I totally meant this when I said it, and I didn’t tune in for the next J&K episode, the one where the Gosselins finally announced their intention to divorce. But I have to admit that I have cheated since drawing my J&K line in the sand; while I might not have actually watched the last episode, I’ve continued to follow the Gosselins fairly avidly via the media — both online and in line at the supermarket. Plus — true confession here — I sometimes even spend a few minutes perusing Gosselins Without Pity, the community for obsessive Jon and Kate haters. I don’t approve of the vitriol there, but that hasn’t kept me from taking a peek. If you add to this evidence the fact that even after I publicly swore off the Gosselins, I went on to blog about them yet again, one can only conclude that I’m actually a wee bit obsessed myself with the very thing I have more than once claimed to loathe.

I am not alone in my secret, shameful, and continuing consumption of Gosselin, Inc. Even as most of the world claims to be appalled and bored by couple’s painfully raw on-air disintegration, we continue to watch and read. In fact, last week’s episode — featuring the couple’s much-hyped “big announcement” — drew more than ten million viewers in the U.S. (that’s a lot). This sustained level of extreme public interest is why the editors of US Magazine, who can lay claim to a pretty good understanding of the cultural appetites of the masses, chose to put J&K on their cover for a record-breaking seven times in a row over the last two months.

So what is it about these people that turned them into the first true superstars of the reality TV era?

Usually, when we speak of “reality TV” programs, we aren’t talking about reality at all; instead, we are talking about people, lifestyles, or dramatic conceits that are as far removed from the “reality” most of us will ever know as the worst episode ever of Fantasy Island ever was. We don’t drive big rigs over treacherous ice passages for a living, or party every night in The Hills. We don’t have parents who are little people, and Bruce Jenner isn’t our stepfather. We aren’t desperate D-list celebrities or former child stars with “issues.”

We are, like Jon and Kate Gosselin were for the first several seasons of the show, families who live in modest brick and tile homes in the suburbs. We bicker with our spouses when we are stressed, sometimes sounding pretty shrewish. We take our children on ever-so-thrilling excursions to places like Target and the paediatrician, and we sometimes get to go out to a grown-ups-only dinner. We worry about money, and our children throw tantrums and make messes. And yes, once every few years, just like Kate Gosselin, we end up with our own regrettably awful “hair-don’t, which we only realise was that bad in hindsight.

Before the first episode of the show aired, Jon and Kate were nobodies in the most honest, down-to-earth sense of the word. Even with eight small children, Jon and Kate Gosselin’s “reality” was closer to that of their viewers than any other reality show. They could be us, and we could be them. That’s what’s captured our attention in such a powerful way.

We watched these people, our cultural doppelgangers, for the same reason “mommyblogs” have exploded in popularity; both the TV show and the blogs offer us a reflection of ourselves via the prism of mundane details of Other People’s Lives. While there are certainly many parent-penned blogs featuring high drama and out-there storylines, these kinds of mommyblogs haven’t gained the mainstream popularity and supportive following of the “classic” momblogs, like Dooce, Finslippy and BusyMom. These bloggers may offer the occasional glimpse into their family’s tough times — miscarriage, depression or job loss — but these are dramatic elements we recognise from our own lives. And the momblogging superstars maintain a content balance tilted decidedly toward the everyday — weaning, daycare, nappies and those hilariously competitive other mothers at the playground. In other words, they, like Jon and Kate, have are a hit because there is something affirming and comforting in the realisation that our lives are actually no more or less crazy or interesting than anybody else’s.

But when Jon and Kate Gosselin, these aggressively average people, began to change so obviously and dramatically, and then started exposing their marital problems in the same declarative, exceptionally revealing way they had previously exposed their struggles with mundane things like toilet training and paying the electricity bill, it was too late for us to turn away. We thought we knew these people, but suddenly, we didn’t. Jon and Kate’s wickedly rapid transformation from parents-like-us to coiffed, over-tanned, wealthy, cheating bar-hoppers was like one of those changed-in-an-instant stories you read in which the beloved family dog inexplicably snaps one day, killing a houseguest, or a single mum waiting tables receives an anonymous $100,000 tip. As Kate acquired a personal bodyguard and Jon began wearing Ed Hardy jeans and diamond studs in his ears, our affection might have turned to disdain, but our appetite for more details of this train wreck in the making only grew.

But even with the newly acquired celebrity accoutrements, Jon and Kate’s narrative still resonates with us, because unlike paparazzi stories about Brad and Angelina’s latest walk down the red carpet in Cannes, we can still find connection to this previously quite bland couple: We have troubled marriages. We deal with infidelity. We get divorces and try to figure out custody arrangements. The “it could happen to me” factor means that, despite our protestations, we are now even more enthralled with the Gosselins’ ordinary lives writ large than we were back when all they had to entertain us was a demonstration of how they sorted their weekly recycling. And I suspect we would have the same perversely heightened fascination combined with public condemnation if the world’s most popular mommy blogger, Heather Armstrong of Dooce suddenly stopped blogging about Leta’s favorite breakfast cereal, and instead starting publishing pictures of herself sunbathing in a bikini in her front yard, or writing about how she and her husband had decided to take up swinging.

Of course, there is a very dark side to this circus. Those eight children are real, flesh-and-blood human beings, not actors, with feelings and rights of their own. Any sane parent must wonder what the long-term ramifications of all of this will be for the Gosselin children. It’s hard enough to live through your parents’ divorce the first time without one day being able to re-live every lurid detail through re-runs, You Tube and Google. One can make a pretty strong case that the truly unprecedented extent to which the Gosselins have exposed every aspect of their young children’s lives to the public over the past several years constitutes a form of child abuse.

One can also argue that by continuing to watch, we are complicit in that abuse, no matter how much we try to obviate our involvement via loud proclamations of disapproval for the Gosselin parents’ choices. In this way, Jon & Kate differs significantly from the comparatively limited and narrow glimpse that even the boldest mommy bloggers offer into their children’s lives. Blogging about our families may be a form of public-facing, reality-based entertainment, but it’s one that generally seems to find a healthy balance between sweet, memoir-like sharing and inappropriate, capitalistic exploitation. Jon and Kate is the worst side of mommy blogging, taken to its furthest extreme.

Given the show’s increasingly depressing turn, how long will our collective fascination with Jon and Kate continue? I suspect that it will go on as long as they choose to keep living their lives for public consumption. We, “the public,” have become enmeshed in this couple’s reality. We’re all now as much a part of the Gosselin saga as Jon and Kate themselves. We are caught in a co-dependent relationship with these characters. If we can tear ourselves away, maybe they will eventually go back to being normal again, and then so can we.

Journalist and yoga teacher Debbie Hodgson (pictured right) has written a guide for parents keen to move towards a more sustainable and less commercial lifestyle with her new book Sustainable Baby. We spoke to her about why having a child forces you to examine your environmental impact – and whether it really is possible for busy urban parents to switch to cloth and make their own baby food. – Amber Robinson

Were you always a greenie, or did having kids make you re-think your lifestyle?
I come from the country so I know a little bit about where our water comes from and where our food comes from , but I wasn’t a rabid environmentalist. Becoming a parent made the vague idea that it’s a good thing to conserve the environment into a very immediate feeling. Suddenly we were talking about the future of my child, and I think that’s a really common experience with parents, that they do become environmentalists when they have children because they suddenly see their world through their child’s eyes.

Modern parents are so busy, often both parents are working and their weekends are full of activities. Is it too much to ask to switch back to cloth nappies and cook own baby food?

The lifestyle many families live or have lived up to now (I think it’s changing a bit) everything is go go go. We need to get a bigger house, we need to make more money, we need to go on more extravagant holidays… not many people are prepared to put that on hold when they’ve got children. For people that are, it’s not such a stretch to use cloth nappies. I think I wrote in the book, once you’ve got your system going it should take less than 10 minutes a day. That’s a conservative estimate, it could take even less.

But I hope my book doesn’t come across as ‘everyone has to use cloth nappies, everybody has to cook their own baby food”. I hope it comes across as ‘here are some options, here are some alternatives’.

I know lots of people who do it who work full time. It’s a challenge, but there’s also options, like part time cloth. Using cloth at home but disposables when you’re out.

