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QUEEN BEE MOMS & KINGPIN DADS
By Rosalind Wiseman
Crown, $25, 352 pp
Reviewed by PIPER JONES CASTILLO
To make you understand parenting in the 21st century, Rosalind Wiseman wants you to wallow in your bad memories. She asks you to be 12 again, remembering what it was like to be tangled up in the social hierarchy of middle school.
Parenting brings out our nurturing side, but it also "taps our deepest insecurities, makes us question our every ability, and causes us to measure ourselves against everyone around us," says Wiseman in Queen Bee Moms and Kingpin Dads.
"In other words, it makes us feel like seventh graders all over again."
Just like kids in middle school, adults often fall into readily identifiable stereotypes and cliques, says Wiseman. In Queen Bees and Wannabees (2002), she explored the "mean" world of adolescent girls, including the Queen Bee girl, a middle schooler "who looks like Barbie and acts like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland." Now she introduces us to the adult version: the Queen Bee mom who is socially intelligent, usually very charming and often voted head of the PTA because "Queen Bees are the ones who get the job done."
Queen Bees and other parental archetypes - the Kingpin Dad, the Proud to be a Pain Mom (The school did what?) and the Hip Dad (Okay kids, since I know you are going to drink, party over here!) - form what Wiseman calls "Perfect Parent World," a childish place where decisions are too often made on the basis of fear and competition or sometimes just to make a good impression on back-to-school night.
Where are the grownups?
When two mothers discover that their daughters participated in a party that got dangerously out of hand, one mother accuses the other of not being a trustworthy adult, Wiseman relates in a chapter entitled "Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll." Her daughter is not permitted to socialize with the family again. In other words, the mothers choose to fight. "Why do these situations so often end up with the parents alienated from one another?" Wiseman asks. Why not instead use the opportunity to join forces?
"We've got to hope that other parents will have the courage to let us know if they see our kids stepping out of line," writes Wiseman. "We have to have that same courage - not out of a sense of superiority but out of a sense of community."
Parents would better serve their kids by setting aside childish reactions and working together to raise this generation, says Wisman, who is co-founder of the Empower Program, a national organization focused on teens and violence prevention.
Parents do not need to be insanely involved in their child's lives nor, the other extreme, too self-absorbed with their own professional ambitions, she says. Her goal is to help parents participate in their child's life with a more "sane involvement."
Wiseman's descriptions of archetypal moms and dads, those intense parents many of us know all too well, are amusing, but the real value of Queen Bee Moms and Kingpin Dads is the road map it offers, showing the way out of "Perfect Parent World," populated by parents who never grew up.
- Piper Jones Castillo is a Times staff writer.
MEET THE AUTHORRosalind Wiseman will be the guest speaker at a luncheon to benefit the Ophelia Project Tampa Bay, from noon to 1:30 p.m., Thursday at Higgins Hall, 5225 N Himes Ave., Tampa. The cost is $25 per person. Advance registration is required. Call (813) 224-9622, ext. 279.