Scandal!

Wait. Not scandal.

Jennifer Garner is promoting her new file The Invention of Lying and in this video (below) she talks about the white lies in her own life — namely those that are parent-centric.

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.

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.

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!

When she’s not in front of the camera or enjoying some quality family time, she’s at her computer cranking out books that wind up on the New York Times Bestseller List. In her memoir, Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression, Brooke discussed her very personal struggle with PPD after Rowan was born. Since then, she’s penned a more lighthearted children’s book, Welcome to Your World, Baby, based on little Rowan’s preparation for her baby sister Grier’s arrival.

Brooke spoke with Babble about the joys and challenges of being a working mum and her newest children’s book, It’s the Best Day Ever, Dad! — this one a personal glimpse of her girls’ special relationship with their dad — hitting bookstores April 21. — Mary Ann Cooper

You have two young daughters — the perfect set up for writing a mother/daughter children’s book. Yet, you wrote your newest children book about father/daughter relationships. How come?

I told my editor that my girls have a different language with their father. And it’s something I’m not a part of. That was something new to me. I didn’t grow up in the same house as my father and when I watch my girls with their dad it’s so sweet and it’s so heartwarming. My editor and I talked about the special bond that fathers do have with their daughters and that they don’t get that much attention, because everything’s about mothers and daughters. But looking back, I think some of the best relationships I witnessed in the course of my life have been between fathers and daughters. For our girls, he’s sort of their first love in a sweet, innocent kind of way. So when we talked about it, we felt that we wanted to give dads their due.

What’s different about your husband’s relationship with Rowan and Grier as opposed to your relationship with them?

I feel like they need me, but I feel like they’re able to be more self-sufficient and their real personalities come out with their father. For my girls, mum is sort of laden with emotions. When they’re sad, they want Mum. When they’re hurt, they want Mum. So much of it is based on them needing me. And also, because I’m mum, I’m more of the disciplinarian. It feels like they need their dad in a sort of more independent level. My older daughter Rowan really loves watching any type of sports with her dad. She’s not really interested in the sport, per se, but she has this unique bond with him about it. It’s almost like she has this inside joke with her dad. They’re friends; they act like buddies.

Were the girls the inspiration for the copy and illustrations?

When I wrote the first children’s book, it was about a little girl anticipating her baby sister being born and what comes with that. We included Rowan in all preparation for her sister. The first book practically came verbatim from Rowan. All of the things she said are in the book one way or another. So the copy for sure was Rowan’s in the first one. The second one had other elements to it because it was more my words picked up by observations. Harper Collins paired me with illustrator Cori Doerrfeld. I gave her the copy and we sort of boiled it down to what could be said in pictures and what could be said in writing. Cori got it in the first drawing. The whole idea is that the illustrations are supposed to be similar to my kids even though they have different names. Of course, I described them to her and she saw pictures of my two little girls, but she also really understood the essence of these two little girls.

So when the book was completed did you test market it on Rowan and Grier to see if you nailed your target audience?

My girls are so funny. They love the second book. It took Rowan a while to warm up to the first book. I think she was a little bit embarrassed by it. I think it’s because the first one was really all on her. But Rowan is now past the embarrassment. She asked if we could take a copy of it and bring it to her class, and that was a big validating moment. I was a little wary, because I didn’t want her separate from the rest of the kids, but it came from a good place. The second one was based on what they do with their dad. Rowan is a bit more proud of the second one, because she gets to show her dad off. The dog is in it because the dog is about the most important thing in the girls’ lives. Grier loves both books, but she doesn’t really have the concept that it’s about her yet.

Rowan went off to school this past year. Did you suffer separation anxiety with Rowan? Grier is just coming out of her terrible twos. How terrible was that?

There was no separation anxiety on her part, just mine. She was like, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” It was almost as if she was saying, “And you are . . .? Oh right, my mother. We’ve met, haven’t we?” Even though she’s about to turn three, Grier never really went through the terrible twos. She hasn’t reached that phase yet, but I can tell she’s about to enter that phase. Then again, she would almost like to get back into the womb as well. Rowan and Grier are the antithesis of one another. Rowan is very analytical; she needs to think things through. She needs all of the information. Grier is pure emotion. She’s just raw emotion, and I don’t think it’s just her age. I just think she’s very sensitive, very emotional and very dramatic in her emotions. You can’t really raise your voice to her to prove your authority, because she’ll just crumble. Rowan will sort of smarten up and look at you and think, “Okay, I get it. The stakes are really high. I’m going to now listen because Mum’s serious.”