If you’re using disposables there are ways you can reduce your environmental impact. You can use washable wipes, you can use reusable wipes, you can reduce how many nappies you use by getting the baby to toilet into a container rather than into the nappy… there are lots of options.

If you can’t give up disposable nappies, what about some other ways to reduce your impact? My book provides chapters on other things you can do. It’s important to look at the overall footprint of your house. You could reduce it in a huge way by getting rid of a car. It doesn’t have to be all about nappies.

The thing with cloth nappies is that the lingo is so confusing, as I wrote about it in my blog last week.

When I had my baby I never even considered using cloth nappies and I wasn’t in an environment where anyone used them. My son was 5 months old when I got my first cloth nappy and I thought, ‘what the hell do I do with this?’ I took it home and did a bit of research and realised that I was going to need a cover and that one wasn’t going to be enough, I needed a few! I really knew nothing. My background’s in journalism, so when I don’t get something I exhaustively research it until I do. By the time I got it, I had so many hours behind me, I thought this all needs to be collated in to one place, which made me want to write the book.

In your book you have some nice ideas for homemade toys and activities for babies. Do you think parents are conned in to buying too many toys for their kids? I feel like my house is full of plastic.

Plastic is an incredibly useful substance and it’s fantastic for kitchen utensils — which is why kitchen utensils make great toys because they can’t break them!

My toddler has a cupboard in the kitchen and everything that can’t be broken goes in there, that’s his little area where he can cook and he can tidy, he can imitate what I’m doing. You don’t need to buy a plastic kitchen, I mean they’re cute… but they’re just kitchens. Whereas with a cupboard, you can pull everything out of them and use them for something completely different, like to display a rock collection, which is what my son’s really into at the moment.

So I really think that not just talking about plastic, but custom made toys, they’re very limited in that you buy them and the child has to use them for that one purpose. Not only are they unsustainable because once that purpose has passed you have to throw it out, it also doesn’t grow with the child. Developmentally, it’s better to have something that can grow with a child.

In the book I wrote about a piece of wood we had that was gnarled and really interestingly shaped. For my 18-month-old it was an elephant that he rode on. Then we had a four- year-old visit and for him it was a motorbike. So it adapts to where the child’s at and what their interests are.

I think for children, what I’ve come to realise is that more than toys its more interesting to have spaces for them. What my little boy loves are cubbies and places to hide away and take histoys to play. You can make one out of a sheet hung over two chairs or pull the sofa out from the wall so that they can crawl behind it. The great thing is that you haven’t added to what’s in your house already, you haven’t had to buy anything.

If families wanted to make a few changes to become more sustainable what would you recommend?

Draw an imaginary line around your house, and think about what comes in and what comes out.. what’s the footprint? What are you using? That includes overseas holidays and car trips. That would be the first thing I would do, then evaluate where you are prepared to cut down.

You could sell your second car and send your kids to the local school walking distance away – that would make a big impact.

One of my favourite small tips is to not flush the toilet so often, I’m not talking number 2s! Have a compost bin or worm farm if you live in an apartment. Use the worm castings to grow vegetables in containers. It’s a great way to introduce your child to the idea that food needs to be grown, it’s a great way to get your kids to eat veges too. You start to realise what’s in season and what’s grown locally.

If you live near a co-op buy grains and staples with your own packaging. If you grow your own veges and buy at a co-op, you only need to take your bins once a month, and that’s a great feeling!

Think twice about buying new clothes. There are a lot of good quality clothes just sitting in second hand shops and op shops. I think they need to be rotated around more. The cotton industry is a huge user of resources.

Sustainable Baby is available from the ABC Store for $AU24.95. Read more about Debbie and sustainability at her blog.

1. Shrek

Didn’t know this was based on a book, did you? You’re not missing much. The 1990 version written by William Steig is crudely drawn, and its ogre is missing the sweet inner onion layers of everyone’s favorite curmudgeon. Shrek onscreen makes a good show of being a beast, his gruffness aided and abetted by Mike Myers’ spot-on Scottish brogue. Shrek on the page is simply beastly, and proud of it. Stuck in the palace hall of mirrors, Steig’s ogre is shocked by the hideous creatures all around him — until he realizes they’re all him. “He faced himself, full of rabid self-esteem, happier than ever to be exactly what he was,” Steig writes. Bring back our self-effacing swamp settler and give us a double dose of donkey.

2. Bambi

If you thought mama deer getting blown away in the movie was harsh, try reading Bambi as told by Felix Salten. While Mom’s busy dying, Bambi is scrambling to get away and meets “a dying pheasant, with its neck twisted,” as well as Friend Hare’s wife, whose “hind leg dangled lifelessly in the snow, dyeing it red and melting it with warm, oozing blood. . . In the middle of her words, she rolled over on her side and died.” True to nature? Yes. Child appropriate? If you’re a fan of the “give my kids nightmares for a month” canon, then yes. Something stinks about this book, and it isn’t Flower.

3. Cinderella

The poor little orphan girl in the Disney movie has it rough there for awhile, but try being the Cinderella in the original Grimm’s Fairy Tale. Her dad was very much alive and totally blind to his witch of a second wife. When dad asks his daughter and stepdaughters what they want from one of his trips, he takes Cinderella’s wishes at face value and brings the stepmonsters pearls and jewels while the little cinder girl gets the branch from a hazel bush. Gee, thanks Dad, but the mice made better benefactors.

4. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966 version)

Now before you get your Dr. Seuss-loving panties in a bunch, it’s not that the book was bad. But we’re hard-pressed to imagine a time when the mean one wasn’t voiced by Boris Karloff. The animated flick redefined one of our Seussian favorites, and helped our heart grow two sizes. The Jim Carrey version, however — and we quote — “stink, stank, stunk.”

5. The Little Mermaid

Ursula the sea witch was a kind-hearted old soul next to the enchantress in Hans Christian Anderson’s original tale. He cut the tongue out of the mouth of the Mer-King’s youngest daughter and treated her with a potion that would let her retain her “graceful movements,” but make “every step [she took] cause [her] pain all but unbearable.” That Ariel of the Disney tale let go of her precious voice for the love of a boy is hard enough for parents of little girls to bear, but the lengths the original mermaid went to hook herself a man are best left in the 1800s, when the Anderson tale was written.

6. How to Eat Fried Worms

The 1973 book is a goofy send-up of little-boy antics, but Billy Forrester’s tender tummy and worm-eating quest finds real meaning in the 2006 flick about a new kid at school faced with an impossible quest: He has to eat ten worms by seven p.m. on Saturday — or end up wearing worms in his pants to school on Monday. Instead of noshing on nightcrawlers for a measley $50 like his written counterpart (who ate fifteen, and ended up being “the first person who’s ever been hooked on worms”), the live action Billy is a hero for new kids everywhere. He shows up the bully, realises girls can be good friends, and starts getting along with his little brother.

7. The Neverending Story

A movie based on a book about a book that takes a kid on an adventure worthy of the movies? If you can follow that, you can follow the story of Bastian’s journey to Fantasia and back. This is another case of a book that isn’t exactly bad (it has its own cult following), but for kids who grew up fantasizing about their own fluffy, puppy-headed Luck Dragon in the ’80s, the movie is still the best option for sharing the story with their kids. The book is just too long, made for reading in installments to younger kids, and its twists and turns are — while fantastical — sometimes hard to follow on the page. The original was written in German, and the English translation can be awkward going. It’s also plagued by a moral that does not translate to younger kids; Bastian turns from the fat kid with no friends to a powerful one, but in the book all his changes and all his abilities cannot completely conquer unhappiness. The author (Michael Ende) was so angry at the film that he sued for the production of the movie to be changed, but he lost. Rumour has it another film adaptation is in the works. And that, folks, is why they call it neverending.

8. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Ian Fleming has had his fair share of books loosely adapted for the silver screen (”James Bond” ring any bells?) — the word “loosely” being the operative word when it comes to his children’s tale of that marvelous flying machine. Hollywood threw in a love story that’s Truly Scrumptious, exing out old Mimsie (the mum, who was very much alive on the page). In doing so, they gave Professor Caracatus Potts, the kooky widower trying to do right for his kids, a higher purpose.

