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Top five MOM stories of 2008
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Thomas Beatie, the pregnant man, on Oprah
Ok, everyone is doing it, so we are going to make a list of the parenting stories we found interesting. We, of course, are totally biased and don't always pay attention to everything we should, so we surely missed some. If there is another story you think we missed, let us know!
Celebrity teen pregnancy
With Jamie Lynn Spears, sister of pop singer Britney, giving birth at age 16 to Maddie Briann Aldridge, and 17 year old Bristol Palin, daughter of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, due any day now, 2008 may be known as the year of the pregnant teen. Pregnant teens made their mark all over the news and entertainment world. In addition to Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin (which led to my favorite Tina Fey quote as Sarah Palin: "Marriage is meant to be a sacred institution between two unwilling teenagers."), add the movie Juno, about a teen who gives her baby up for adoption, and the ABC tv show The Secret Life of the American Teen which is about another pregnant teen. And if the media was not saturated enough with teens getting ready to give birth, up popped the now debunked story of media the Manchester "Pregnancy Pact," in which the news claimed several teenaged girls at one high school all agreed to get pregnant at the same time. That all turned out not to be true, but it fascinated and disturbed the press for quite a while.
Man gives birth
This one was a strange one, for all sorts of reasons. First, there was the fact that a man, Thomas Beatie, was pregnant. It turned out he was born a woman, and when he went through the process of becoming a man, he did not have his ovaries removed. This made the pregnancy less of a scientific wonder and more an issue of gender politics. The gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community was torn on whether this man should have told his story so publically, concerned it could cause more damage than good. The jury is still out on whether telling the story to Oprah hurt or helped. Now, according to Barbara Walters, Beatie is pregnant again.
Monster families
Two big families were in the media this year, and they illustrate two completely different ways to have kids. The first family is the Duggars, Michelle and Jim and their 18 children. The family follows the controversial "Quiverfull" Christian movement, which is very conservative, generally opposes using either birth control or infertility treatments, and is opposed to feminism. The most recent addition to the family was Jordyn-Grace, born December 19 of this year. The rest range in age from 17 months to 21 years old and also have names starting with "J": John-David, Jana, Jill, Jessa, Jinger, Joseph, Josiah, Joy-Anna, Jeremiah, Jedidiah, Jason, James, Justin, Jackson, Johannah Jennifer, and Joshua. The family's life is now being chronicled in a reality show on TLC called 17 Kids & Counting.
Another TLC reality show follows the next giant family that became famous in 2008. The show became quite popular after an appearance on the Oprah show this year. Jon & Kate Plus Eight shows the daily life of a family that went from Jon & Kate and their twin girls, to Jon & Kate, the twins, and a new set of sextuplets. Unlike the Duggars, this family was the product of modern fertility science. The twin girls are now eight years old and the sextuplets are four. Everything they do happens in sextuplicate (is that a word?) and it really makes having just one kid look easy!
Read more about the Duggars new baby, click here.
Momification of Michelle Obama
Not surprisingly, with the election of Barack Obama as the 44th president, quite a bit of attention has been paid to his accomplished wife, Michelle. Michelle has a distinguished career in law and a history of working on behalf of the underpriveleged. As part of the campaign, there was an effort to make her more "palatable" to more conservative America, giving her a fashion make-over, even advice to speak more quietly so she would not seem so "militant." On top of that, a great deal of attention has been paid to what role she will have as First Lady, something she herself has defined as "mom-in-chief." Debate now rages on the internet about whether she has been too "mom-ified", transforming a formidable working woman into a docile stay-at-home mom (although, if you met any of the stay-at-home moms I know, formidable would apply to them, too). Some argue that she is "throwing away her achievements" by not keeping a paying job, others say she is "reinventing the stay-at-home mom." She has, indeed, said she plans not to take a paying job while in the White House, but there is still question over whether she would qualify as a "stay-at-home mom", considering all the volunteer work she will no likely do. I would also argue that even if she chose to truly become a stay-at-home mom for awhile, it is in no way "throwing away" your education or achievements. Either way, the debate has not been settled and will no doubt continue for the entire four (or eight) years she is in the White House.
Twilight Moms
This last one is about those crazy moms that got a little bit obsessed with the books from the Twilight series, and the movie that was made from the first book. The books, about a vampire who falls in love with a human girl and the romance that follows, has become a worldwide phenomenon, selling 17 million copies so far. The movie, which came out in November, has made of $150 million in less than a month in theaters. The sequel is already in pre-production and has a release date of November 20, 2009. Although the general assumption was that the movie would draw only teens and tweens, it turned out that women over 25 made up 45% of the females in attendance (only a quarter of the audience was male) . Many of them were moms, either attending with their daughters, or going on their own with other moms. Twilight moms have gotten mixed reviews- they are pretty much just women who like a book and the community of people who share their fun. Not everyone likes the Twilight Moms, or thinks they are normal, but they had a lot of fun and made the movie a lot of money. After the sequel comes out next year, there is a good chance the Twilight Moms will make this list again!
To read more about Twilight Moms, click here.
To read a defense of Twilight Moms, click here.
So what did we miss? Let us know in the comments.
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