What Help Do You Get As a Parent?
In her book Year of Yes, Shonda Rhimes writes about how she spent “every morning” in high school trying to make her hair look like Whitney Houston’s. “Hours and hours of my life have been spent on a hot curling iron, a bottle of hairspray and burnt fingertips,” she describes. But she could never get it right. It wasn’t until she became an adult that she found out that Whitney was wearing a wig.
Moral: If everyone was more transparent about the help they receive, it would save people from a lot of unnecessary strife.
On the Offspring website, we publish a column titled “ How I Am a Parent” , which highlights the daily activities, tricks, victories and failures of famous parents. Some of you pointed out that many of our profiles use nannies / au pair and / or cleaning services and have certain privileges. We are working to explore a wider range of diversity, socio-economic and other, and appreciate your comments and ideas that will help make the column more real, useful and high quality.
Having heard from our guests “As a parent,” I know that I appreciated the honesty that people receive. This is something that parents say little about. I believe that being able to look into the logistics of different families can help everyone make more informed choices, and also understand that no one can do it alone.
So, I wanted to ask you readers: what kind of help do you get as a parent? I will go: my daughter goes to kindergarten and an extracurricular program, which allows my husband and me to work full time. Before that, she went to a private kindergarten. We have a cleaning lady who comes every two weeks. Both couples of grandparents live side by side and babysit at least once a month. We acknowledge and appreciate the resources we have at our disposal.
If you want, share your situation. Let’s take off the paternity wig.