9. Mary Poppins

Julie Andrews made her sweet, but the real Mary was anything but. Strict, vain and kind of cranky, P.L. Travers’ carpetbagging nanny was not going to sing out explanations about the world around Jane and Michael Banks (and their twin siblings in the book). This excerpt from the original Poppins book sums her up quite well: “Michael sighed happily. He loved the story and was never tired of hearing it. ‘And it’s all quite true, isn’t it?” he said, just as he always did. ‘No,’ said Mary Poppins, who always said ‘No.’” Sounds like someone could have used a spoonful of sugar. Author Travers, by the way, hated the movie.

10. Old Yeller

A Newberry Award winner, it’s been reprinted and branded as a “perennial classic.” In other words, another book that isn’t bad… Still, we find the heart-wrenching loss of Travis’ dog more moving onscreen. Is it the baby face of Kevin Corcoran (the little boy who played the youngest Coates boy in the 1957 Disney film) or the sweet disposition of Tommy Kirk (who played Yeller’s bonded-for-life best boy, Travis)? More likely it’s Spike, the canine actor who brought to life the joyful friendship of a boy and his dog. He made you believe a mutt could fend off a bear and a bunch of wild hogs to save his family. Spike made us sob hysterical tears when we were kids, and then brought on another gushing river when we sat down as adults to watch it with our own kids.

Ferberizing is the Ironman of competitive parenting: You train your baby to sleep on his own by letting him scream his little lungs out all alone wondering where the hell you went.  It’s not for the weak or the lazy.

But if you have the stony heart to do it, it’s worth it. Because, as every overachieving parent knows, it’s all about the sleep: how soon your child does it through the night, how long, and how deeply. It’s the single biggest mark of success or failure in the first three months or parenthood. The faster you reach it, the sooner little Max can get on with tracking a raisin with his eyes and packing his bags for Harvard.

So, naturally, if you live in Boston and you want your child to have an edge, you try to get a piece of the sleep doctors. Anxious and overeducated, we’ll line up, like Oscar day gawkers, to catch a glimpse of the great ones — to hear them speak, or to rub elbows with them at your husband’s boss’s college roommate who went to med school with one of them’s cocktail party.

Some parents might even have the balls to seek an appointment. Fat chance. Someone has to actually die before a space opens up and, even then, there are parents who’ve been waiting years ahead of you. Get in line, groupie. You can’t sleep your way to the sleep doctors in this town.

You need to know all this so you can appreciate what it is I’m about to tell you. I’m not a lucky person. I don’t win preschool raffles, or baby-shower games, or Blues Clues Bingo. But one day— one frigid New England Monday— my luck changed. I got the golden ticket of competitive parenting.

My daughter hadn’t slept through the night in four and a half years. In other words, never.  For a while we were able to make excuses for her: “Oh, she needs to eat every few hours”; or, “We just moved, so she’s in a transition period”; or, “it’s Daylight Savings. Again.” Every few months we’d buy another sleep book, read it, and try the latest method out on her for a week or so, but none of them ever took. Then we’d get too tired, or lose the book, and things would just keep on keeping on.

We never volunteered any of this information. But inevitably we would get asked The Question: “Is she sleeping through the night?” Now, this is a land mine of a question. It seems harmless, but what the person really wants to know is: “Are you a lazy slacker?” or, if they’re newish parents, “Are you worse at this than I am?” The few times we fell into the trap of telling people the truth, they’d start in about setting limits and consistency. Usually this would be followed by a lecture on their personal sleep guru’s philosophy and how, with the right commitment, it worked for them.

The point is, no one feels sorry for you when your kid is the “Bad Sleeper.” They just look at you like you represent everything that’s wrong with the world: negligence, sloth, incompetence. Like I can’t be bothered with sleep training because I’m too busy surfing the Internet for cheap deals on recalled car seats. To make things worse, every time we turned around there’d be another study out about how sleep deprivation makes you stupid and fat. Great. Now we weren’t just lame. We were dumb, fat, and lame.

One day, determined to seize control, we locked our daughter in her room and let her scream from three-thirty to six-o’-clock in the morning. Just like the book said. When she finally stopped, our stony hearts leapt for joy. We cracked open the door, expecting to find her little body in a heap on the floor, surrendered to sleep. Instead, there she stood, staring at us with a twinkle in her eye — baby shit everywhere.  If I hadn’t been so completely freaked out, I might have admired her for her ingenuity. After all, she figured out what the biggest weapon in her toddler arsenal was, and she wasn’t afraid to use it. But as I pulled on my rubber gloves and started scrubbing the walls with every ounce of disinfectant I could find in the house, all I could hear was the snide voice of Failure whispering in my ear: It’s over. She’s broken you. You just don’t have what it takes.

We started lying to friends and relatives after that. We figured if we couldn’t wipe out Failure, we could hide it like a fifth of scotch in the flour bin.

But then our son was born, and I stopped being able to keep up whatever façade of control I’d managed to cobble together. The interrupted sleep combined with a newborn was finally just too much. I started doing things like leaving the house with my Brest Friend still on.  A Brest Friend, if you haven’t seen one, is a big foam donut that velcros around your waist so you can rest the baby on it, breast feed, and keep your hands free for things like eating and crying. It even has little pockets in it for the remote and your cell phone in case you want to watch people on TV eating and crying; or want to talk to a friend and cry, or talk to her about what you’re eating.

I don’t know if it was the hormones, or the sense of our utter failure finally hitting me that drove me to chance the unthinkable. But, one day, Brest Friend strapped to my waist, boobs flapping around like a crazed harpy, I fished out my phone and called the office of the Great Dr. Ferber himself.

There must have been something in my voice — some sound-wave frequency that vibrated in just the right way off the receptionist’s inner ear. Kind of like a dying whale sending out a distress call. Maybe someone had just that second died, and, before the receptionist had had time to pick up the phone to call the next family in line, my call had gone through. All I know is that she had an appointment for me. Six months away in July. But, still, an appointment. And not with one of his lackeys, or his protégés. With Him.

I carried that appointment around with me like a sweet secret. Every time I would have to endure the smug advice of another parent toting her sleep-glutted wunder-child, I would think: I have tried everything possible to fix this problem. If Dr. Ferber can’t fix it, then it’s unfixable.

In a weird way, I think this was the outcome I was hoping for. I imagined Ferber working intensely on our daughter, canceling all of his appointments and speaking engagements to direct all of his brilliance toward her. He would let her scream for days in a padded room that he would spray down with Lysol every few hours, but she would persevere. She would be his greatest challenge. A medical anomaly. Never in his thirty years of practice (he would say) had he seen such a child. She must be a genius. How lucky she was to have such patient and insightful parents who had the guts to make that call. But there’s nothing to be done. Nothing. (A pause: he removes his glasses, and rubs his giant brain-vein). I have exhausted all of my expertise, all of my tricks. If I can’t make this child sleep through the night, then no one possibly can.

And then he would send us home, vindicated. When people would hear about our Vampire child and ask in that patronizing tone, “Well, have you tried Ferberizing her?” we would finally have the iron-clad response: “Why, Yes. Yes, we have.” Then I’d reach into my impeccably organized diaper bag and pull out the laminated article from the New England Journal of Medicine featuring my little genius. Judgment would turn to awe.

Don’t get me wrong. There was a part of me that was hoping it would work. But I liked this story a lot and kept adding onto it as the months went by. It kept me warm and safe through that frigid winter.

But then things, as they always do, started to change: Winter turned to Spring; I didn’t need my Brest Friend anymore; my baby son inexplicably, accidentally really, started sleeping through the night. Even my daughter started waking up just once instead of twice or three times. Sometimes.

In June, I got a call from Dr. Ferber’s receptionist to confirm my appointment. And you know what?  I didn’t think twice before telling her I didn’t need it anymore. When I hung up the phone, it took me a few moments to realize the hugeness of what had just happened: I had actually broken up with the man of my dreams.

My daughter’s eight now. She’s a great kid, but she still wakes up at least once a night usually and calls out for a snuggle or a blanket, or just because she can. We have, according to the books, utterly failed. But when I walked away from my Ferber fantasy, I also walked away from what those books represent: the idea that every child can and must be shaped into the same perfect being, and our need to get the gold star for doing it perfectly and by the book.

