"All you need is two tits and a blanket." It's time to take parenting back from the experts

Nancy McDermott's The Problem with Parenting is a humane, thorough analysis of how we raise children today; and why we need to reassess our most fundamental relationships

This is the latest in a series of long-form essays on childhood, generational change, modern parenting, and how this all affects the wider culture. If you’d like to support my work, please consider a paid subscription, or share it with a friend!

Once upon a time, I knew a powerful female professional at the top of her game in a highly competitive, demanding environment. In this environment, she held enormous sway and was unafraid of whether or not she was liked.

A few times I had the occasion to see her with her young child. It was like watching a different person. It is burned into my memory because it was such a striking contrast. This woman was wholly in charge in the professional sphere, but when confronted with a kid in grade school to whom she had given life, she was bizarrely meek, uncomfortable, even afraid. 

I lived in Brooklyn from the late nineties until 2011. During that time, it was very clear to me that among the middle, upper middle, non-ethnic classes, the prevailing family culture was a highly rarified, curated world in which simply living your life was of such external significance that it ceased to really belong to you anymore. Your private family choices signalled your outer worthiness. Did you buy non-organic peas to mush up? Did you send your kid to…daycare? Did you give your child — horror of horrors — formula??

Disclaimer: lest I sound like I’m attacking individual parents, let me say that in my immediate circle of friends I did not witness the kinds of terrible behaviour that came to be associated with permissive, precious hipster parenting. My friends have produced lovely, sane humans, and I’m not just saying that because some of them are reading this.

However, I disliked and distrusted the wider atmosphere so much that I left the US altogether. We left when my son was 2 years old, because I could what was coming down the road: infamous battlefields like Getting Into Kindergarten and Summer Camps for Gifted Children. But even though I felt strongly that more traditional childrearing was far better, part of me always thought that perhaps I was just being judgmental. I slightly downplayed my own hostility to these new norms, casting them as comical but superficial excesses. 

Then I read The Problem With Parenting, by Nancy McDermott.

McDermott is asking a question that is key to unlocking the great socio-cultural drama of our time:

“What on earth is going on in America’s playgrounds? When did children’s play become so contentious?”

Through extensive research —  not just anecdote and observation — McDermott confirms what I had picked up on in wider society. Well-off, well-educated and well-meaning moms and dads who were hyper-focused on providing their babies and children with everything natural — natural childbirth, natural diet, natural fabrics, natural learning. But the most important thing, their relationship with said child, was the most unnatural thing I had ever seen. Like the powerful executive I knew who would stand up to any man in a board room, but was afraid of her own little kid. 

Parents Lost Their Way

Nancy McDermott — who herself was a Brooklyn mom in the prime hipster years — notes that for everyone up until our grandparents generation, raising children was something it was assumed adults would just know how to do. But this assumption evaporated in the social upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s. By the 1980’s: 

“The conventional wisdom shifted from one of confidence in parents’ capacity to learn on the job to the belief that Parenting was far too complex and far too difficult to be left to mere parents.”

By the late ’90’s, McDermott writes, these much less confident but more formally educated parents set about “transforming their childrearing into an act of self-expression.”

These parents thought they were improving the lives of modern American children, of course, sparing them from soul-crushing conformity or dangerous neglect. But actually, what they were doing was untethering from basic common sense. And that has brought about some extremely dark — in my opinion, anyway — unintended consequences. 

Enter The Experts, Exit The Happiness

A few months ago I published the first two essays that I wanted to write about the different facets of parenting today. First, I looked at how harmful critical race theory is to young children — overtly and purposefully removing innocence from the child, who is reduced to just a racial category in the oppressed/oppressor matrix. (If this doesn’t terrify you because of the obviously dangerous path it leads down, see a shrink). Then I looked at how, among working class children in the UK, a bureaucratic welfare state designed to provide poor kids with social mobility has actually entrapped them in a stagnant economic and cultural place. 

But well-off, middle class children are not faring well in our current climate, either. And the pandemic has made many things worse for them — and not because they were catching COVID.

One main reason is many parents have become enthralled to the ‘experts.’ American parents right now are far, far too trusting of ‘experts’ and ‘science.’

 (See also: CDC ‘experts’ telling parents it’s only safe for little kids to take masks off outside at summer camp if they are swimming. GTFO.) 

