The photo on the cover of the magazine I’m looking at couldn’t be more April-perfect. Two adorable, giggling sprites — a gap-toothed African American girl and a pixie-eyed white one — peer through a plastic window in an oversized rainbow umbrella spattered with rain.
Headlines positioned above their faces tease the magazine’s contents: "The Art of Listening to Children," "The Truth about Those New Mother Blues," and "What Every Preschooler Needs." Only the dated font telegraphs the fact that this magazine was published exactly 40 years ago (when fonts were still called typefaces).
Otherwise, the April 1969 issue of Parents magazine doesn’t look so different from Parents circa 2009, or from any of its newsstand contemporaries. Inside, there are stories on traveling with tots, tarting up lunchbox fare, home decorating, and kids’ fashions. There’s beauty advice for mom and reassurance from child development experts on a number of topics.
A friend of mine scored a stack of these old issues on eBay. I don’t know what he paid, but I can tell you the evening I spent perusing them was priceless. I mean, if the worries plaguing my mother’s generation were pretty much the same as mine, there’s a reasonable chance my kids will turn out okay enough to eventually want to start their own families — in turn giving them the chance to believe their parenting concerns are novel.
When I was done marveling at how, at least for the under-6 set, the girly fashions of 1969 resemble the girly fashions of 2009, I leafed through the February issue of today’s hot parenting title, Cookie. At first glance, it appeared that really, the big difference between the two was their treatment of sex.
Parents took the oblique approach. One full-page ad included an order form for a book for "sophisticated couples." "Sexual Adventure in Marriage spells out, in detail, many practices that may seem unfamiliar and strange at first," the text promised. "Is there, for this reason, any danger of perversion if the suggestions in its pages are followed? The authors answer this question with one of the most enlightening discussions of perversion that you have ever read." Yours to examine for 10 days for just $5.95.
By contrast, Cookie devotes page after page to ensuring everyone is getting as much as possible. A first-person essay by a dad describes his and his wife’s "one-night stand." They pack three condoms but only "deploy" two. (Deploy? Might the military campaign approach be a bigger buzz-kill than kids? Just a thought.)
That’s followed by a lengthy guide to date night, including a feature on making sure it stays in the budget, a guide to conversation dos and don’ts, a five-point plan for getting ready over the course of several days, a sidebar on the importance of having a Plan B, and two — count ’em two — full-page "charticles" outlining appropriate clothing and gear.
I tell you, by the time I got to the end of this overheated package (ba-dum-cha!), I was too tired — and desensitized — to reach for more than the remote.
I soldiered on, though, boggling my way through a fashion layout involving India Hicks "and her sunny, happy brood." Who is India Hicks, I wondered, and how come she wears backless evening gowns while doing housework? I was trying to psyche myself up to plumb the accompanying text for answers when I noticed an African-American boy leaping for joy along with India and her trio of towheads.
India, it turns out, is a British royal of the minor variety and a Bravo design show star, which I imagine explains the combination chanteuse/laundress look. But the boy? Beyond the brand names and prices of his outfits, there was no explanation how he ended up in the spread. I was puzzling over this, as well as the lamentable return of the plaid necktie, when it hit me: His was the only dark-skinned face in the entire magazine. I flipped it over and went back through it page by page. There were two Asian American kids in photos accompanying other pieces, but other than that Cookie was pretty vanilla.
Back to Parents, which not only had an African American child on the cover, it contained a first-person essay by a white woman who had become involved in race-relations after becoming painfully aware of her ignorance. There were also stories on poverty, children’s rights, and UNICEF’s efforts to reduce infant and maternal mortality.
Viewed via the prism of the older magazines, the American family was clearly part of a much larger society. The modern one, by contrast, is intensely focused on the welfare of its own members. Indeed, one of only two substantive — and very good — pieces in Cookie was a review of a terrific book (which just might make its way into this space in the not-too-distant future) about the value of high-quality childcare and the United States’ dismal record of supporting working parents.
I don’t mean to pick on Cookie, which always manages to sandwich at least a couple of clever, insightful pieces between its frothy covers. My point has more to do with a shift in the way the family as an institution is perceived by the culture.
We’ve expanded our definition of family, which is terrific. But when, exactly, during the last four decades did we decide that the family is an island? When did we become more familiar with the parenting wisdom of a reality TV star than of the real parents next door? When did we lose sight of the fact that the welfare of all our children is interconnected?
Talk of community may not sell as many magazine ads as glossy layouts of kid-scale furniture and date-night underwear, but I daresay all of us, and most especially the smaller members of the tribe, could use a healthy dose of it.
Beth Hawkins is a Minneapolis writer.