Now, instead of lying about how well my family sleeps, I tell people that I cancelled on Dr. Ferber. And I feel kind of proud about it. Because when I did it, I owned what every parent knows but few of us publicly admit: that this is a sloppy job, and no amount of Lysol can wipe out all the messy, petrifying imperfections it brings out.

Even if the real reason was that I was just too tired to go.

Excerpted from Afterbirth: Stories You Won’t Read in a Parenting Magazine, edited by Dani Klein Modisett.

God Is is your second book with a religious theme. What inspired you to write it?

My children are all adults now. I was having a conversation with one of them a year or so ago and we mentioned the word God and she said oh, I don’t think I believe in God anymore. I thought I knew everything about her but it happened while I wasn’t watching you know.

So I went away, and thought well, that’s really her business and it’s not up to me to lecture her and try to change her mind. What I’ll do is go away and think about all the young people who don’t necessarily believe in such things and I will write a story about that.

What is your religious background?
I grew up believing in God, however the kind of god I grew up (I was raised as a Presbyterian) with was the idea of an old man in the sky with a big book that he wrote down everything dreadful that I had done — kind of like a terrifying parent who punished me and made me feel guilty.

I’m more interested in the idea of a God who has positive rather than negative, who is a friend and comfort and life affirming and nurturing force.

And then I started to think about, when I grew up as a child in the 50s, we were told that the whole of our future would be about technology and science that religion would be dead, there would be absolutely no point in belief in the future. Looking back on that, in my eyes, the complete opposite happened. In fact I don’t think that anyone really expected the interest that our society has taken in the metaphysical, the supernatural and belief systems.

I think the reason for that is that the more we have been chasing material wealth, the big house and the big car, the more that we thought would bring us happiness the more disappointed we’ve been. I think it’s a really important time, during the financial crisis, to be talking about “is there anything else”?

It seems to be a bit of a publishing trend at the moment, the ’search for spirituality in a modern world’. I have just finished Eat, Pray, Love which is for adults, but follows that theme.

Exactly. Many of us got all our material things that we thought would make us happy but they didn’t make us happy and so a lot of us are going, so, what else is there? And not just adults, it’s a lot of young people going ’so what else is there’. I think there’s a lot of searching in our world.

I guess I was lucky so far as I was brought up by parents and grandparents who believed there was something else. A lot of young people have been brought up by adults who don’t say that, who say well, ‘you find out for yourself when you’re ready’. So I hope this book is for them.

What I liked about the book was it was non-denominational – you could be talking about anyone’s God. I don’t know if that was your aim, if you wanted to write a particularly Christian book or deliberately kept it kind of free so anyone with a belief in a higher deity could read it to their kids and it would have some kind of resonance.

That’s completely my hope. As I said, I was brought up a Presbyterian, but as an adult I became a Quaker. And first of all as Quakers, we’re not interested in trying to change other people’s beliefs, trying to lecture them.

God Is was thought by the [Australian] school book clubs to be inappropriate to be put in schools. I’m not interested in making kids read this book, so I was not hoping that it would on any reading lists as that would be imposing my ideas on someone else but i thought it would be really good to have in the library if someone wanted to go find it. We’ve gone down that American route where people are so terrified that they might be be seen to be imposing their views on others that nothing gets.

I’ve got Muslim friends and Buddhist friends who say to me, “Get over it, celebrate Christmas. Don’t say Season’s Greetings or Happy Holidays like the Americans do, say Happy Christmas, that’s what it’s about.”

My Buddhist Chinese friend says well, my biggest celebration is Chinese new year, I’m perfectly happy for you to have Christmas. I don’t want you to feel like you can’t mention Christmas in case I’m offended.”

So I kind of feel like in a away, we’re a bit too cautious about this. For me, while it’s really important to create space for people to celebrate different beliefs, it’s also important to have space for mine.

Do you think it’s a kind of political correctness gone mad?
I do, I think we’re too polite and too cautious, which is a funny thing to say about Australians!

What seems to be popular for my generation, many of whom were brought up with fire-and-brimstone scripture classes, is to give our kids information about lots of different religions and allow them to make up their own minds. What do you think of that approach?

I think its a great theory and I think some parents carry that out really effectively. But for other parents, there’s a kind of laziness or absence in it, because being able to explore other religions and explain them to people, you need to have a lot of information and unless you’ve been brought up in those traditions, unless you’ve read them thoroughly and spoken to people se beliefs are shared by those religions, I don’t think you’ll have the information

While I do know of some parents who go on adventure with their kids in learning about a whole range of religious beliefs, I also know others who kind of basically leave them vacant and I’m not sure that that’s very helpful. I think that can result in confusion and emptiness rather than enquiry.

How much do you think a small child can understand the concept of God? When did you start talking about God with your children?

It’s never too early, I think. With all types of learning, it’s about putting concepts to the child in words they can understand. You know, in language we make mistakes before we find the right word, in walking we fall and stumble a lot before we become confident walkers. I think it’s the same thing in belief and understanding the world. When we’re children we think the sun comes up in the morning and comes down at night. Once we get into high school science we learn that we’re the ones that revolve around the sun. I think that we gradually accumulate knowledge Therefore I think it’s really important not just to think you need to need to teach it once and never go back to it again. You have to keep coming back to it. You have to keep the lines open with your kids.

As former National President of the Children’s Book Council of Australia, you must have a rather extensive kid’s book collection. What do you think makes a good book for children, and who are your favourite authors?

Ha ha yes – they’re piled everywhere!

As for what makes a good book… I think unless you have, what we used to call ‘the inner child’, the emotional memories of what it’s like to be a child, then you may as well give up. If you have forgotten what children ate when you were five, or what TV programs were on, you can find that out, the internet will tell you all you need to know. But if you’ve forgotten what it felt like to be the only child in class not invited to someone’s birthday party, if you’ve forgotten what’s it felt like to wet your pants on the bus when you were five, its very difficult as an adult writer to get that back.

I love funny books, and so in Australia, for very young children I love Pamela Allen because she often makes me laugh, her picture books are fabulous. For slightly older children, I love books by Andy Griffiths, or Andrew Daddo for slightly older children again; Margaret Clark makes me laugh or Morris Gleitzman or Paul Jennings.

So laughter’s really important and I hope that’s evident in God Is, as I was surprised when [Sydney Anglican] Bishop Forsyth said recently that there was no place for jokes or humour in church, I completely disagree with that, I actually went to school with Bishop Forsyth and in year 11 he was a very funny kid and he made a lot of us laugh. So I was very surprised to hear him say that. All I can think is that he really means, bad jokes or lame jokes. Humour is a bonding agent, it brings comunities together.

Ziggy’s third solo album, Family Time, is his first kids’ CD, and  it’s got a mind-blowing array of guest performers. (Willie Nelson! Laurie Berkner! Paul Simon! Even Jamie Lee Curtis shows up – twice.) The album was also a family affair. His mother and sister perform, as does his four-year-old daughter, Judah. (Ziggy has four other kids, aged 20, 17, 14 and 2.)

Ziggy talked to Babble about his interest in education, his famous dad, and the expertise he’s gained from raising all those kids. — Jennifer V. Hughes

You have some major stars on your new album. What was it like bringing together such a wildly diverse group of artists?

It was a privilege for me, you know what I?m saying? It was very exciting to bring in guest artists.

Is there a thread musically or emotionally between all of them and your work?

I felt something for them, when I was going to put together a group of people who I would work with, I had to find people I have a good feeling for, it has to be a good vibe. It’s a cool vibe,  the spirit in their music. It’s hard to explain, but everything cannot always make sense — sometimes it’s just a feeling.

The proceeds from the sale of the CD will go toward the Chepstowe Basic School in Jamaica — tell me about that project.

The school is for the very young. I wanted to get into education for kids so I adopted a school and we started doing some development. Some of the money will help with more classrooms, more books, better pay for the teachers. I want it to be an example for the rest of Jamaica in terms of what we can do.

You know, I read that Ziggy is not your given name — it’s David. Where did Ziggy come from?

Ziggy came from my father ? it’s from how I used to kick the soccer ball.

Maybe this is a silly question, but what do you think it is about music and children — why are children so drawn to music?

I think that music, beats, melody, sound are a natural part of our DNA, our vibe. It’s just a part of the cycle of our lives, we’re born, we have eyes, we have music. It’s part of us from the beginning. We’re drawn to it because it?s a part of us.