So, who is more like you, Rowan or Grier?

I’m really a blend of the two of them, but I’m more like Rowan because both of us are very aware of how things sound and how they seem. Like me, Rowan is self-aware at a very young age. Grier could care less about being liked. Whatever she wants is what she wants and it’s the most important thing. She doesn’t believe in softening her response. Rowan is like, “Okay, how do I navigate this?”

You’ve got so much on your plate. You have to juggle a demanding career with being a great mother. Do you relate to Wendy, the character you played on Lipstick Jungle?

I definitely identify with her. But her kids are older and I look at my kids and think “Oh God, I hope I’m more equipped than she is by the time they’re teenagers!” I have to say I am anticipating it with fear — abject fear!

So, what has been your greatest challenge in trying to do it all and be the best mum you can be?

Slowing my brain down long enough to hear them. I’ll go into function mode as long as they’re fine. I make sure the school projects get done and the play dates are scheduled. The time is never an issue with me as much as my focus within the time that I’m not trying to do ten things at once. Sitting down and actually slowing down enough to color the coloring book, rather than giving them the coloring books while I’m doing emails. They are starting to get to the stage when they say, “Nevermind” or “You don’t understand.” And I’ll think, “No, I do mind and you have to talk to me”; “No, I don’t understand and you need to explain it to me.” But it can’t be rushed. It takes time, and I’m used to being on the move all the time and being busy all the time. So I need to be mindful of that.

When you do slow down and you and the girls hang out together what’s a typical day like?

It usually involves something outdoors like the park. Sometimes we’ll go get our nails done. It’s usually the park and a movie or some kind of fun meal. We try to make a day of it and not come back for hours.

You caused quite a stir when you talked about your struggles with postpartum depression after Rowan was born. Did you experience the same thing after Grier was born?

I had none of it with Grier. The circumstances were so different. During my pregnancy I was able to find a medication in my third trimester that sort of kept me hormonally balanced but was totally safe for the baby. The doctors also monitored me. Plus, I got pregnant naturally. I was physically and biologically stronger. I’m convinced people still need to talk about PPD more. There is still a sort of shame surrounding it, and that’s so sad. But there are always people coming up to me saying somehow my story helped them, and that’s a good thing.

You’ve been in show business since you were a baby. What would be your reaction if Rowan and Grier came to you and asked to be models or actresses?

I realise they don’t understand how difficult it is. And I certainly would not make it easier for them, insofar as take them around. I think it’s a really difficult world to go into, and what they don’t know now is that they wouldn’t want it. I work with kids a lot of the time and they don’t to want to be doing it. They’re not having fun. They’re just not enjoying themselves. But if they grew up and wanted to be actresses after they went to school, then I would be much more amenable to helping them. The important thing is that they have to go to school first.

Has being a mother yourself made you view your relationship with your own mother in a new light?

There hasn’t been any great epiphany in any of it. It just gets you to this place where you have a better understanding of the difficulties of being a parent. My mum was with me all the time and it was just us. And she didn’t have any kind of work aside from me. I don’t think I ever realised how hard it must have been to be a single mum, because I rely on my husband so much.

Having children can sometimes test a marriage. How has parenthood affected yours?

I don’t think children can ever be considered to fix a marriage, but boy, it can give you a whole new level of respect for your partner. I realise there’s so much in the point of view that he provides that I wouldn’t have if I were alone. My husband makes the time for our daughters. He works a lot, but what he does with the time he does have is pure. I’ve watched this since the girls were born. It’s really something special.

Congratulations on the play! How is it going?

It’s going great! I have to say audiences have been very enthused. Certainly there’s are a lot of laughs to be had, but it also affects people. Everybody I talk to afterward, especially parents who are dealing with these issues of autism or OCD or ADD — it really hits home for them in terms of the endless maze of a journey they have to go through trying to figure out the right thing to do for their kids.

Is it practically an all-parent audience? I picture hordes of thirty-somethings chortling knowingly through the whole thing.

I think that certainly there are people who hear about the play and come to it specifically for that reason. But other people come not knowing what it’s really about and it ends up going beyond that for them.

Has it brought the condition into sharp focus for you?

