Adults can offer valuable perspective on life with disability

“Autism Awareness” puzzle-piece ribbon magnet
Photo by Cynthia M. Parkhill

Parents often seek support from other parents when a child has a disability. Meriah Nichols advocates mixing blogs by adults with disabilities into a parent-blog reading routine.

‘Commitment’ shouldn’t obligate children to stay in abusive friendships

A 2014 article by writer Amy Joyce for The Washington Post showed up this week in my Facebook feed. In it, Harvard psychologist Richard Weissbourd and his colleagues with the “Making Caring Common Project” offer five strategies to raise moral and caring children.

Is anyone’s family truly ‘normal’?

While reading and formulating my response to Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed (Picador, April 2015), I was reminded that intentionally childless people are not alone in being criticized. In her blog posts, Kate Wasserman challenges negative views that society holds toward single parenting.

‘Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed’ (Book review)

Sixteen writers examine their decisions not to have children in Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed (Picador, April 2015).

Edited by Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum, the book reflects Daum’s assertion that “people who opt out of parenthood ... are not a monolithic group” (2). As these writings make plain, there is no single reason why these women and men chose to remain childless.

But what unites these writers is the way in which society feels it can judge or intervene in this among the countless other decisions that can define an adult life.

‘Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed’

In response to the question, “Why don’t you have children?,” author/editor Meghan Daum recommends this answer: “Parenting is probably one of the hardest things you could do. It’s an important job, so why should somebody who doesn’t really want to do that job, do it?”

That’s according to columnist Zosia Bielski for the Globe and Mail, who highlights a social contradiction: “Although we pat ourselves on the backs for tolerating all kinds of familial configurations in this country, we continue to reserve puzzlement, pity and judgment for adults who really don’t want to have children, ever.”

Religious Explorations: Recent posts

Here are recent posts to social media in my professional role as Administrative Coordinator for the Religious Explorations program at a church in Ashland, Oregon, the Rogue Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. When curating these items, I look for resources and commentary that strengthen constituent families.

Consumer choices carry environmental weight

The message of two videos viewed this week for my women’s health class is that consumer decisions carry weight. The resulting impacts are entirely up to us.

Mother rewarded with book deal for violating daughter’s privacy

Dara-Lynn Weiss, a woman who put her daughter on a diet and then wrote a Vogue article about it, had a book published in January. The Heavy: A Mother, A Daughter, A Diet was released by Ballantine Books.

As reported last spring by Jessica Samakow for the Huffington Post, Weiss's article drew the attention of bloggers who questioned her methods (A link to Samakow’s article was posted this week to a discussion board in my online women’s health class).

Jezebel author Katie J.M. Baker called Weiss’s piece “the worst Vogue article ever”:

“Weiss' initial quandary is a complicated one, to be sure: what do you do if your pediatrician tells you your child is clinically obese? But the justifications to which Weiss clings as she describes the abrasive, often irrational weight-loss strategies she imposed upon her young daughter are truly disgusting, as is the obvious fact that Weiss was projecting her hatred of her own body onto her child throughout her year-long diet. The ickiness of the essay is only overshadowed by the accompanying photos, in which Weiss and her now-slender daughter — who even Weiss admits is traumatized by the events of the past year — don miniskirts and giggle girlishly over tea.”

The article was published in April in Vogue’s Shape 2012 issue.

After reading the account on Huffington Post, my main issue of concern wasn’t that the child, Bea, was overweight: although, to be sure, some of the other bloggers included in Samakow’s summary seemed to have much healthier attitudes about a child who was overweight.

One blogger wrote under the name Mom De Guerre because she said she would never put her child's well-being at stake the way that Weiss had. And Samakow described a piece by HuffPost blogger Janell Burley Hofmann as an “honest, self-accepting response.”

(Hofmann’s initial response to her daughter telling her, “I'm fat,” was, “You are built just perfect -- strong and healthy.”)

From the excerpt in Samakow’s summary, Weiss displayed a self-pitying attitude that I found distasteful:

“‘Everyone supports the mission, but no one seems to approve of my methods,’ she admits and then goes on to mention her own exhaustion: ‘It is grating to have someone constantly complain of being hungry, or refuse to eat what she’s supposed to, month after month.’”

What most concerned me was the way that Weiss exposed her young daughter to public scrutiny and possible condemnation.  I know from experience that adults can be quick to judge someone else’s child’s behavior without knowing her circumstances.

Weiss crossed an important line when she wrote about her daughter’s weight.

I can choose for myself to share details of my life, including struggles and challenges. And there are details about my life that I don’t feel comfortable sharing, even as I readily disclose other areas. It’s my life, my choice what, and how much, to reveal.

Weiss could similarly make a choice to disclose her own struggles or insecurities. But her daughter Bea did not get to make that choice; Weiss took the choice from her daughter.

Now that Weiss’s book has been published, Bea’s life will be exposed before that many more people, in a story that, based on advance praise, casts Weiss and not Bea in the role of heroine. Weiss does not deserve to be financially rewarded for violating her daughter’s privacy.

My thanks to Cuesta College instructor Allison Merzon for posting a link to the Huffington Post article on our women’s health class discussion board.

More of us are ‘Married without children’

I am part of a growing percentage of women in the United States who have never had children. Another of those women, Deborah Petersen, shares her experience of being “Married without children” at MercuryNews.com.