I feel like there is some clear value in separating child care work from parenting. If we can’t separate the two then fathers who aren’t primary caregivers can’t claim to be parents.

Myself, I don’t know how separable they are, particularly for babies and young children–but even for teenagers. I don’t think it’s possible to parent (if I understand you correctly, here meaning to build a relationship with a child) without providing some form of care. I think the emotional, intellectual, and social end up being grounded in and inseparable from the physical–which is itself an interesting dismantling of the scale of prestige that values those things above the physical.

I agree with you in that we shouldn’t be turning to experts to teach us how to be good mothers and fathers, and have good relationships with our kids, but we certainly can turn to the experts to teach us that, say, babies need a lot of fat in their diet and so forth.

I think part of the problem with parenting expertise is that precisely because parenting is so common we have a plethora of self-styled experts making their claims far too general. (The situation is analogous to eating. We all eat, and so everyone considers herself a nutrition and weight-loss expert and many love to dispense advice, but most of us aren’t and most of the advice is simply the repetition of well-publicized fads.)

I’d actually argue that what we need is more genuine research and a lot more critical thinking, not less–just with the caveat that given the state of the parenting field to find any genuine expertise we’re going to have to ignore a lot of the disinformation being propagated, which is why it’s actually possible to be better informed about parenting by reading less, and reading much more selectively.

But I’m more comfortable trusting the genuine expertise of, say, a nutritionist who specializes in infants and children than someone who’s simply sold a lot of books or appeared on Oprah. Still, at the end of the day, even someone who’s spent years or decades studying children may be trumped in my particular situation by my particular expertise on my particular child. He or she may even be entirely right about some issue in general–just not right for my particular daughter.

I guess, I feel that my priorities are most in order when I view it like this: my choice to be an at home parent means I have made child care my job (and that my kids benefit from having a more skilled care giver). I also see that, since someone else could be doing that job for me, I need to be doing something to build a relationship with my kids, since simply providing care does not make me a parent, let alone a good one.

Certainly the sheer amount of time I spend with my kids makes that relationship building easier, and the relationship informs the way I perform the work of childcare, but I think the relationship is separate from the job. I agree with you in that we shouldn’t be turning to experts to teach us how to be good mothers and fathers, and have good relationships with our kids, but we certainly can turn to the experts to teach us that, say, babies need a lot of fat in their diet and so forth.

However, caring for children is skilled labor- and my feminist hackles go into overdrive when it is implied otherwise- because so often that is exactly how traditionally feminine work is denigrated; “It is so easy that anyone with a pulse can do it.”

I wholeheartedly share your feminist hackles on this issue, Starfoxy. Where we may disagree is on the issue of how best to rehabilitate (in the sense of acknowledging and granting due dignity to) women’s work such as childcare. It is indeed skilled labor, but not in precisely the sense that high-prestige traditionally masculine fields such as neurosurgery are.

The thing is, while anything but easy, motherhood and fatherhood are so ubiquitous that it’s not far off to say that they are being done by anyone with a pulse. Animals are mothers and fathers. Parenthood is as common as grass, although heaven knows good parenting is likely considerably rarer. But the expertise we gain from family life isn’t the kind to which our traditional status and prestige markers adhere that results from years and years of specialized, exclusive education. Rather, it’s an expertise in individual people (that is, as parents, we ideally become the world experts on our particular children, and as spouses, on our particular spouses).

It’s an expertise almost completely without prestige in our culture, but it’s also the only realm of life in which we are truly unique and irreplaceable. If I died tomorrow, no one, no matter how loving and devoted, could take my place with my daughter and husband and siblings. (Or so I like to think. ). If my husband remarried, a different set of relationships would form instead.

