Writes the New York Times' Hilary Stout,

incongruously and with regularity, this is a generation that yells..."I've worked with thousands of parents and I can tell you, without question, that screaming is the new spanking," said Amy McCready, the founder of Positive Parenting Solutions, which teaches parenting skills in classes, individual coaching sessions and an online course. "This is so the issue right now. As parents understand that it's not socially acceptable to spank children, they are at a loss for what they can do. They resort to reminding, nagging, timeout, counting 1-2-3 and quickly realize that those strategies don't work to change behavior. In the absence of tools that really work, they feel frustrated and angry and raise their voice. They feel guilty afterward, and the whole cycle begins again."

So, those unenlightened generations who did hit their kids maintained a calm silence at all times? Doubtful. Yelling is apparently traumatic for kids, but having come from such a family - no hitting, plenty of exasperated yelling - at least part of the issue seems to be that it's so ineffective. Yeah, it might mean Mom's mad, but in our house, that was as bad as it got...her being mad. Yelling implied a lack of control that wasn't scary, but certainly didn't suggest authority. On Supernanny, a show to which I'm addicted, if only because she makes parenting look so deceptively easy, Jo arrives at a house full of screaming, ineffectual adults and insolent brats and with a little consistency, plenty of hugs and a few rounds on the Naughty Mat, gets the house running like a well-oiled Duggar machine. (And say what you will about Michelle Duggar, the woman doesn't raise her voice.) The issue isn't "corporal punishment" versus "total lack of discipline," and it seems a little problematic to make the choice seem so diametric. Indeed, isn't that parenting coach (!) kind of implying that spanking is the only solution that "works" - albeit "socially unacceptable?" Many a formerly slap-happy Supernanny success story could tell you otherwise - at least as of two weeks after filming.

For Some Parents, Shouting Is The New Spanking [NYTimes]

In a deliciously snarky post on Slate, Regina Schrambling denounces the precious new phenomenon that is child foodies.

First there was the 12-year-old "restaurant critic," David Fishman in New York City, whose "review" of a neighborhood salumeria somehow snared him huge coverage in his hometown paper and then a long appearance on the CBS morning show, replete with warnings that his power had local chefs quaking in their clogs. Next a 5-year-old, Julian Kreusser, was touted for his cooking show on public access television in Portland, Ore., with the Times of London warning that he might get a cookbook deal at an age when most kids need In the Night Kitchen read to them. Now the New York Times Magazine has pledged one-quarter of its monthly food real estate to the kitchen exploits of a 4-year-old, Dexter Wells, who just happens to be the firstborn of the newspaper's food editor, Pete Wells.

Beyond the patent absurdity of the phenomenon - biologically speaking, young children don't have the palates of adults and don't enjoy as large a range of flavors - and the apparent safety hazards of kids around sharp knives and flames, Schrambling objects to this because it's quite obviously done for the benefit of other adults. After all, these kids, however advanced, are neither finding their own ways around the kitchen nor distributing their own recipes. No one is decrying children taking an interest in good food or experimenting in the kitchen. On the contrary, it should be encouraged. Which is not to say that children should be lecturing to adult gourmets, which is less about addressing the epidemic of childhood obesity than telling other parents how advanced these kids are.

Says Schrambling,

I'm willing to set aside the annoying narcissism of parents who believe they have spawned a cross between Ferran Adria and Brillat-Savarin. On a larger scale, the trend emphasizes the worst of the food frenzy today: the celebration of celebrity and novelty over authenticity and seriousness. Julia Child was 50 years old before she flipped her first omelet on television. She got that gig only after studying at the Cordon Bleu and then devoting 10 years to perfecting Mastering the Art of French Cooking with two collaborators. Today chefs barely out of high school are competing on reality cooking shows, and the bar keeps being lowered, with Internet exposure for every little Thomas Keller. The movement devalues the very subject it pretends to celebrate.

If the author's objection is largely philosophical and aesthetic, mine is practical. After all, it is this kind of thing that has made cooking, which should be inherently democratic, the currency of wealth and "lifestyle" - just what we don't need. In order for a love of good food and the ensuing economic and health benefits to really go national, the idea of adult cooking has to be divested of just this taint of preciousness. Kids should and will continue to cook and explore, but in a different realm from adults - as a means of learning and playing, just as it's always been. I hope that'll be enough for their parents.