The move away from traditional mother-knows-best attitudes has left parents uncertain. But a corollary has been that, since raising children now apparently requires a degree of professionalism dumb normal moms do not have, it has given rise to a sense that you can’t just be a parent. It’s not good or important enough. You have to demonstrate your morality or politics in outward- facing actions so that your peer group can witness the type of parent (and therefore the type of person) you are. 

Both these things, it turns out, are disastrous for children.

McDermott says that while the 1950’s were a conformist, sterile time in American culture, it was also the last time women, in particular, really trusted themselves to know how to be mothers.

This is a tragedy. Not just for women, who have lost out on experiencing the spontaneous joys of motherhood, but for children most of all. Because they have been raised by women who are trying so hard they forget to be themselves, relax and enjoy it. Darker still, mothers and fathers have turned over their once-great authority to faddish ideas and pseudo-scientific experts who profit off making uncertain parents even more insecure. McDermott writes:

“The proliferation of expertise…delegitimizes parental instincts and judgment. Instead of relying on their experience and common sense, parents are increasingly called upon to play the role of the expert in their children’s lives. Simple decisions begin to feel complex as overthink sets in. Should parents sit on the park bench and read the paper while their child climbs on the playground equipment or shadow them in case they start to fall? Should they reassure their son or daughter about the fleeting nature of schoolyard bullies or alert their school and book them an appointment with a therapist?” 

When a Hat Isn’t Just a Hat

If you lived in New York in the mid-2000’s, you might remember the infamous Park Slope boys hat debacle, in which a boys hat was found on the street, someone posted the lost item to the neighbourhood parents Yahoo group (of which McDermott was an early member and former head), and all hell broke loose. Because the original poster assumed the boy’s hat belonged to a boy. One woman went so far as to write: 

“Lisa's post could have led to an interesting discussion about sexism, marketing, gender neutral child-rearing (does it work?), education- how can we encourage and develop styles of playing and games which enhance girls skills and love of math and science? Why is it that society is suddenly obsessing about how boys are falling behind in reading? Are they really and is it a function of sexism that everyone cares so much about the success of boys when girls have been shut out of math and sciences for decades? Doesn't it rebalance in middle school and high school when boys pick up speed and girls start dumbing down so that they can be cute for the boys? And what about puberty itself, how does that effect academic success?

I could go on.” 

Please don’t.

This parental psychodrama, which was amplified in the early, heady days of social media and blogs, came to represent the crazy direction family life was heading in. A hat wasn’t just a hat. It was an opportunity for a few parents to jump on the soap box and loudly proclaim that everyone else was doing it wrong.

As McDermott writes:

“Parents have so intensely internalised the dictates of expert opinions that they experience it as their own…They behave this way spontaneously because they have thoroughly internalized the idea that good parents manage their children’s experiences to ensure that they yield the desired effects. This lends parents’ behavior a strain of theatricality, as if parenthood has become a performance taking place under the gaze of some evaluating expert.”

Fifteen years later, the acrimony has grown exponentially worse. Back in 2006, tearing other parents apart over a boys hat just seemed like a joke. But no one is laughing now.

Two Tits and a Blanket

To me, first as an observer in my 20’s and then as a new mom, the prevailing American method of childrearing seemed an utterly joyless grind in a never-ending pressure cooker of emotional, financial and political tension. It made me long for the days when mothers smoked throughout pregnancy, everyone drove around without seatbelts and the go-to parenting move if your kid was being bullied was to tell them to punch the bully in the face.

I will always remember my mother — a Boomer herself but the daughter of a salt-of-the-earth Bronx woman who married at 20 and bore 11 children — being bemused at the plethora of equipment I was told I absolutely needed when I was pregnant. Diaper Genie! BPA-free bottles! Slings! Baby Bjorns! She rolled her eyes at such nonsense and uttered this immortal words: 

“All you need are two tits and a blanket!”

You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows

Past childrearing practices were far from perfect and each generation seems to inflict a unique form of damage on the next. But what I find most disturbing about this over-confidence in expert advice and under-confidence in what we used to call common sense is that it has brought about a willingness to essentially perform medical experiments on children. 

First in the form of gender “transitioning.” I fail to understand how a person can endorse giving opposite-sex sex hormones to young teens. You should not need the approval of a medical expert to understand how this is not a good idea. Even stranger, I’m sure many mothers who allow their child to ingest opposite-sex sex hormones would not have dreamed of allowing hormone-and-antibiotics filled cow’s milk to pass the lips of that child as a baby; or would have gone full psycho if someone fed them a McDonald’s Happy Meal. 