I understand it more on a sliding scale. What I’ve learned is the things that happen to a mother dealing with a son who’s told he might have it, and the exploratory measures she has to go through. The worry. And the process of figuring out that if he does have it, what to do about it. On her journey she starts to see it everywhere — in her husband, her neighbour, the doctor she’s going to for treatment. Because of this the play spirals into a sort of farcical mania. It eventually gets to the point of sort of asking, in this incredibly fast-paced world, with all the multi-tasking, does anyone not have ADD? It makes me notice the lower end of the spectrum of ADD — the touches of ADD we all have.

What about your own kids, Samantha (twelve) and Charlie (six)? No ADD? Any other issues that would confound a smart, well-informed mother?

No, none other than what’s associated with a normal child. They do have normal child issues.

A tween and a first-grader: that’s a lot to juggle. Are you a very hands-on mum? Do you rely on a lot of help?

I think I’m a pretty hands-on mum. But also, my kids have four parents, including my girlfriend, who’s been a stay-at-home mum for the last year and a half. We don’t have a lot of people we hire, but we do have the four of us (including Nixon’s ex-husband, Danny Mozes, and his partner). The more parents the better, you know.

The internet links you to a lot of different good-work missions: public schools — a cause you took up with your girlfriend, who’s an education activist — gay and lesbian role models for young kids, and breast cancer. Are you still working in all these areas? How does it affect your kids?

As a breast cancer survivor and the daughter of a two-time breast cancer survivor, I work with the Susan G. Komen Foundation. This has been a part of my life for a long time. As a public school advocate, having both my kids in public schools, it’s an endless battle to try and get proper funding and to make sure teachers are supported. And in terms of gay and lesbian rights — that’s been hugely important. We’re living in this exciting time where marriage for gay couples is now a reality in some states — nobody was even thinking about that ten years ago. That it’s now a possibility in some places is certainly a giant step forward, and the goal is to keep working to make it a possibility in more places. But all these things are cyclical. You do what you can and try to show your kids how things can change, where you can help.

About raising kids in a same-sex household: beyond working toward the right to marry, is it getting easier in general? More accepted?

Absolutely. If you look at people on the opposite side of the issue, the arguments they make have changed greatly. And think about Milk — that was such a great movie to have come out this year. I look at how far we’ve come in such a relatively short space of time — people write to me say and say things like, “Thank you for being so open. It’s made my life easier.” That’s a nice benefit.

Back to the play. I read a review that describes your character, Mama, as “one of those women in her late thirties that you see in a big city, pulled in a zillion different directions by her career, her marriage and her attention-challenged only son.” Is that fair? Are we, as parents, pulled in too many directions?

I think we are. And I think it goes back to the having-it-all syndrome. We’re lucky we have the possibility of having it all, but it does make us spread ourselves very thin. We’re worn out. And if we’re not alone and we have a partner, we’re lucky. But there’s a responsibility there too. One of the things in my own life is, I feel like sometimes there’s a kind of high you can get from being so busy and so fast-moving, and that is in its own way a form of addiction. This warp-speed efficiency can be oppressive. When you think of all the things you can accomplish in a day — are you leaving out the central thing you should be focusing on? Like looking at your child, sitting with your child and operating on the speed they operate on? Too many parents try to make kids super-achievers rather than just sitting with them, looking at them.

Would we be better served if more mums and dads were able to stay at home?

Not necessarily. I think the more time you have for your kids, the better it is. But I don’t think you have to be a stay-at-home mum to have time for them. I’ve seen wonderful stay-at-home moms and mums that could use a little improving. The same thing goes for women who work outside the home. We’ve all seen the mum who devotes all her time and attention to her child and is so hungry for adult interaction that as soon as she’s around another adult, she’s not paying attention anymore. It’s a balance. And I’m a working mother and the daughter of a working mother, and she’s the daughter of a working mother. My mother wasn’t there to pick me up from school, but she was on the other end of the phone any time I needed to talk to her. And there is something to seeing not only what your father does, but what your mother does, and how proud it makes you. My mother worked in TV. That made me so proud. I loved having her home, but I also loved getting all dressed up and going to visit her at work. That made me feel good.

Distracted’s characters don’t so much parent their children as justify their inability to manage them, another review said. Which sounds like the sort of criticism that might fairly be levelled at Miranda from Sex & the City. Is she, in your estimation, a good parent?