Other than reggae, what other styles of music do you and your kids listen to?

My kids listen to my father’s music, which is reggae of course. They just listen to music that makes us feel good ? rock, jazz, anything. For me it changes depending on what I’m feeling. I’ve listened to Jack Johnson, Green Day, I listen to African music. I listen to a wide variety, I don?t think there is any constant. I go from one thing to the next.

Many of the songs on the album have messages — saving the earth, caring for your brother. What do you think little kids will take from those kind of songs?

I don’t know what they can take from it — I hope they take something. The songs have different layers to them, it wasn’t that it was important, it’s just how we did it. As the kids grow they can understand the deeper meanings of the songs. It will stay with you from birth to old age.

Your dad was such an influential artist, so renowned and beloved. What is that like for you, as a musician?

Well, I was just always trying to play music and create something. I’m very adventurous and so the aspect of being my father’s son never really struck me as any difficulty or a problem or whatever. I just wanted to make music. What he did was not a deciding factor for me.

What do you think you would have done if you were not a musician?

If I was not a musician, I’d still be a musician. Being a musician is just what I’m on earth for. I might not be talking to you, I might not be making records but I’d be making music.

Do you think any of your kids will follow in your musical footsteps?

I don’t know for sure ? it’s possible, but I don’t care at this point. I’m not thinking about that now. I just want them to get a good education and a good upbringing and be good human beings. I want them to be good people first.

Since you have five kids ? which automatically makes you a parenting expert in my book ?

Oh, yeah? Really?

? what?s the most important piece of advice you would give to another parent?

I don’t know — it can’t be one thing for every parent because every child is different. Patience is important, discipline is important, you have to learn balance. I guess that would be my general advice, keep it balanced — don’t lean one way or the other way too far.

You know, come to think of it ? the lyrics to “Three Little Birds” might just be good parenting advice…

(Laughs) Oh yeah, sure.

Ziggy Marley is on tour! Check out his tour dates here.

The book (based on his “Dad Again” Slate column) is elegantly written, frequently funny, and yet at times shockingly old-fashioned. Lewis talks about how much he resents having to do women’s work, what a dope he is when it comes to kid mysteries like the swim nappy, and how men have been conned by women into doing their part in this whole child rearing thing.

We were aghast. And so we called to talk to both him and his wife, the MTV reporter-turned fine art photographer Tabitha Soren, about how couples today balance the work of raising kids and making money. Hilarious bickering ensued. At the end of the interview, Lewis said, “Thanks for exploring our psyche. We don’t do therapy, but you’re the next best thing.”

It was our pleasure! — Ada Calhoun

I was taken aback by some of the things in the book, like, if I can read you one quote: “At some point in the last few decades the American male sat down at the dining room table with the American female, and let us be frank, got fleeced.” I was shocked by that, because when I look it our generation, it seems like men are happy to play their part.

Michael: Ah, well, you must know different men than me.

I think I do.

Michael: Bear in mind that most of the men I’m surrounded by are in Berkeley, California. So, the men I know are very much in the left end of the spectrum. Relatively highly involved dads. On the one hand, it is completely true that there are a lot of men who take great satisfaction in being involved in the minutiae and messiness of actually raising children. But, it is a much smaller universe of men who take any pleasure in the newborn stage. Men, I think, tend to engage once they start to be able to play with the thing and talk to it and have some kind of communication.

But, even so, there is just a wealth of bitching and moaning about the responsibility that I hear and it never really gets voiced. In the universe I’m talking about it’s men who are potentially breadwinners at the same time that they are having all these new caretaking responsibilities and they don’t have a real mental model to use. This is something that’s obviously been changing over the last few decades, and even a man in Berkeley who had his first child today might find himself in a different climate than I did, even ten years ago.

But I do think that there is just enormous friction about who is supposed to do what. I think, actually, that when men are made to do things they don’t want to do, like take care of a child, which they assumed the mother was going to take care of — I think they can get enormous rewards from it, but nevertheless it can be messy getting to that place.

Tabitha: Well, this should be put into some sort of context, both in terms of the book and in terms of the temperament of the hypothetical child. There are realities. Our first child was very far away from the Buddha baby, incredibly demanding — and still is, frankly. So that changes your approach to newborn life entirely. There are people who have easier children that it would probably be more fun to take care of. That was not our situation. In addition, in the book, there are certainly a lot of quotes in there that are not politically correct and aren’t going to make us a lot of friends in Berkeley. But I feel like the book is balanced out by other thoughts about how he’s very quick to feel sorry for himself. If it was just him talking about how men are getting fleeced, I think it would be a really hard thing for most people to stomach. But I think that you watch his emotional state change. It goes up and down and up and down throughout.

Michael: The broader point, to get back to the quote you pulled out, is that there’s sort of this deal that goes on between couples and it used to be — I mean we’re going back to what you would regard as the dark ages, thirty years ago — universal and understood. And the absence of a deal, a universal deal, has wreaked chaos in relationships. I mean, it is unbelievable to me how sensitive an issue it is amongst couples — how much parenting the dad does or the mum does. It may be that you know lots of couples where everybody’s doing half the work outside the house to generate income and exactly half the work raising children, but I don’t know a lot of couples like that. In every relationship I know, there are these imbalances and these imbalances lead to enormous friction, most of which is never spoken. You get it out with your friends when you meet with them for a drink, but basically, people hide it.

I wonder how much of it is the pressure of being the breadwinner. We just ran a story about a woman who really resented her stay-at-home husband because she was making the money and here she was having to toil away at this job she was increasingly dissatisfied with. And at the same time, she found herself cleaning up the house and scheduling the doctor’s appointments and she found herself really resenting him.

Tabitha: Most of the women I know who are the main breadwinners are also the people who are doing all the 1950s defined domestic chores as well, like the stuff you just listed. So that’s sort of just piling on. I don’t know dads who work all day and then complain that they’re also the ones who have to clean up the whole house, and make the doctor’s appointments. I don’t see men multi-tasking in that way. They have one job description and that’s fine and then they get to play and be fun with the kids.

Michael: So, what you’re saying is that when men become stay-at-home dads they completely screw it up?

No, certainly not. The writer was saying that her husband was doing a really good job with the kids. It was just that everything that she had to do that was extra to being a breadwinner, she resented.

Michael: That is not the way, probably, most men feel right now, but it would have been the way men felt thirty years ago. They would have expected this other part to be taken care of. So, if you’re a man now having children, your model is a father who thought that anything extra that he did was slightly a nuisance. Which gets to a larger point of how much of raising children is shit work. Some part of it is wonderful, right? There’s a really fun part of it. But I am dragged kicking and screaming into the shitty parts. Every time, basically. I think maybe in some ways I’m a horrible person, but I don’t think I’m that unusual. That’s my point.

I think it’s funny that there’s an assumption that women love the hard parts.

Michael: Well, that’s a really good point.

Tabitha: That’s baloney. Nobody loves it.

Michael: Nobody loves it. And also, it is really unseemly to complain about it, because you were the one who screwed up and had the children in the first place. So what right do you have to complain about those roles? I’ll tell you one thing I find very funny about parenthood is how deceitful it is. I found that if I didn’t write down exactly how I felt and exactly what had happened within twenty-four hours of what I felt and how it had happened, I was already lying about it. It has actually become one of the litmus tests in friendship for me: will they be honest about all this? When you lie about it, you go around saying, “Oh, everything about kids is just wonderful!”

Tabitha: “Such a blessing.”

Michael: And that makes it so much easier to dump all the shit work on Tabitha, because I’m saying it’s not shit work. You have to basically just face up to the fact that some large part of this is not pleasant and that’s not exactly something that gets told before you have them. Because everybody’s lying to you.

Since the book, have you had an epiphany about how you divide things up? Are you doing charts or something?

Tabitha: Oh God, no. We can’t even do star charts with the kids, let alone each other.

Michael: I would say there’s a lot less conflict. But I’m not sure why. I think basically we’ve just sort of grown used to doing it together. There’s still conflict but . . .

Tabitha: That’s a lie! The reason that we have less conflict is that we happen to have Mary Poppins.

Michael: Well, there you go. That’s true. We have a nanny.