There’s obviously no clear line between this kind of personal expertise and expertise in the helping professions, such as the examples you give of skilled therapists and experienced caregivers and teachers. (And the limitations of what we can do in the face of another’s agency carry over to these professions; those limitations are one of my husband’s greatest frustrations as a psychologist.) But it seems to me that the feminist effort to rehabilitate women’s work often buys into a whole set of assumptions about what makes labor skilled and dignified–remuneration and intellectual abstraction are honored; unpaid, repetitive, physical labor, particularly the labor done by women to care for children, is not. On the one hand, I think it’s important to unpack the intelligence and creativity careful parenthood demand; on the other, I also think it’s inadequate to simply try to move parenthood up the scale of prestige without engaging in a deeper dismantling of that scale. (Not to say that’s what you’re arguing for here, Starfoxy–just to explain some of my resistance to viewing parenthood as a job.)

And so to address one of jks’s comments, understanding parenthood as a job seems like a well-intentioned but ultimately flawed move to me. It would be as if we considered God to have the “job” of raising all of us. Yes, there’s considerable overlap, of course, as jks’s list of her childcare tasks clearly demonstrates, but in the end the job paradigm is inadequate for our most intimate human relationships. That’s where I would disagree with jks’s opening sentence. In my view, it’s not the word “relationship” we should denigrate with the modifier “just”; it’s the word “job.” To the extent that don’t, we’re buying into (dare I say it?) a capitalist system of values that I think is deeply antithetical to the gospel.

Apologies to my interlocutors and patient readers for the length of my comments! As I think Forster put it, I don’t seem to have the time to make them shorter.

Each of my three children has different personalities.

Isn’t that the truth. I had some friends, their first two kids were so well behaved they were asked to give talks at wards on how to raise kids. I can only say that they did not have the same luck with later kids.

Of my two surviving children, they are polar opposites. Amazing to think they are sisters.

So any discussion of parenthood becomes complicated because parenting is the business/job of meeting the physical needs of a child (children). But there is so much more to it as well. The language of success and failure (and goals) does make this complicated. There is a lot of gray.

The thing is, parenting is always evolving. My daughter is different now at almost-7 than she was at 1 or 4 or even 6. Our life situation is different. Each of my three children has different personalities. That’s why I’m hesitant to pick a particular approach and just stick to it no matter what. I try to ‘study it out in my mind’ by doing some research and talking to other experienced parents, and then ponder things before doing them. (In my ideal world; other days I just read or blog while ignoring the kids as much as possible until I break down and yell at them).

My biggest issue with parenting is actually resolving differences with my husband. His ideas about children and how he wants to parent are very different from mine, and we’re both so stubborn that we unfortunately spend a lot of time working at cross purposes to each other. It’s been hard because we do agree on so many things I had no idea that figuring out how to be parents together would be so hard.

In the end, I’m not so sure it’s about parenting practices or theories “working”, what does that mean anyway? What is the nature of success as a parent?

That’s the proverbial $64,0000 question, isn’t it? Something from our own theology that should give us pause is that by the very measurements we ourselves often employ Satan promised a higher rate of success (all souls returned guaranteed!) than God is ever going to be able to deliver precisely because of his respect for our agency.

That said, I don’t know what it means to have succeeded–or failed–as a parent. As I said above, I think the whole language of success and failure, of tasks and goals and accomplishments, ultimately falters before the deeper realities of human relationships.

Amelia poses an interesting question, one that’s beyond the scope of even my considerable long-windedness, about the tensions between our Mormon theology and our practice. I don’t have a lot to say in response, I’m afraid; it’s such a large issue I’d have to think a lot more about it. I suppose my short answer would be that human nature is fallen and that religious (and other) communities inevitably and constantly fail to live up to their most inspiring, most constitutive ideals. Maybe all we can keep doing is returning to those ideals–love, sacrifice, devotion, and in this case, respect for agency–and attempting, as best we can, to renew them in our own lives and our own corners of our communities. Maybe that’s just one reason that a private devotional religious life is so vital to maintain; it allows us to return to and experience and nurture those good things that come from God in ourselves and ultimately in the broader community.