I think she is a good parent, but I think it doesn’t come naturally to her. It’s a real struggle. And I think she’s lucky that she has the partner she does — her husband and she complement each other very nicely. She’s more of the planner and the disciplinarian, and he’s more of the hands-on guy who’s the “on” parent. Miranda has trouble with her heart. Her heart is not front and center. She’s lucky she’s in this marriage.

There’s a sequel to the movie coming out. Miranda’s not having more kids, is she?

Hmm. Not that I know of!

Moore’s latest enjoyable project? A follow-up to her 2007 children’s book Freckleface Strawberry. The new book, Freckleface Strawberry and the Dodgeball Bully, aimed at kids ages 4-8, illustrated by LeUyen Pham and due out in April, finds Moore’s redheaded, pint-sized protagonist confronting her fears — and a burly kid named Windy Pants Patrick — in the world’s most terrifying playground game.

Babble caught up with Moore in Toronto, where she was shooting an Atom Egoyan movie — and traveling home on weekends to be with her family. After a long day of filming, Moore dialed us up to discuss dodgeball strategy, parental guilt, celebrity culture and how our friends can teach us more than our mothers. — Amy Reiter

Why is dodgeball such an icon of terror for so many people?

[Laughs] You know, people fall into two camps with dodgeball: the ones who love it, and the ones who hate it. My little eleven-year-old boy, who’s a really sensitive soul, loves dodgeball. So does my daughter. And my husband will laugh at me when I say, “Oh my gosh, it’s terrifying.” For them it’s just a ball! But I was not that kid. I was on the small side and I wasn’t athletic. I would stay in the back as long as I could so the kids wouldn’t hit me with the ball. But invariably I’d be the last one left, and there’d be a big kid on the other side, and then I’d get hit with the ball. So I learned to stand in the front and get out really fast. It didn’t really hurt much when the ball hit you. The anticipation was the worst, which is what the character in the book finds out.

The main character’s problem springs from going to the Early Bird program at school because her parents have to work. Will the next book in the series be Freckleface Strawberry’s Guilt-Ridden Parents?

[Laughs] But she loves Early Bird. Early Bird actually came from a time when my son was little and he would beg to go to school early because the teacher in charge of the Early Bird program was a great basketball player. So Cal would say “Can I please go to Early Bird?” And we’d say, no, you can’t, because it meant we had to get there forty-five minutes early. Freckleface Strawberry loves Early Bird because she doesn’t have to stay home eating breakfast. She gets to go to school early, and she loves school.

I guess I was projecting my own guilt.

Well, the Early Bird thing is something that all working parents will recognise, because, yeah, that’s why it’s there, so you can work.

Have you had to make career concessions to accommodate your kids, and vice versa?

Oh my god. Yes. I’m not really any different than any other working parent. I mean, one thing my job does allow is tremendous flexibility, so I can be there at school drop-off and pick-up and go to soccer and dance. There are times when really, that’s all I’m doing. And then there are times like now, where for seven weeks, I’m out of town and home only on the weekends. Which is really hard, except that I have a husband who can do that other stuff. Last summer, he was away a lot and I was the one who was home with the kids and taking them to day camp. Also I think it’s imperative that kids understand that parents have to work for a living, that there’s an economic model that you have to follow, which is that you do some work and that enables you to take care of your family, and with any luck you do work that you really enjoy, too. That’s the truth of the world. And kids understand that.

Did your kids understand early on the trade-off that you go away for a while and then you come back and they get you all to themselves?

No, because this is recent. I didn’t go away when they were little; they came with me, which is the other huge upside of being an actress. There aren’t many other jobs where you can bring your children to your workplace, but acting is one of them. My joke is that my kids for a long time thought I worked in a trailer, because that’s where we would go. We’d go to work and sit in the trailer, and then I’d go do a scene and come back to the trailer, and that’s how it was. When I did “Savage Grace,” we all went to Spain together. When I was in “Blindness,” we were all in rural Canada. We all went away in the summers and made movies. This is pretty new, this me-going-to-Toronto thing. They don’t like it at all. But I feel like I’m really lucky to work.

You grew up all over the world. Why have you chosen to raise your kids in New York City?

