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For December 23: The perils of being the perfect mom

23 Dec 2012 - Preaching the News for Sunday

“Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb,” cries Elizabeth in this Sunday’s gospel as the child in her womb, the future John the Baptist, leaps at the approach of her cousin Mary, who carries the Savior of the world in her own womb. As these two courageous women could attest, raising a child has never been a vocation for the faint of heart. Perils and preoccupations have always existed, and that remains the case today.While medical developments are lowering the risk of childhood illnesses, research suggests that the mental health of modern moms faces a new threat: the current emphasis on being the perfect mom, what researchers call “intense mothering,” which only ends up frustrating moms and making them unhappy.Moms these days are pelted with advice and recommendations: a “good” mom stimulates her children’s creativity constantly, taking them to museums and signing them up for character-broadening extracurricular activities. She reads all the current literature on parenting. And she takes exclusive responsibility for the care and feeding of the children because she is told, as psychology professor Holly Schiffrin put it, “We are the most qualified and you can’t trust anyone else, even husbands, because they won’t do it as well as we do.”In the new study, published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies, Schiffrin and other researchers at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia relied on a measure of intense mothering they had developed. It included five categories: stimulation of the kids; the view that mother is best, which the researchers called “essentialism”; the belief that child-centered parenting needs to be fundamentally different from two generations ago when children were to be seen and not heard; the idea that children are absolutely sacred and should bring continual joy and love to their parents; and the premise that parenting is (and should be) challenging and exhausting.The researchers looked at moms of kids age 5 and under to measure their opinions about intensive mothering. Even after controlling for social support—lots of help from Grandma, for example—researchers found that “intensive mothers” were not as happy. Mothers who believe parenting demands expert knowledge and skills were more stressed and more depressed than moms who didn’t think an arsenal of expertise was necessary or even desirable.Homily hint: Elizabeth and Mary managed to give birth to two pretty incredible sons without a single self-help book or expert on child development on call but clearly with a lot of faith, hope, and love. These three elements remain the most important, in child-rearing as in the rest of life. Encourage parents—stressed moms, especially—to strive for balance and harmony, not perfection. Source: An article by Bonnie Rochman for TIME

mothers intense mothering holly schiffrin parenting university of mary washington
Online overkill is apparent

22 Mar 2015 - Preaching the News for Sunday

The psalmist this Sunday yearns always to be in God’s presence and promises to teach “transgressors” the ways of God. Many a social media user wishes parents with children adoped a lower-key presence online, protesting that the deluge of parental posts about their children is a transgression of social media etiquette. There is even a new word for exaggerated postings about one’s children—instead of over-parenting, think “over-sharinting.” Homily hint: Studies have shown that social media is no substitute for face-to-face human contact. Make sure that your time online is not spent at the expense of human contact—God created us for community, and community involves contact. Unplug the computer and connect with someone face to face! For more on parental overposting, see: Is there too much 'oversharenting' on social media?

facebook social media parenting
Homily stories

07 Jun 2009 - Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, Cycle B

A friend of mine likes to say, “Ninety percent of being successful in life is just showing up.” I think this is especially true for parents. When my daughters were infants, my wife would count it a successful day if she got a shower in before dinner, the house was still standing, and everybody was still breathing. Taking a nap was an extravagant luxury. Later on in our kids’ lives we parents show up at back-to-school nights, parent/teacher conferences, and science fairs. We show up at baseball, basketball, volleyball, and soccer games. We show up for First Reconciliation night, First Communion night, Confirmation commissioning, and graduation practice. We also show up when they come home sad and hurt, when they get the notice that they didn’t make the team, when they’ve been elected class president, or chosen to be a lector at the children’s Mass. We show up the best we can. Like the apostles who stood on the mountaintop before the risen Jesus in this week’s gospel, we may doubt, but at least we’re where the action is.

Authors Tom McGrath

parenting

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Homily stories

13 May 2018 - Seventh Sunday of Easter, Cycle B

I feel lucky that I had a relatively technology-free childhood. The internet wasn’t widely used until the end of my college years, which was about the same time people started getting cell phones. My parents couldn’t keep tabs on me the way parents can today. My friends have video cameras in their toddlers’ bedrooms. My grade-school-aged niece and nephews have GPS devices on their jackets. The teenagers I know can be contacted anytime, anywhere via the mobile devices they all have. I’m not knocking any of it—I don’t blame parents for doing everything they can to protect their kids. But, while I may have been less safe and had more opportunity to get into undetected trouble, the freedom that came with it meant I had to learn to take care of myself sooner and more completely than kids today. My parents had no choice but to trust that I could navigate the world and handle difficulties on my own. All they could do was teach me how to make good decisions and then leave the rest to prayer! Even with all the technology in our lives today, in the end prayer is still the best anyone can do for their precious loved ones.