Tabitha: He’s already lying to you. He’s been on the phone fifteen minutes. All-day childcare means I have fewer drudgerous tasks. In addition, I have a colleague and somebody who makes me feel like we’re in it together. That doesn’t happen to be Michael. But, that’s okay.

Michael: Who?

Tabitha: Amy! She struggles over some of the same things that I do. So it makes me feel like I’m maybe not crazy when my nine-year-old is driving me up the wall or I feel like my six-year-old is lying. I have somebody to either commiserate with or celebrate with. Michael is a really energetic parent and he’s engaged and gets involved in the things that he cares about, but I don’t feel alienated because we have this other person in our family who is very engaged in some of the drudgerous stuff. And, for that matter, she really appreciates all of the stuff I do in the way that one might want a husband to appreciate . . .

Michael: [Laughs.]

Tabitha: I mean, she wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him. So I have to be grateful to him too, which is kind of a 1950s point of view. There’s enough of my life that’s very 2009 that I’m comfortable with some of it being 1950s.

So the moral for people who are struggling with their marriages is—

Tabitha: Buy your way out of the problem. Don’t be afraid to throw money on the problem.

Michael: So let’s get down to basic responsibilities. I cook breakfast for them every morning.

Tabitha: Like, elaborate breakfasts.

Michael: I tend to put them to bed if I’m home, if I’m in town, read books, sometimes at great length. I drive them to school once a week, twice a week, whatever I can fit into the schedule. Right now, the two girls are in a softball league and one of them has ten hours of softball practice and games a week. I’m her head coach. And the other one has two hours and every Saturday and I’m her assistant coach. So, when you pile all of that up, it ends up being twenty to twenty-five hours a week of one-on-one stuff. It’s a lot of time. And it creates enormous pressure in my life. Because there’s no way my work life is suited to parenting. My work life is essentially obsessive. I have to write books and books are obsessive things. There’s a lot of stress and give-and-take in all of this. And suffering. I think that suffering is actually really good for the relationship with the kids. It’s just got to be controlled, and to control it we have this thing called the nanny.

So if you can’t afford Mary Poppins, the secret is to revel in the suffering? What’s your advice for the poor?

Tabitha: Everyone’s happier if they have choices, so you have to figure out a way to have some choice in your life for both partners.

Michael: I would say there was nothing as horrible as just having one infant home from the hospital, with just the two of us to take care of it. Those first three months of parenthood were absolutely traumatizing.

Are you worried about having the kids read the book?

Michael: I read parts in the making to them in their classrooms at school, and they got enormous pleasure out of it. Quinn picked it up and after about ninety seconds put it down and said, “I can’t read this daddy, there are too many bad words.” I think the truth is they will take no real interest in it until they’re old enough to be more amused by it. I’m actually not going to write about them — I seriously doubt — ever again. I’m so glad that they have this little artifact from a period of their lives that normally gets completely forgotten and washed away.

Tabitha: Undoubtedly our actions as parents over time will put them into therapy as adults, but I don’t think that this book will be the main reason.

25. Joyce Summers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
As if raising an adolescent wasn’t enough to deal with as a single mum, Joyce Summer has to contend with a daughter whose destiny is to slay vampires and save the world. Instead of disowning or discouraging her, though, Joyce embraces Buffy’s fate. Plus, she’s an awesome surrogate mum to Buffy’s equally eccentric crew of friends.

24. Samantha, Bewitched
You have to give Samantha some credit. She’s an other-worldly witch plonked into suburban life, with a husband who won’t let her use her magic powers on housework. Her mother is intent on breaking up her marriage, her husband has constant work dramas and her daughter Tabitha is a little witch in training. No wonder she occasionally breaks out in to her alter-ego, groovy miniskirt-wearing cousin Serena. All mums need to rebel a little.

23. Roseanne Conner, Roseanne
Just the fact that a blue collar, feminist, middle-aged woman with a bone-dry sense of humour (and who wasn’t a size two!) was on TV for nine seasons was pretty radical. But what was even more radical was that, as the antithesis of the stereotypical Stepford sitcom mom, Roseanne Conner was portrayed as a great mother, who negotiated her kids’ battles with puberty and rebelliousness with ease.

22. Carson Drew, the Nancy Drew series
He may have been the most respected lawyer in River Heights, but Carson Drew seemed to have little in the way of a life of his own. As a widower, he rarely had a love interest and instead devoted himself to his spunky girl-detective daughter, Nancy. But that’s what also makes him so cool–he knows Nancy’s special and doesn’t try to get in the way of her passion, even if that means he has to get kidnapped occasionally so she can save him.

21. Gil Buckman, Parenthood
When Cowboy Dan, a children’s entertainer, fails to show at his socially awkward son’s birthday, Gil Buckman makes himself into a DIY cowboy. Any father who will make balloon animals to placate his kids is a true hero.

20. Ma and Pa, Little House on the Prairie
What other parents could successfully turn a pig’s bladder into a toy? As actual pioneers, Ma and Pa do things like make butter, trap muskrats, and chop wood, earning them an exalted place in the hearts of many a dreamy adolescent girl.

19. Sophia Petrillo, The Golden Girls
Fake senility, mob connections, endless straight talk… No one made cranky as lovable as Sophia Petrillo, who, as she once put it, lived through “two world wars, fifteen vendettas, four operations and two Darrins on Bewitched.”

18. Elyse and Steven Keaton, Family Ties
As classic hippie parents who participated in the Peace Corps and went to Berkeley, they seem more amused than annoyed at the culture divide embodied in their kids: Jennifer, the tomboy; Mallory, the boy-crazy clothes horse; and Alex, the Young Republican. The Keatons’ parenting was a hit with both the health-food crowd and Reaganites.

17. Jim and Cindy Walsh, Beverly Hills, 90210
Let’s say your teenage son does a fictional drug called U4EA at an underground rave and can’t drive home. And he leaves the vintage Mustang he worked so hard for, waiting tables at the Peach Pit, only to come back and find it spray-painted and missing tires. How long would you be mad at him? For the Walshes, it’s just about one episode. Their twins Brandon and Brenda were constantly getting into trouble, but Jim and Cindy seemed to thrive on their kids’ drama.

16. Jack and Norma Arnold, The Wonder Years
On the surface Jack seems a little overbearing and Norma seems like a pushover, but as the series progressed, the parents’ lives started to look more nuanced: Jack quit his middle-management job and Norma went back to college. As they found themselves (it was the late ’60s, after all), we were able to watch as they became better parents.

15. Molly, A Country Practice
When Molly died, Australians collectively stopped in our tracks and reached for a tissue. Full of good humour to the end, we’ll remember her for her loud jumpers as well as the lullaby she used to sing to daughter Chloe: “Blow the wind southerly, southerly, southerly. Blow the wind south o’er the bonny blue sea.”

14. Henry Warnimont, Punky Brewster
A young girl is abandoned by her mum and an old widower, undeterred, fosters her. This is not Masterpiece Theatre, but the plot of the totally ’80s sitcom Punky Brewster. For Henry, Punky’s aggressive uniqueness — embodied in her awesome, mismatched fashion sense (bandannas tied around the leg, tights with legs two different colors, pigtails) — was more of a reason to love her.

13. Mr. and Mrs. Quimby, the Ramona series
Theses parents deal with real life: layoffs, trying to quit smoking, arguing in front of their two precocious kids. And yet, even if their lives aren’t fairy tale-perfect, they try their best and prove that’s enough.

12. Mr. Drummond, Diff’rent Strokes
It takes a compassionate man to step up and honour his former employee’s dying wish to care for her two sons. How does he deal with hostility from his newly adopted son Willis? With lots of toys!

11. Darryl and Sal Kerrigan, The Castle
The blue collar Kerrigan home  may be short on style but big on love. You can be guaranteed than every child’s success – whether they dug a hole or graduated from a hairdressing apprenticeship – will be equally celebrated.

10. Bette Porter and Tina Kennard, The L-Word
They’ve dealt with miscarriages, parent kidnapping, and cheating on each other in this soap version of Sapphic life, but through it all, they always remember to put their daughter Angelica first.

