Parental guidance

CHESHIRE, Conn. -- Beverly Conyers and Tynicha Drummonds unfurl a list of concerns they have as mothers living in New Haven: a teacher who struck a blow to the self-esteem of Conyers's grandchild by calling her a hoodlum; welfare reform that pushed Drummonds off the rolls, out of the housing projects, and into a bookstore job with a salary too low to pay for both a baby sitter for her 9-year-old son and a college degree that could get her a higher-paying job.

"I do get depressed," says Drummonds, 28, "because everything is not going my way."

These kinds of situations leave some working mothers with little time to monitor their offspring, says Conyers, a 54-year-old who cares for the eldest of her six grandkids. She rails against a generation of children that memorizes rap rhymes before learning the ABCs. The unrelenting violence and sexuality that kids can see by flicking on the TV causes Conyers to emit a helpless "my gosh." She senses something needs to be done: "It's up to society to help protect these kids if they want a civilized society. They need to do something to help the parents help themselves."

Enola Aird shakes her head understandingly as she records the two-hour conversation in the dining room of her suburban home. Conyers's concerns reflect Aird's own as a parent struggling to raise her teenage son and daughter in a fast-paced culture. In 1999, Aird decided to do something about it by creating the Motherhood Project under the umbrella of the Institute for American Values in New York. Her goal: to help women "meet the unprecedented challenges of mothering in the 21st century," to quote the mission statement on its website (watchoutforchildren.org).

One way the Motherhood Project does this is by raising awareness about the dangers of advertising and marketing to children. Aird formed the Mothers' Council, a group of 20 mothers from a variety of racial and political backgrounds, to advise the Motherhood Project. The organization administers Mothers' Gatherings like the one in Aird's home, which gives women nationwide a chance to air their needs and concerns. Recordings of these meetings go to the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, which is concocting questions for a national telephone survey by the Motherhood Project that will look into the minds of at least 2,000 moms.

As Aird struggles to make her organization reflect the needs of a diverse group of mothers, she battles on a daily basis the whiff of suspicion that accompanies the organization's affiliation with the Institute for American Values. Is the Motherhood Project a conservative group pushing for a return to old-fashioned values? Or is it a newfangled answer to the modern challenges of motherhood? The subject causes Jennifer James, editor of Mommy Too!, an online magazine for mothers of color, to sigh, pause, and speak with careful words. She admires Aird's work, but she has heard complaints about the institute's pro-marriage stance and perceived conservatism.

"One mom," says James, 29, "went through the website and said, `I don't know if I want to deal with this organization because I've heard X about the founder or somebody in the institute. I don't know if I want to be a part of that or even support that.' That's one of the things that may potentially . . . be a real difficult thing to overcome."

The issue haunts Aird's comments, even when she talks about something else. Asked whether children today are being raised well, she answers, "I don't idolize the past, `Let's go back there.' I'm really interested in what we can create out there in the future. But right now there are three values that are being taught by our culture: self-indulgence, self-gratification, and excessive materialism. I don't think it's going to be a very happy place to live in if that's the reigning value system. For my children, I want a world where we have a better balance."

Aird isn't the only mother feeling overwhelmed. Her organization is part of a burgeoning motherhood movement gathering momentum nationwide. Political action groups, membership organizations, and nonfiction books are demanding political and cultural changes to make mothering easier. Books from 1999's "Unbending Gender" to 2001's "The Price of Motherhood" to this year's "The Mommy Myth" are inspiring an increasing number of mothers to unite or get politically active. They're joining groups such as Mothers Ought to Have Equal Rights (MOTHERS), Mothers & More, the National Association of Mothers' Centers, Mothers Acting Up, and Mocha Moms Inc.

Some see this movement as the unfinished business of feminism, which in their eyes focused on getting women into the workplace but ignored the needs of moms. Now the next generation of women, who either dump their careers to raise their kids or struggle to balance work and family, want to continue the battle on the motherhood front.

"The younger women felt this had all been taken care of, that they were entitled to some sort of accommodation, some way to balance all of this," says Joanne Brundage, 52, founder and director of Mothers & More, which started in a Chicago suburb in 1987 and with 7,500 members nationally is considered the largest group in the movement. "Those of us who came before might have felt . . . if it didn't work out it was our fault, not the workplace, not public policy."

Aird, 50, comes from Brundage's generation. Sitting comfortably in a club chair in the living room of her sprawling house, she describes the path that led her to this point. Her hair is styled in a short afro. As she talks, her hazel eyes often gaze thoughtfully out the window at the backyard pool.

"She's possibly the smartest woman I've ever met," says Brundage. "We've had engaging conversations on the phone for hours at a time where we can both respectfully realize we have different perspectives. Enola has an unerring ability to see those perspectives, to understand them and respect them and still hold firm," she adds, laughing.

"Ethical" and "moral" are the words Peggy O'Mara, editor and publisher of Mothering magazine and a member of the Mothers' Council, uses to describe Aird. "She comes from a strong religious faith," says O'Mara, "but not one that she wears on her sleeve."

A strict begininng
Aird was born in Panama and spent her first nine years there. Then her parents sent her to Brooklyn to live with two aunts and an uncle. She says she thrived under the love and support of these five demanding relatives. The arrangement also resulted in a sheltered upbringing, says Aird, "partly because my aunt and uncle were holding me in trust for my parents [and] treated me very carefully. They didn't let me do a lot of stuff."

