I have already written about one of the works of Anna Shadrina, entitled "Unmarried: Sex, love and family outside of marriage", "Reducing the birth rate and increasing the price of" motherhood in the XXI century" - this is the author's second book, as if continuing the topic touched upon in the first monograph and concurrently the researcher's master's thesis.
I will immediately mention the fact that this book is not at all a list of reasons why being childless in our time is better or cooler than having children, it is not a defense of child - free, supported by facts from statistics, but at the same time it is not propaganda of childbearing. Shadrina herself, like the author of this review, stands on the position of conscious motherhood, combining it with the position of deferred motherhood ("maybe someday, if you really want, so it's just unbearable"), but this does not mean that for the reason that we have a popular science publication, and not a purely scientific monograph, the author of the text will " rub " us how to live and give birth or not give birth, the purpose of the work is not at all in this.
If in" Unmarried: Sex, Love and Family outside of marriage " Shadrina made the single-lady of the post-Soviet space the object of her research, then in "Dear Children" this object was motherhood in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.
The main questions of interest to the author are questions about how the attitude to children and mothers has been transformed over the past hundred years (there are examples from earlier times, but there are not so many of them), what metamorphoses the image of the mother underwent, what the family looks like today and what is the place of the mother and child in it, the concept of child-centrism, "good" and " bad "mother, and child psychological trauma associated with" wrong " maternal behavior.
In my opinion, the book "Dear children. The reduction of the birth rate and the growth of the" price "of motherhood in the XXI century" may be interesting to everyone for one simple reason: we all had or have mothers, and we all encounter mothers and their children within the public space. Shadrina's work really allows us to look at some things that we no longer notice or have never noticed, from an unexpected side, for example, I had a million thoughts during and after reading it.
In general, modern society treats motherhood in exactly the opposite way: some shout about the main role of a woman, the innate maternal instinct, the highest purpose and naturalness of everything connected with the birth and upbringing of a child, others call motherhood hard work, which is associated with enormous responsibility and return, so it is logical to assume that not everyone is ready for this responsibility and not everyone is capable of this return.
Shadrina surprisingly managed to capture and capture this opposition of views and reveal all the topics that arise from this strange contradiction. Well, for example: if motherhood is hard work, if it is not economically profitable for a family to have children in modern times (and this is really true, because the costs are too high, and there may not be any return at all), if we have professions and a market of services related.
To the supervision, care and upbringing of children, then why do women not pay for motherhood and combine work, household chores and motherhood, to the detriment of personal interests and banal rest, which is required by any living organism? Or questions of eternal guilt: if a mother is not a trained professional, then why are there such high demands of society for her, why do we blame their mothers for all the crimes, and even crimes, even for adult children?
Well, don't look at any movie or book maniac - all his problems are solely from his relationship with his parent, and even if he also had a dad who often beat him on the head, then the mother is still to blame: well, why didn't she leave her tyrant husband? Shadrina in her book gives a rather interesting analysis of the film "Something is wrong with Kevin" based on the novel "The Price of Dislike", I involuntarily remembered.
When Anna, having finished her interpretation, said that there are those who, despite everything shown, continue to say that Eva was the culprit: I remember-I remember, there are also those who branded the screen / book mother, although the works are just about how high the price of motherhood can be, and how it can be for a woman.
It is somehow accepted among us that parenthood, it is parenthood in Africa, and at all times - parenthood. Parents love their children, take care of their well-being and you and you, in the "Reduction of the birth rate and the growth "of the price of" motherhood in the XXI century" we are famously reminded that, in general, children ceased to be "little adults" and "free labor", the attitude to which was from the category.
"God gave, God took", not so long ago, and only recently they began to plan, and not to give birth simply because there is nowhere to go, and they became the center of the family and the flowers of life even less years ago. How much the attitude towards children has changed even in one generation, from the time when my mother gave birth to me and the time when I myself entered the childbearing age: previously, they managed with one Spock's.
"Child and care for him", now at least 9 months, or even all the next 18 years, the fortresses of pedagogical literature are being stormed, educational methods are being mastered, they shout from all the cracks that "after three it's too late", and "French children do not spit food". Child-centrism has changed the world even for those who did not have a child themselves: once you go to Instagram, you will inevitably stumble upon the accounts of" advanced moms"," stylish moms", women who teach how to live, how to educate and how not to go crazy and at least occasionally unravel your bun on your head.
A decent part of my former classmates for 6 years have turned into self-made bloggers, posting their expert notes about children, family and marriage daily, and accompanying them with photos a la Hallmark channel movie frames. I'm not talking about what is happening in the goods and entertainment industry: children's champagne and children's cigarettes from the 90s are still flowers, what about slings for children, where you can put babies and rings for these mini-slings, without which life is not life and childhood is not childhood?
As I have already mentioned, one of the reasons why I read such books is the desire to find out how everything that exists in our society relates to the past century and "parallel Universes" - the state of affairs in other cultures and countries.
And "The decline in the birth rate and the growth of the" price of "motherhood in the XXI century" tells in full detail about how we "came to such a life": ideology, politics, culture - after all, it is in them that we should look for the roots of problems, from them we get a significant part of the attitudes, even if we are firmly convinced that we are all so special and have reached everything with our own mind, and observing the change in attitudes to family, children and motherhood.
And at least within the framework of the 20th century, we can finally formulate conclusions about what from the recent past influenced the formation of public opinion regarding children and mothers. But the most valuable thing in this book is - these are the contradictions revealed by Anna Shadrina between how things are in reality and how the entire Russian media space portrays it: TV series about family values, after watching which you generally want to hide away from people, the family policy.
Of the state, which relies not on freeing women from part of their duties and taking part of their worries on themselves, but on stimulating the birth rate with money (in the light of new initiatives, the conclusion also suggests that they stimulate a very certain class whose income is in the area of the subsistence minimum), "traditional family values", which are being talked about on every corner vs. news reports about family violence, which makes the hair stand on end, and the Soviet past, in which the state was placed above both the family and individual interests, and children were taken to kindergarten at least for the entire working five-day period.
The book is definitely worthwhile, it will be interesting to readers of both sexes and all ages, regardless of whether they have children and whether they plan to have them in the future, after all, we do not live in soap bubbles filled with a vacuum.
699.839 SRY