9. Sandy and Kirsten Cohen, The OC
As a couple, they’re a case of opposites attracting: Sandy is an idealistic lawyer from New York, and Kirsten is a WASPy heiress to a real estate conglomerate, but they managed to make their love believable in a nighttime soap filled with fakes. Plus, they gave genuinely sound love advice.

8. Pippa, Home and Away
Rather than give up on their foster children when her husband lost his job, Pippa moved the family to a regional coastal town, quickly becoming a pillar of the community. After years of fostering and the loss of two husbands, Pippa eventually chose to put herself first for the first time in her life and headed overseas with her lover.

7. Edna and Wilbur Turnblad, Hairspray
Edna and Wilbur never make their plus-size daughter Tracy feel anything less than beautiful. And they champion racial integration! In a brilliant casting move, director John Waters cast his muse Divine as mum Edna, making drag queens seem like ideal mum material.

6. Mister Incredible and Elastigirl, The Incredibles
Their attempt to trade in their superhero identity for a bland suburban life fails, and proves to their freaky budding superhero kids (and us!) that it’s never a good idea to hide who you truly are.

5. Julie Rafter, Packed to the Rafters
With two adult kids, a daughter-in-law and her own father sharing her home, it’s a wonder Julie Rafter gets out of bed some mornings. But somehow she does, and even finds the time to go clubbing with her girlfriends.

4. Marge Simpson, The Simpsons
Although close to straight-edge daughter Lisa, Marge has a deep understanding of her “special little guy” Bart and has defended him on many occasions. She once said “I know Bart can be a handful, but I also know what he’s like inside. He’s got a spark. It’s not a bad thing… Of course, it makes him do bad things.” Other mums would be begging for Ritalin.

3. Jack Walsh, Pretty in Pink
Harry Dean Stanton, as single dad Jack Walsh in John Hughes’ ’80s teen masterpiece, had his issues: he was chronically unemployed and was seemingly unable to get over his ex-wife’s abandoning him and his daughter. But he was savvy enough to know that his teenage daughter’s greatest concern is fitting in, and he redeems himself by buying an admittedly tacky dress he can’t afford so she can attend prom.

2. Mike and Carol Brady, The Brady Bunch
With six kids, a housekeeper and a dog, the Bradys didn’t make having a blended family look easy, but they always made it look fun.

1. Clair and Cliff Huxtable, The Cosby Show
As the Huxtables, Bill Cosby and Phylicia Rashad reigned supreme for eight TV seasons as the brownstone-dwelling, advice-dispensing parents of five kids. Their ability to raise kids in a big city no doubt inspired many young fans to stay (or move) to the city when they started their own families.

Dr. Penelope Leach, author of a massive new four-year study, the largest in the history of the UK, has now written what may be the definitive reference book on child care of all kinds — care by the mother, by the father, by grandparents, by nursery schools, and by daycare centres. She doesn’t say — and how refreshing is this! — that full-time care by the mother is the gold standard (although the press has tried to interpret it that way), and she doesn’t scold anyone for choosing childcare outside the home. What she does do is detail the advantages and disadvantages of each form of care, and suggest that each family ought to select the kind of care that best fits its own unique situation. Her research in a nutshell: “The quality of care matters much more than the kind of care.”

That such a straightforward, non-judgmental book should be so revolutionary is a sign of how polarised we’ve become on matters of working vs. staying home. Babble called Dr. Leach at her home in Cornwall to see if she could help us put the child care conundrum in perspective. — Ada Calhoun

Your book really starts a whole new conversation about childcare. Unlike what seems like every book out there on the subject, it’s not about how women should stay home or go to work!

Well we certainly needed a new conversation, I felt! [Laughs]

I particularly enjoyed the little dialogue box on page 94 where you start out a conversation with a mother about how she feels full-time at-home mother care is the very best kind of care for all babies and by the end she has a million qualifiers. So you don’t idealise full-time stay-at-home motherhood?

That’s right. In effect, that was my motivation for writing the book. In the course of my research, we learned otherwise, and yet you still end up with people seeing mother care as the gold standard and everything else as being lesser, whether that’s care by the father or something else. In my own study we had 1,200 families and there were some pretty awful full-time mothers among them! [Laughs] The truth is, it depends. Who are we talking about? What mother? What family? What child? That’s why I don’t think there’s a lot to be said for generalising. People say to me, What kind of care is the best for a baby? And really the best I can do is give certain indicators of high-quality care. It just depends.

It’s amazing how rare it is that an expert will say, “It depends.”

I came out of this study feeling very strongly that this is one area in life where choice is absolutely vital, and where women in particular have a right to choose. They have to choose. Their ability to choose is what ensures the baby’s care will be good, whether that means staying home or going back to work. What’s bad is when the mother wants to go back to work but can’t find childcare, or the other way around where she desperately wants to stay home but can’t afford to. And I’m afraid that may be more often the case now because of the economic crash.

It is a very hard time to be a parent of young children.

Unless you are singularly gifted: a highly qualified mother with a loving grandmother living around the corner, a devoted husband wants to be involved, and a very understanding boss who will do anything rather than lose you. Unfortunately, that isn’t a large percentage of us.

One thing I think our readers will be very happy to hear from your research is that even if you work long hours, your child won’t forget you. I think many of us fear that if we go on a business trip or something, we’ll come back to a child saying, “And you are?”

I was rather shocked in my own research by how many parents genuinely believe that if they find a really good caretaker for their child, the child might come to love the nanny more. That is one of those rare cases where we can actually say, “No chance. Not going to happen.” Unless the parent is separated from the child almost entirely from the very beginning, it just doesn’t happen. It’s actually quite surprising where children have had nannies for years, parents worry that when the nanny leaves the children will be terribly upset and actually as long as everything remains stable with the parents, they’re really not very. Yes, they’re sad to see her go, but she’s not the centre of their world.

I was surprised that you say time outs aren’t an indicator of high-quality care. Why is that?

The problem with time outs is that children who have not yet learned to self-control need an adult to control them until they can get back together. They don’t need a time out; they need a time in. By all means, if a child is throwing a tantrum in a restaurant, you remove that child so everyone else can get on with their dinner, but I don’t think time outs work as a discipline strategy for young children. I believe in time ins.

What’s the first step you think the government should take on the issue of early childcare?

[The U.S] is the most influential nation in the world and the only one other than Australia that has no paid parental leave. Every study shows these incredible financial reasons to invest in young children; it’s said that for every dollar put into early childcare, it pays off something like seven dollars down the road. Everyone agrees that it’s more important than almost anything else… so we don’t do it.

Why do think think that is?

I have a sense that part of the reason is that a lot of Americans actually don’t realise it’s possible. I think mothers in the U.S. don’t believe that U.K. mothers are really entitled to nine months of paid leave! We all need good education and we need children’s healthcare. I’m not an American, so I hate to say this, but I think your lack of those things has to be seen as a kind of disgrace.

Well, thank you so much for speaking with us. It’s so refreshing to read some actual evidence on the subject rather than another diatribe about what women should be doing. Usually if it isn’t Why aren’t you working more? it’s worship of stay-at-home mums.

If you’re at stay-at-home mum, of course you’ll go buy that book and feel good about it. But it would be good to think: Why am I doing it this way? Is it working for me? Is it working for my children?

Click here to buy Child Care Today: Getting It Right for Everyone.

But despite the glimmering darkness of some of her lyrics and the personal hardships she’s endured, or maybe because of them, Amos, who is married to British sound engineer Mark Hawley and splits her time between Cornwall, England, and Florida, when she’s not on the road, has a remarkably upbeat approach to life. “The universe never deals you a problem you can’t handle,” she says, on the phone from London. “If it’s on your plate then it’s your time to learn this at Earth school.”

In a candid, rather intense and occasionally un-PC conversation, Amos spoke to Babble about facing tough times, appreciating her husband’s smell, and the pleasure she takes in sharing “Blueberry Girl,” the poem Neil Gaiman wrote for Natashya and recently released as a book. — Amy Reiter

You released one of the new album’s songs, “Maybe California,” as a free download for Mother’s Day. What are you hoping to get across to other mothers with that song?

