I usually wouldn’t care, but as I’ve said many times, I support Darbi Boddy, who is a Lakota school board member, and there are a lot of mad moms and some strangely testosterone-free dads who just absolutely hate her and are petitioning to remove her from the board with a signature drive. So I’ve been reading some of the comments and listening to their complaints about Darbi more than I otherwise would to see if there is anything to their anger. Of course, there isn’t. Much of what they don’t like Darbi over is the result of their own terrible parenting, which requires some point of reference to consider. First of all, the attempt to remove a school board member with a petition drive is a steep hill. No matter how many signatures they gather, there were still 8 thousand people who had just put her in office, and a judge would ultimately have to rule on the action. So, just because there are a lot of mad moms signing a petition, that doesn’t mean they have any power to remove Darbi from her position, no matter how many of them sign a piece of paper. But let’s forget about that for this article and consider what they are so mad at, why they are angry with her, then consider what impact such people have on government in general. This situation with Darbi Boddy is just one local example of a much bigger problem that creates a lot of noise in all government interaction, the mad mom activist and the reasons they lobby government to compensate their children for the things that they, as parents, should be giving them. When you listen carefully to their complaints about Darbi Boddy, psychologically, what we really hear from them is nothing that Darbi has done but that they are planting a seed of discontent that will put the blame for their own bad parenting on a politician or a school. They crave more centralized authority to mask their own parental inadequacies.

I personally think motherhood is the most important job on planet earth. There is nothing else that comes close to the importance of motherhood. There is no CEO job or President of the United States that has a more important job than a mom in a family. She gives children everything they will ever be; if she does a bad job, the kids will be screwed up for life. It’s a big responsibility, and I think we should support moms much more than we do as a society. But, saying all that, often, moms are just kids themselves. As 20-somethings and 30-somethings, about to the age of 40, people just don’t have enough emotional development to have all the wisdom that children require. Motherhood is tricky business; in the beginning of a child’s life, it’s easy to know whether or not a mom is doing a good job.   Kids need everything when they are born. So if a mom keeps a child from crying, then they could be said to have success in their task. If they are there to help teach the child to walk, dress themselves, and can keep them from crying, because that’s all kids know to do when they are born, then a mom can say to herself that she is a good mom. But, at about age five, that entire relationship changes, and most parents don’t adapt. This second part of the job of raising a child is much more difficult, and most parents, especially in the kind of society we have these days, are not prepared for the task. 

From ages 5 to 15, children need wisdom from their parents, especially their moms. They need to learn to start managing risk and to advance their intellect through many minor bumps and bruises, which will then instruct them how to solve problems when they are adults. But too often, moms are still trying to keep their children from crying instead of teaching them not to cry and to solve their problems, no matter what they are. Kids need wise advice more than a padded room during this period of time, and it is monstrously difficult for moms to make that transition. I call this the “fat ass” phase, where anxious moms overeat because their own childhood neurosis explodes against the perpetual disappointments of the intellectual needs of their children, and it shows in the parents with expanded waistlines and upsized jean sizes. It’s no longer easy to just stop them from crying; what kids need in those formative years is much more difficult than simple pacification, and most mothers fail at it miserably. So they eat too many bags of chips, they divert their attention to too much ridiculous trivia, and when the children need that wise advice, the mother simply doesn’t have it in them. Too often, moms led embarrassing lives up until the time they were married or decided to have a baby, and all the guilt from that previous life comes back at them now that they are in charge of another life, and they just lack the confidence to give wise advice to anybody. 

Those mad moms turn to the government to help raise their children. This momma-age voting bracket is filled with big government disasters of people who were ill-equipped to have children or even be married to a spouse. So they vote for big government to hide their many faults behind government action. So the anger you often hear leveled at a school board member like Darbi Boddy at Lakota is because the parents feel inadequate. They want government to give them cover for their bad parenting skills, and a person like Darbi is encouraging more responsibility. When she takes pictures of kids dressed like prostitutes in the halls of Lakota, violating dress codes, it makes the parents feel bad because their bad parenting has been exposed. I can certainly understand why it would hurt their feelings, but perhaps it should. Rather than getting angry at Darbi, perhaps the right thing to do would be to change how they are parenting for the child’s sake. Trying to be the cool mom to a child that clearly has issues based on the way they appear in public isn’t going to give that child the skills they need once they become adults. What will end up happening is they will just repeat the process when they have their own children. And we’ll have more societal disasters in government as a result. Those people will become voters who seek to hide their bad behavior, their wasted lives behind more big government programs, which then gives us the kind of trouble we see today in politics. 

The worst public excuse that you can hear from a mother when they make demands on political sentiment when they are trying to express validation for their cause is to say, “I’m a mom,” as if that should say it all. Because she’s a mom, she has the right to ask for anything, and society should do whatever it takes to help her kid become successful. But she should have thought about that when she wasted her own youth sexually reckless, doing the floss at every wedding reception in a drunken stupor to the big butt song, and taking too many drugs from ages 15 to 25 when they realize that their flowers are wilting and they better do something to start a family by around age 30 before all their petals fall off and nobody wants to buy a house with them. Those are not the kind of conditions that produce a healthy family and make well-balanced kids who grow up into success. Those are crippling conditions that destroy lives, not just of the mother but of all her offspring. And Lakota schools, any government school, or any government agency cannot help such a person hide all the mistakes they have made in life with more policy, more rules, all driven from neurotic nonsense. Kids need a mom and a good person who can give them good advice. And when parents don’t feel confident in their ability to provide sound advice, they become these train-wrecks of people you see at school board meetings speaking about what they need Lakota to do to make their kid better. Or they complain about Darbi Boddy and put a lot of attention into getting rid of her with a petition drive. Rather than spend that time listening to their kids and advising them on how to be good people, they instead spend all their efforts getting rid of a school board member so that when their children are disasters of people twenty years from now, they can point to the school and blame them for all the mistakes. But the truth is, the problems begin and end with the moms who never made the successful transition with their kids from preventing them from crying to the wise advisor that children ultimately need. The great crisis of our time is that when kids reach that critical age, there just aren’t enough parents who can fill that role, and kids are greatly hampered in life because of it.

Rich Hoffman