Modern motherhood: Nannify, bitch less, hug more

By Sharan Saikumar

When Adam Mansbach wrote Go the Fuck To Sleep during his two-hour struggle to put his baby daughter to bed, he had no idea his despair would spark a global frenzy. The book, a collection of exasperated verse by a sleep-deprived father, went on to become the No #1 Bestseller on the New York Times, LA Times and The Wall Street Journal. Mansbach had unknowingly hit a note of solidarity with parents around the world because he recognised that parenthood is nothing but a daily battle between bone-crushing tiredness and an all-consuming love.

We’ve all grown up with harrowed mothers who have spent the best years of their lives yelling and tearing their hair out while trying to get us to sleep, to get up, to start eating, to stop eating, to behave, to shut up, to speak up or make us do anything that we absolutely did not want to do. Mansbach knows that parenthood is less about Hallmark sentiments and more about harrowing chores – spilled milk, dirty rooms, fussy feeders, the run for school, the fight for sleep and the sheer energy to wake up the next morning to do it all over again. My mother often tells me as I settle down to read my son his bedtime story – where do you guys find the energy to do these things?

The answer is simple: we delegate. Modern motherhood is a slightly selfish, yet immensely practical version of what we grew up with. In my mother’s day, if she had to put three wired children to bed, she would sit it out till the point she wanted to pull her fingernails one by one, but she would persist. My mother belonged to the Masochist Motherhood club that believed in doing every chore personally, no matter how soul squeezing. In fact, the harder the squeeze, the better the mother. Modern Motherhood (also known as the My-Sanity-Comes-First version) believes in outsourcing the menial chores of parenting to nannies and focusing only on the stuff that really matters. Instead of the bath and feed, they do play and read, instead of the changing and cleaning they focus on teaching and cuddling.

Everyone from the righteous media to the nosy neighbour and finicky in-laws have gone to town decrying the nanny culture when they should be celebrating it. Guilty as these mothers might be about not getting involved in the “back room” operations of child rearing, it is also the reason why they have time to sit and read Elmo to their kids, discuss dinosaurs in detail and construct complicated paper airplanes. They are not shirking their duties, they are simply prioritising.

The most popular accusation against nannifying your child is that it weakens the bond between mother and child. Sociologist Cameron Macdonald disagrees in her book Shadow Mothers that is dedicated to nannies and au-pairs. According to her, mothers have been outsourcing the unimportant stuff for ages – wet nurses were socially acceptable since breastfeeding was once considered menial — but the emotional bond has sustained. In fact it’s a mark of secure parenting to be able to delegate as long as the separation of roles is clear.

The happy result is that members of the modern motherhood club yell less and chat more, they bitch less and hug more. They enjoy the incessant patter and the unending questions that bog down a stressed-out mother.

And when bedtime rolls around, they finish the story and call in the nanny instead of having a Mansbach meltdown and begging their child to ‘go the fuck to sleep’.

As a blogger, ex-marketer, evangelist of socialfootprint.in and would-be novelist, Sharan Saikumar wears many hats, none of which really fit.