Aird lived up to everyone's expectations. After getting her law degree from Yale University in 1979, she spent the next seven years in high-powered jobs at the National Association of Broadcasters, Westinghouse Broadcasting, and corporate law offices. The first sign that she would get off the fast track occurred in 1985, after Aird gave birth to her first child, Leah, with her husband, Stephen Carter, a Yale law professor who made headlines in 2001 for scoring a $4 million advance to write two novels.

"When it came time for us to have someone come take care of Leah," says Aird, "I could not believe that people didn't think she was the most wonderful person. It just seemed like it was just a job to them. Stephen and I looked at each other and said, `This is not going to work.' So he stayed home with her, then my mother stayed home with her, then my aunt stayed home with her."

Soon it was Aird's turn to step up to the plate. Even now, this woman who says her favorite expression is "fire in the belly" expresses wonder about her decision to leave the working world. "I expected at this point in my life I would have been a lawyer in a law firm, a partner with goo gobs of money. So this sojourn that my life has taken is as much a surprise to me as anybody else. What I do know is that as I had my children and recognized the importance of caring for them . . . I was realizing how the culture did not value that work."

As parents, Aird and her husband fall under the category of strict. "When we were little we had to ask permission to watch television," says Leah, 19, who will be a freshman at Dartmouth in the fall. "And we only were allowed to watch public television. Until a couple of years ago, we never watched MTV."

The music Leah and her younger brother, Andrew, were exposed to was limited to the music their parents loved. They could only eat candy once a week. Things lightened up as the kids learned how to make responsible choices, but Andrew, 16, won't be seeing either volume of Quentin Tarantino's violent "Kill Bill" movies anytime soon.

The result of that upbringing can be seen in Leah and Andrew's manners. When Conyers and Drummonds visit, the siblings formally say "hello" and "goodbye." Leah clears dirty plates and sets up dessert without complaint. If Aird and Carter can raise well-adjusted kids by turning off the radio and television, why can't other parents?

Aird leans forward excitedly and says it's because "the advertising and marketing industry really has become the enemy of the parents. They think they have a better idea of what children ought to be, how they ought to be raised, how they ought to dress, what they value." As a result, she says, these huge corporations "have just taken from me as a mother my prerogative to raise my children in an alternative way -- if I so desire. That is just not right. They have too much power to claim that parents should just be able to control them."

Joining the movement
For a time, Aird focused on raising Leah and Andrew. But in 1994, when the Children's Defense Fund founder and president Marian Wright Edelman came calling with a job, Aird took it, commuting several days a week to D.C. to work as director of Safe Start, a violence prevention program, and as acting director of its Black Community Crusade for Children program. "I was frankly feeling that feeling of worthlessness that you get: `I'm just a mother,' " she says, sitting back in her chair. "I wanted to do something else out there."

But the job took a toll on her son. "I met with his teacher, and he was having some challenges," says Aird. "She said, `You know it was really hard on him your not being here.' Of course, I felt terrible." After almost two years on the job, it was time for Aird to be a stay-at-home mom again.

It wasn't enough to satisfy her for long. By 1998, Aird was talking to the Institute for American Values director David Blankenhorn about forming an organization that could champion issues important to mothers. Why did this self-avowed Independent choose Blankenhorn's socially conservative group? "There aren't too many organizations that are not extreme right that are talking about values," she says. "There are not a lot of organizations that would describe themselves as liberal that really talk a lot about values. Being neither left nor right, liberal or conservative, I just tried to find a space where I could think holistically about the issues facing us."

Now there's a growing realization that if the motherhood movement is to blossom, it needs the support of a wide swath of people. The movement, says Brundage, "does not belong to one political philosophy. We have to quit worrying about where these messages come from and the motivations behind them and look at the messages themselves and judge them on their own merits."

A day after the Mothers' Gathering with Conyers and Drummonds, Aird sits in the cafeteria of the University of Connecticut in West Hartford. As her son lounges nearby, reading, she talks to two members of the Center for Survey Research and Analysis about the types of questions that should be in the motherhood study. About 60 will be asked in a 20-minute period during the September survey. Inspired by a comment by Drummonds, Aird requests that a question about depression be added.

It's Aird's openness to championing issues of concern to mothers from a variety of racial and socioeconomic backgrounds that impresses her fans. In this year's book "Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood," editor Cecelie Berry criticizes the feminist movement for focusing "primarily on the needs of middle-class White women who wanted the right to work [while] Black women had always worked." Some worry that black mothers will be just as invisible in the mothers movement: "Black moms," says James, the editor of Mommy Too!, "aren't included in the national dialogue about motherhood. . . . The maternal side of us is really kind of neglected."

Aird does a lot of her work with a phone clamped to her ear, she says. She also travels for the cause. A recent visit to D.C. found her talking to representatives of Congress -- she won't say which ones -- about tackling the issue of advertising and kids. She traveled to Minnesota for a Mothers' Gathering. It's work so tiring, she told Brundage last year, that she wants to help people have conversations, not run the motherhood movement. She has a nonfiction book, "Militant Mothering," to write; an elderly aunt and parents to care for.

"I often say to myself, `Why am I doing this?,"' says Aird, "because it sometimes seems useless. It seems so hopeless. But the corporate accountability thing -- I think something good is going to come of that. The motherhood study is going to be extremely informative about the state of motherhood."

And the possibility that she will someday effect change keeps Aird pressing forward.