Right on.
Underground Moms are not different from other moms in most ways: just trying to raise our kids and live our lives. What’s different is that we try to examine the parenting culture we are swimming in, a culture that has brought us baby knee pads, professional babyproofers and prime time specials on child abductions. Not to mention Baby Einstein. (Do you know what the real Einstein played with as a child? He built card houses. So much for “educational DVDs”.)
All together, it is a culture that induces unnecessary self-doubt and fear in parents–fear that our children will be harmed, poisoned, slowed down, snatched, or bored for even a second. At Underground Moms we look at where these assumptions come from, which ones merit buying into and which ones should be fought, for our sake and the sake of our precious kids. We believe in freeing them from the restrictions that are baseless, and freeing ourselves from the extra guilt and worry. In other words, it’s a liberation movement! But so far without a good song!
I mean, what else you can you ask for? It’s rational, and it’s sassy. And there are tons of interesting books on this website! Turns out this site was started by Free Range Kids author Lenore Skenazy; Spiked writer, Nancy McDermott (who has commented on here and helped me with a few posts); and Angeline Piotrowski, of Mommy Myth Buster.
Piotrowski has this to say on her Mommy Myth Buster site:
Many parenting “news” items are lies, myths, exaggerations and marketing designed to scare parents into buying products. Here we bust up those myths and reveal the truth so we can relax and enjoy parenthood.
Damn straight!
Chris Said,
May 30, 2009 @ 11:34 pm
Heh, heh, heh… I must have been an “underground mom.” My kids are teenagers, but I still remember the Einstein silliness. Then I read a couple of biographies on the guy, and I really did not want my kids to be like him (he was a bit of a womanizer, he did not treat his first wife terribly well).
What is funny is that one mom who whose son was the same age as my oldest, thought it was amazing how I let my kids get creative. I thought it was natural to give kids lots of paper, crayons and paint… yet, she thought is was remarkable.
I knew of places where one could get inexpensive rolls of paper (the ends of 36 inch wide rolls from places that print out architectural drawings). I would roll out a few feet of the paper on the floor, and then give the kids paint, and them create.
I also have blackmail pictures of at least two of my kids who have painted their bodies with mud outside. I am keeping those safe. Along with the videos of my kids playing Robin Hood in the costumes I made (which is why I have a deviantart account!).
Now the result of my evil version of parenting (also known as “Mommy Brag Time): My 18 year old younger son is a swim teacher. This evening he came home from work and told me that one of his classes consisted on only one three year old (the 3 year old classes are typically three kids to one teacher, so two of them were not there). The child did not want to get into the water. So my son asked if he wanted to be a pirate, to which the answer was “Yeah!”. So my son got his pirate hat and sword out of his locker, took the little inflatable boat that the pool had, put the child in and went around the pool with him. They went to the other classes of older kids and stole the kick boards.
The biggest part of this brag is that he told me this (get prepared for teenagers, read the cartoon “Zits”). Because when he was three years old, his teenage instructor did the same thing to him!