Too Many Kiddie Cooks Spoil the Broth [Slate]

“If you just compare him, to, say, Patrick Dempsey on Grey’s Anatomy, Dr. McDreamy comes off as a whiny little sensitive bitch,” says one Draper fan to the Observer. Adds another of her perfect house husband, “It works as a social system, but it’s not terribly erotic.”

The Observer piece chronicles a bunch of these enlightened yuppie marriages. The working women described are unsurprisingly proud — or defensive — about their partners. “It takes a certain kind of guy to be confident enough to stay home and still have a sense of identity...(my husband) can easily choose to be in the corporate world and make a lot of money, but he chose to stay at home,” says one. Adds a stay-at-home dad, "There just aren’t those issues of masculinity.” Here's one dad's day:

Every morning, Mr. Ryan wakes up between 4:30 and 5 and cleans the house; gets the laundry cycle through; makes a to-do list and plans the meals; gets the children up; and goes for a run with the dog. He makes an errand run: dry cleaning, hardware store, socks for his son, pay off a parking ticket, pick up a new coffee carafe, the tennis club, make doctor’s appointments for the kids, then grocery store. Shower, shave, then lunch with other SAHDs and SAHMs. Back at the house, he replies to e-mails, mows the lawn, organizes the basement, sands down some wood and makes house repairs, then nap. Kids get home, he makes lunch; then homework, extracurricular activities, and finally, cooks dinner, for which his wife may or may not be present. “There was a word for guys like me back then,' said Mr. Ryan of the 1960s. 'Losers.'”

More to the point, there was a word for women like him: normal housewives.

And yet, these same wives admit to idolizing the remote philanderer who'd never dream of lifting a finger in the kitchen. Says one "anonymous Brooklyn mom", "You appreciate a stay-at-home dad — as feminists, this is what we wanted! — but marriage now is all about equal partnership," and that's apparently not hot. Another wife complains about having to listen to her husband drone on about preschool. "And I just completely glazed over, went a million miles away in my head. I thought, 'Jesus, fellas, get a life!’”

These women protest that it's not just Don Draper's smoldering looks and emotional unavailability that gets their motors running. It's that he's secretly sensitive: "With his taste for strong women living outside the very rules he feels boxed in by, Don Draper seems as though he just might understand all angles of the domestic equation." It's not that they want Draper; these women are him.
“His sense of yearning, his sense of being confined by the home yet also craving that confinement and comfort, I identify with it,” says one Brooklyn dame with a house hubby. But to others the connection seems more basic: “When our world is so chaotic, we tend to romanticize a time when men were men and women were women. Certainly, Don Draper is not making his wife very happy, but there is a strength to him. A stability.”

You could certainly argue that in painting Don Draper as so complex, so tortured, so stealth-enlightened, so handsome, the Mad Men writers are doing women and men a disservice. They've endowed a definition of pre-feminist masculinity — a composite of all traditional manly virtues — with hints of modernity that make him appealing to women who can fancy he would have swept them off their feet while secretly supporting their dreams of equality. There's a sense on the show that his wife can't keep his interest purely because she's so docile and subservient; we could, we think. Who can compete with that?

But what no one interviewed seems to consider is that the situations described in this piece aren't so much "equality" as a pretty direct flip of the old gender divide. When anyone's career takes total precedence over another's, doesn't that automatically create a, well, 1950s dynamic? If all these women are identifying so powerfully with a philandering 1960s businessman whose work life feels unconnected to home, might they consider that their dynamic is just as binary? Not merely that a man is "not being a man" but that they are with a person who has voluntarily put himself second which is, ironically, not erotic?

The Career Woman/Understanding Husband dynamic illustrated here is way more like the Betty-Don marriage than those relationships in Mad Men that people find so appealing — Draper's flings with tough, smart women with their own careers. The erotic charge in these scenarios comes from the clash of wills and intellects; in short, from a certain basic equality. Obviously the lives these couples have developed seem to work for them and these women have opportunities and careers Betty Draper could only have dreamed of. But whereas chaos may breed a desire for the defined roles described, ironically what they seem to be fantasizing about is ambiguity.

Mad About The Man [New York Observer]