But testosterone to a 16- year-old girl? The Scientists (Peace Be Upon Them) say it’s fine! So go ahead. What’s the worst than could happen?

I can only imagine that for many parents confronted with this painful decision, with a chorus of approving ‘experts’ urging them forward, constant positive messaging aggressively promoting the lie that a human being can change sex, and the manipulative insistence that children must be allowed to medically transition or they might kill themselves, it must be easier to go along with it than to risk an accusation of transphobia. The pressure must feel utterly overwhelming. And if you have confused your self-expression and self-worth with your job as a parent, if you have any concern whatsoever about what other people think of you, it would be difficult to push back.¹

And now we see an increasing push to include under-18’s in the COVID mRNA shot. As soon as the vaccines became available, the pressure campaign was on in the media and much of the public responded in kind. That air of euphoria has begun to wear off, with extremely knowledgeable professionals — like Robert Malone, the man who invented the mRNA vaccine technology — saying truly alarming things about the COVID mRNA shots. These folks — who are, in fact, experts — say there is absolutely no reason to risk giving the shot to children, who do not suffer high rates of COVID sickness to make the risk worth it. Kids run the risk of getting killed by a car every time they cross the street. I’m not going to break my son’s legs and keep him in a wheelchair to protect him from that possibility, am I? See footnote below² for the sources, who include the scientist who invented the mRNA technology and former executive at Pfizer.

This has the potential to be a horror story unfolding before our eyes. The reason parents are submitting to and allowing these procedures? Because ‘experts’ tell them it’s the right thing to do. The wholly owned corporate media then tells them it’s not just safe; it’s also virtuous. It’s worthy. It tells a story of your family that the outside world with reward with praise and attention. What the media is not mentioning is the many risks and uncertainties involved.

Take the case of Tami Burages, a Twitter user with tens of thousands of followers. She shared a heartbreaking story of her 13 year old nephew who died days after his second COVID shot. A preliminary autopsy on the boy, who had no pre-existing conditions, found he had an enlarged heart. This family’s worst nightmare was made appalling by the fact that his aunt was still insisting that kids should get the shot. She called the shot “mostly safe” and “I’m pro-vaccine” and:

“I hate that things have gotten so politicized. The last thing I want is for someone like Tucker Carlson or anyone else on Hate TV using this for political gain.” (She has since deleted the thread and threatened with lawsuits any news outlets who share it.)

Even on the heels of the death of a child in her own family, this woman was publicly considering the political pose this might strike. She tweeted:

“If hadn't already vaccinated my 14-year-old, I would still do it. BUT: Especially for boys, I would monitor heart rate very frequently for the following week. I would even get up in the middle of the night to do it.” 

Words fail me. 

Hopefully, the children who have been pumped with sex hormones and experimental vaccines will not suffer permanent harm in the coming years (though clearly some children have already have been permanently harmed.) And I hope that the concerns of these highly respected doctors, virologists , vaccine developers and Nobel Prize winners over giving the COVID shot to young people prove unfounded. But if these dissenters are even *slightly* correct, how will parents feel that they, on the advice of ‘experts’, took that risk?

We are now in uncharted waters. Better to use your own internal compass than rely on someone else’s. 

1. In the widely covered case against London’s Tavistock Clinic, brought by Keira Bell, who was put on hormones at 16, judges found that she had been subjected, with minimal oversight “what amounted to experimental treatment with life-altering outcomes.” https://www.persuasion.community/p/keira-bell-my-story

2. For a discussion on reproductive toxicity, spike protein dangers and other issues with the COVID vaccines with Dr Robert Malone, inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, see here: https://odysee.com/@BretWeinstein:f/how-to-save-the-world,-in-three-easy:0?r=F8g2gAZTF4wHy9XunJZzh5H8YNVb2QyN

For an interview with Mike Yeadon, former Pfizer executive who is now campaigning against the COVID vaccines because they have not been sufficiently tested: https://warroom.org/2021/06/09/episode-1010-the-trojan-horse-pandemic-dr-yeadon-and-dr-fuellmich-warn-against-dangerous-vaccines-and-expose-lies-about-the-globalist-plandemic/

And on the risks and uncertainties of the mRNA versus traditional vaccines. https://www.bitchute.com/video/qs9X8Blr4Ucv/