All of us as mothers are pushed to the edge sometimes and need another hand or some higher self to reach out to remind us that, more than anything, we want to be with the ones we love, even if we can’t make it all okay. I think it’s the hardest when we can’t make things okay, when we can’t give the husband his job back, when we can’t make the hurts go away. Yet the truth is, we’re irreplaceable as mothers. Nobody can fill our shoes. I felt like that was something we all needed to pass around to each other, because sometimes we suffer in silence and keep our downs in private. I tend to keep them there. These have been some dark times in the last year, but we’re not alone. All of us have to reground ourselves and remember that success is sometimes being able to survive tumultuous times and to be a safe port in a storm.

Do you feel like these tough times are hitting mothers particularly hard right now?

I do. If you’re a working mother and your partner’s being laid off you have to redefine what success is, what power is, what a provider is, and still find your self worth in all that. This is not a time of economic abundance, but it can be a time of spiritual abundance. We just have to create out of the destruction and find different ways, and mothers are amazing conjurers.

We need to find bright spots in the dark times.

Well, I’ve had a rough year. A lot of people have for different reasons. It’s a year of change. Yet through these challenges, there have been times when it’s the songs that have been there for me and reached out to me.

How has this year been difficult for you?

I don’t want to go into detail. It’s just been challenging and I’ve had to make a lot of changes. Change doesn’t have to be a negative thing. Sometimes you just have to upgrade your own system and your way of thinking. You have to look at the situation with pragmatism and know that you’re capable of anything. But the universe never deals you a problem you can’t handle. If it’s on your plate then it’s your time to learn this at Earth school. If we know that, then we go, okay, I’m ready for the next class.

Where have you found your greatest joys in motherhood, and the hardest challenges?

There’s so much fun in having one-on-one time with my daughter. That’s when I really get to know her and begin to see that you don’t have to be old to have wisdom. Because of their innocence, because they don’t have all the responsibilities we do, sometimes children can see something sharper than we can because we’re so distracted by a detail. So I think, well, why can’t an eight-year-old give me really good advice? She gives me good advice all the time, but not about “problems.” Children can be so observant and they know when things aren’t right, and yet they don’t always need to know the details. That’s one thing I’ve had to learn. Sometimes that discipline has to kick in, that “I have to be the mum. She doesn’t have to carry this burden. She doesn’t need to know what’s happening yet. Let’s see if the winds bring in a different result.” And sometimes they do. Sometimes death passes your door. Sometimes what you think is going to happen doesn’t happen.

How have you balanced your life as a mother with your life as a musician?

We share music, and she loves the wardrobe and high heels and all that stuff. Because of what I do, Natashya’s not going to accept play makeup. She likes Dior. You can’t be sitting there with great makeup artists and hair people and be using these products and then say, “Okay, here’s your Barbie stuff.” She got rid of that at five. But now she’s experimenting. She has her own makeup mirror and she does her own makeup. It’s a balance, but it’s about being a mother lioness and letting the cubs grow up. She wants to explore with that, so instead of it being in a vulgar way, she sits and watches the best as they work on mom, and then she works on herself. Then she wants to go make people up, and they’ll let her. She does a very good job.

That sounds like fun.

You know, I’ll say to her, “Is there something you’d like to do?” She’ll say, “Well, I’d love to have a facial at a spa, please.” And, okay, so that’s one of her favorite things to do. But because we travel the world, this is in context. If you ask Tash, “So what’s one of the places you like to go?” She’ll say, “Well, I like Prague very much, and Rome, and I want to go to Moscow soon.” That is just her life. Tash does see the world and she does visit places, so we can’t treat her like we would if we didn’t ever leave a certain town.

So she tours with you. How do you create a sense of stability for her in the midst of it all?

A traveling circus can still be grounded. It has a center. And the bus is the home. But we go into hotels every morning as well. You have to make home where you are. She has her little special things that she takes with her. And backstage, she has her own room, with her music set up. She’s into music, and her books and her dolls and stuff. And there’s tutoring on the road and structure and a routine. She wants to be part of the show, so she always sees the beginning, and then she gets put to bed at a certain point, and she accepts that.

It’s nice to hear she’s into music. Does she make music, too, like you did as a kid?

She sings and writes her own melodies and lyrics and is really into acting and theatrics, so she’s studying that as well. She goes to school in the U.K. I’m in London right now and her father is with her. England is really his stomping ground. We have a beach house two hours north of Miami, and we tour so much that the home front changes. But it’s just part of our life. It doesn’t seem strange to us.

How do you and your husband split the childcare duties?

When we’re out on the road, Tash and I share a bus with the band, and Mark is on the engineer bus, because we’re all on different schedules. But when I’m doing a promo tour, setting up an album, I go off and he holds the fort down. He runs a recording studio by where his house is.

Right, you guys built your own studio.

It’s really his. England is his, and he lets me crash there because I’m not so bad.

Has becoming a mother changed your music?

Yes, I think it has. But differently at different times. You become interested in other subjects. Some continue through your career, but some shift. This emptiness that was inside me before Tash at a certain point completely got filled up. Motherhood was a huge healer for me.

Religion is a big part of your music and how you were raised. I know you don’t adhere to anything specific right now, but has it been an issue for you in raising Tash?

Tash is very aware that Granddad is a minister, but she has her own ideas of Mother Earth and God and what all that is. She’s also really aware that she could be the first [female] American president and the Prime Minister, because she’s checked it out. She’s very much a feminist, Tash. And she thinks Jesus is a very kind person and she doesn’t understand why all those people that are in religions want to kill each other because they disagree. I think that makes a lot of sense, frankly. My personal path has been inspired by the Native American path. My relationship with that community has grown, and a sense of a deep spirituality has been developing that has been influenced by traveling the world and seeing different cultures and perspectives. It’s about being more open-minded instead of accepting some traditional structure that got passed down from my grandparents. That seems very myopic and small-minded to me.

How do you feel about the poem Neil Gaiman wrote for Natashya, “Blueberry Girl,” becoming a book? And more important, how does she feel about it?

She is over the moon that Uncle Neil did that for her. He’s one of her godfathers. We were in a bookstore in the States and bought a couple of copies to send to relatives, and she was really cute. She said, in her British accent, “Do you think, Mummy, they’ll give me a discount because it’s about me?” I said, “No, Tash, that’s not how it works, honey.” That poem he wrote for her, it’s a poem that he and I wanted him to share. I wanted to share it with all the other mothers for their children because I think it’s just the most beautiful thought that I could ever think for Tash.

You sparked some chatter with your last album by calling yourself a MILF. How has your sense of yourself as a sexual being changed since you became a mother?

It changes for a while, because your body is changing. I nursed, and then I wasn’t producing enough milk, but I kept the night feeds up so that she could get the immunity. I’m happy I did that, but then my body changed. It wasn’t that voluptuous shape anymore. Once we got out of that time, I started to focus my interest on other women’s issues, not just little kids’ issues anymore. The human slave trade of women really bothers me, the idea that there are people that need to own a woman because they get off on having power over her. I thought, well, hang on. I, as a woman who is a mother, want to explore my own idea of eroticism, but not in this demeaning perversion.

There has to be a spiritual erotica. Your partner is somebody that you respect and respects you. Mothers are women. We are sexual beings. That’s how we became mothers. That’s how it happens. It doesn’t happen from the stork or because the angels sing or, you know, God passes over and drops some seeds. It happens because we’re sensual women and we did the most beautiful thing a man or woman can do. We have to see that as sacred but sexy. Because if we don’t see it that way, somebody in the office is going to see it that way and try and get your man.

Somebody asked me, what’s the best smell you can think of? Some British paper, of course. And you know what I said? The best smell I can think of is when my husband gets off his motorbike. That’s a good smell to me. I know I’m alive and I’m a woman and I have my high heels on. Let’s go! We as mothers can’t be stupid. Don’t be stupid. Tend your own fire, or some young girl, while your head’s turned, is going to tend it for you.

What sorts of parenting lessons have you learned from your own parents?

My mother had an amazing way of asking me not “How did it go?” but “How do you feel about it?” It’s not about the result; it’s about how I felt about the result. That’s very different. Some nights, when the performances haven’t gone the way I wanted, I’ll call her up and she’ll say, “Now, look, the question is not whether or not you’re a champion. The question is what can Mama do for you?” Sometimes you just need a hug. That’s all you need from Mom, to know that, whatever you do, she’s going to love you.

Click here to download “Maybe California” — free!