I love New York. My husband was born and raised and went to school there. His family lives in New York City, so he has a very strong connection to it. I moved to New York right after college and really, really liked it. The thing about New York is that there’s a tremendous sense of community — more than anywhere I ever lived — and of history. It’s an old city. It has so much to offer. It’s incredibly diverse. It’s a wonderful place to live. I mean, we always toy with the idea of, well, what would it be like to live somewhere else, or to go live in the country? But so far we’ve been very happy.

You’ve said it irritates you to be asked how something affects you as a mother, as opposed to how it affects you as a person.

Absolutely! Because it’s reductive. For crying out loud! I do think it’s been the major experience of my life, but motherhood doesn’t wipe out the person that you are. But because it’s so big, people tend to say, “This is going to be the ultimate thing that defines me,” and that, I think, is where you get into trouble.

Even in the first couple of years, when you’re just in this swamp of motherhood emotionally and hormonally, where you go around like, “Wow, wow, I just am in this. I don’t have the time to read or do anything else,” there is this kind of immersion, but that does pass. And you’re still yourself. You have to be — not just for you, but for your children, too.

That’s a lesson our generation of mothers learned from our own mothers.

Yeah! Our mothers were so f-ing miserable!

Your mother worked, though, right?

My mother didn’t really work until later. She had children when she was nineteen years old. She had three kids by the time she was twenty-five, and she was not happy about it. And believe me, we knew. But that’s a fact that a lot of us grew up with. That’s why I’m saying I don’t think we’re doing our children any favors by saying, “I’m just going to put myself away.” I don’t think it makes children or parents happy.

What about celebrity? Does it make it harder or easier to raise kids?

That’s where there’s an advantage to living in New York City. I’m not the only actor-parent my kids know. And there are lots of people who have big and crazy — eccentric — jobs in New York as well. So we fit in there. Our children don’t perceive our family with a filmmaker father and an actress mother as being somehow different; it’s just sort of more of the same. But I do think that sense of celebrity culture is much more prevalent now than it was even ten or fifteen years ago. It just seems to grow and grow. I’m hoping that maybe with the global economic meltdown, the celebrity culture will melt down somewhat too.

Yes, in some ways, politicians are the new celebrities.

I remember a conversation with my son. He said, “You’re on the cover of a magazine because you’re famous.” I said, “No, it’s because it’s what my job is. If I’m on the cover of a fashion magazine, it’s because I’m promoting a movie. That’s just part of my job.” It’s very important for people to understand that your public face is tied to your work, but it’s not who you are.

You and your husband got married when Caleb was five and Liv was one. Did having children change your concept of marriage and family?

Well, David Letterman asked, “Why did you get married?” And I said, “Well, one kid it seems like it’s okay not to get married, and two kids it just starts to seem sloppy.” I think we ended up getting married just because we were like, “Well, we are here. This is what it is.” It’s a way of cementing your relationship and your family. Though I don’t know that I believe that marriage is the be all and end all for everybody either.

I once met you and Ellen Barkin at an event, and your friendship seemed so warm and supportive. Parenting can really affect friendships. Has it changed yours?

I love her. I became much closer with my friends. Ellen was the person who gave me the most advice about having a baby. She was the first person who came to my room when Cal was born, and she was with me while I was in labour. My daughter’s middle name, Helen, is for Ellen. Somebody once said to me, “You’re going to ask your mother, ‘What do I do when blah-blah-blah?’ And you’re going to get really mad because your mother won’t remember it. And that is not her fault!” You ask anybody who is too far away from having a newborn or whatever, and they won’t remember it. The person you can ask is your girlfriend who’s got a newborn or a five-year-old or an eight-year-old. They’re the ones who say, “Oh, yeah-yeah-yeah, let me tell you how it works.” And that’s how you navigate it. Early on when you have children, your female friendships do go, because you have a job, a baby, a husband. But they also understand. It’s not like falling into a boyfriend hole. You fall into a baby hole, and everybody knows what that is. Then you get out of it and suddenly find you have a tremendous amount of support.

So what’s the most important lesson you’ve learned about parenting so far?

That they’re just other people. You have this baby and you have a relationship with the baby, and then you look at them, and you’re like, “Wow, you’re a whole person! You’re just this whole separate being.” And you get to explore that relationship, especially as they get older. Suddenly there are two separate human beings across the table from you and your husband. It’s just like, “Where did these people come from?” There’s so much you can do to develop them and teach them and take care of them, but in many ways they just are who they are. And that, I think, is the most wonderful thing.