Authors Jennifer Tomshack

Technology parenting

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Homily stories

27 May 2018 - Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, Cycle B

A friend of mine likes to say, “Ninety percent of being successful in life is just showing up.” I think this is especially true for parents. When my daughters were infants, my wife would count it a successful day if she got a shower in before dinner, the house was still standing, and everybody was still breathing. Taking a nap was an extravagant luxury. Later on in our kids’ lives we parents show up at back-to-school nights, parent/teacher conferences, and science fairs. We show up at baseball, basketball, volleyball, and soccer games. We show up for First Reconciliation night, First Communion night, Confirmation commissioning, and graduation practice. We also show up when they come home sad and hurt, when they get the notice that they didn’t make the team, when they’ve been elected class president, or chosen to be a lector at the children’s Mass. We show up the best we can. Like the apostles who stood on the mountaintop before the risen Jesus in this week’s gospel, we may doubt, but at least we’re where the action is.

Authors Tom McGrath

showing up parenting

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Homily stories

31 Dec 2023 - Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Cycle B

Joseph, husband of Mary, had guts. He had the guts to pay attention to his dreams. He had the guts to trust his inner wisdom as opposed to conventional wisdom when he discovered that Mary was pregnant before their marriage, and also when he fled with his family to Egypt to escape the horrors of Herod who ended up sacrificing innocent children to protect his own power. Joseph was wise enough to be led by God as to where his family would live and how they would live. Today’s parents need to have guts, too. We need to have the guts to oppose those elements of modern culture that are dangerous to our own faith and the faith of our children. We need to trust our deeper instincts when they tell us to limit our kids’ screens, or say no to certain fashions, or hold to a curfew, or monitor what movies they watch. We need to listen for the promptings of God through our hopes and our conscience when we are teaching our children the importance of relationships above things, or the value of using our talents for the good of all rather than simply for self-aggrandizement. We need to trust our deeper instincts rather than assume that what the general culture is espousing will be just fine for our kids. Joseph had guts. And he had heart. And he had great love for Mary and Jesus. He showed great leadership in his family. Let’s ask his help and guidance so that we might do the same.

Authors Tom McGrath

Courage guts parenting today's parents

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Homily stories

17 Mar 2024 - Fifth Sunday of Lent, Cycle B

This morning my son came into our room, upset because something he had built had broken. That little boy used to be me—trying so hard to hold on, grab on, cling on to moments—trying so hard to stay a child forever, to not have to ever change. "It's OK," my wife said to him, "you can fix it. You can re-build it." "No!" he cried, "it was hard work." It was hard work. And so it is . . . we work so hard to figure out who we are, where we fit in—in this world, where we belong. We work so hard to figure out the rules—but they keep on changing—the world keeps on changing—we keep on changing no matter how hard we try to stay the same. "Father, take this cup away from me . . . but not my will, but yours be done." Growing up was full of endings and beginnings, winters and springtimes, leaving home, going to university, finding work, getting married having children. Children who continually take me right back to where I started. Children who continually remind me that I am not perfect, that I need help—that I need God. "Father, into Your hands I commend my Spirit . . ." And every day life is full of mini-struggles: mini-desert experiences, mini-agonies in the garden, mini-crucifixions, mini deaths—deaths that are, oh so necessary to bring forth new life. "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." And . . . how can I teach my children this? How can I help it be easier for them? Just when they begin to feel at home, we uproot them—send them to a new school. How can we help them feel safe and at the same time help them accept that change is inevitable—change is necessary. "It's OK," I said, "you needed to put it away anyway." "But it was hard work!" he said, crying now. "You need to take it apart so you can build new things," my wife said. It's the taking apart that is so painful, so scary. And I am just now beginning to understand that I am not ever me at any given moment—rather, I am in the eternal: always changing. This is what is hard to teach: That life is change, change is growth, growth is love, love is God and God . . . God is life. "It was hard work," he said, again and again, crying as we held him. That's all we could do: help him feel safe, despite the little death that had just happened. "It was hard work," I said. "Come, let's build a new one." And with that, a new life had begun.

Authors Deacon Pedro Guevara-Mann

New life Change parenting

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