom and Mommy Tracked is my response to reading Bryan Caplan's book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.

Caplan used a multi-pronged approach to try to persuade parents who already have kids to have more. "Today's Typical Parents artificially inflate the price of kids, needlessly worry and neglect the long-run benefits of larger families," Caplan argues. Some of his main points:

If you chill out, being a parent is fun and not excessively hard (except for the very beginning). We've made child-rearing overcomplicated by all of our hovering, carting children around to a bazillion things and vigorously pursuing kid-enrichment efforts, Caplan says. After pointing to a whole bunch of studies saying that parents' child-rearing doesn't wind up having much impact by the time the kids are grown -- except how they perceive you and their childhood -- he said there's no point in making ourselves crazy by trying so hard. ". . . [B]y adulthood, the fruits of parents’ labor is practically invisible," he wrote. "Children who grew up in enriched homes are no smarter than they would have been if they’d grown up in average homes."

And if you take this more relaxed view of parenting and just enjoy your kids, adding another one won't be such a big deal. Or so Caplan says.

We, as a society, are more well off than the larger families were in the 1950s, so why are we letting financial concerns stop us from having bigger families? Caplan says: "Big families are more affordable than ever, because we’re more than three times richer than we were in 1950. You can see our mounting riches in our homes. Compared to the tiny dwellings of the Fifties, modern families live in castles, with air conditioning. Why hasn’t the size of our families grown in step with the size of our houses?” He added “our real incomes have more than tripled since the 1950s."

(My respon$e would be one word: College.)

"How many kids will I want when I'm sixty?" His pull-at-your-heartstrings admonition is for parents not to determine their family size when they're overly fatigued by raising young kids, a phase which he says passes relatively swiftly when you look at the general scheme of things. Instead, the author wants you to imagine that you're 60 and are looking at your offspring -- and potential makers of grandkids -- and decide your ideal family size from that vantage point. "Many of the benefits of children come later in life," he said. "Kids have high start-up costs, but wise parents weight their initial sleep deprivation against a lifetime of future rewards -- including future grandchildren."

More kids means more people with new ideas, outlooks and talents eventually entering the workplace and supporting the nation's retirees. "Our population and our standards of living have risen side by side for centuries, and it's no coincidence," he said. ". . . The source of new ideas, without a doubt, is people -- creative talent to make discoveries, and paying customers to reward their success. More talent plus more customers equals more ideas and more progress."

After reading this book, I was intrigued by the studies which he said showed that parents' child-rearing has little impact on their children's intellect, future financial/career success and personalities, but I was still stuck on the whole issue of the cost of college, which I didn't think was sufficiently addressed in the book. His notion, that Americans should have more children than we do, seems contrary to the assertions made by many groups including environmentalists and feminists.

What do you think? Should we be having more kids or not? Do we make parenting too hard and discourage ourselves from expanding our families?

This Just In . . . 'Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids'

A friendly UPS delivery guy just dropped off a review copy of the controversial, nonfiction tome, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think by Bryan Caplan.

The cover has stick figure sketches of a mom and a dad and six, count ‘em, six kids standing next to the ‘rents. And all of them are smiling.

I’m going to read this book with an open mind and will report back here – and in an upcoming column – about my thoughts on Caplan's suggestion that parents need to chill out, enjoy child-rearing and have more kids.

Image credit: Basic Books.