Life and Options in Suburbia

[SAWgunner]

Desperate Houswives (subject)

Breakpoint

Besides reviving ABC television’s fortunes, Desperate Housewives led all television programs in Golden Globe nominations. The show is near the top of the ratings and is the most popular program among the coveted 18-to-49 female demographic.

It seems that the only thing the show can’t do is help the audience understand why some housewives are desperate.

Desperate Housewives, of course, tells the story of four friends living on a suburban street called “Wisteria Lane.” Their personal lives are a mess, and their families are, if anything, even worse. So, as television characters often do, they try to fill their vacuums with illicit pleasures: drug abuse, promiscuity, and adultery.

This is obviously the stuff of soap operas, yet there’s an important, if inadvertent, cultural point made: It really is difficult for American women to see marriage and motherhood as a calling these days.

That’s because our increased affluence means that, unlike their ancestors, most American women don’t have to worry about their children’s physical survival. While that’s great, it also makes their contributions to the kids’ well-being more intangible. The line connecting what they do at home and their children’s welfare isn’t as bright as it was for their grandmothers and great-grandmothers.

In addition, we live in a culture where an activity’s value is measured in almost exclusively economic, not moral and cultural, terms. As a result, women caring for their families can be and are made to feel like failures—despite the statistics that tell us children raised by their mothers and their fathers are two to three times less likely to have emotional problems, and boys are one-half less likely to become involved in crime.

Fortunately, there’s an alternative, one that can give mothers a strong sense of significance: homeschooling. And Desperate Housewives brought it up, but then rejected it out-of-hand. The past two decades have witnessed an explosion in the numbers of Americans who are educating their kids at home.

Why? Well, the appeal is that it restores the brightness of the line connecting our efforts and the well-being of our families. Instead of being mere consumers of education, we direct our kids’ education. Instead of hoping they learn history, we work on it with them.

Activities like homeschooling can help us to see being a wife and mother as what is: a calling, not a dead end. Our efforts yield tangible, as well as intangible, results. This is part of the reason that, as of 2003, more than 1.1 million children were being educated at home—an increase of 30 percent in only four years. Homeschoolers score higher on tests, and they take academic honors—like the Patrick Henry College students, all homeschooled, who recently beat a team from Oxford University in an international debate competition.

All of this was lost on the creators of Desperate Housewives, unfortunately. Depicting the lives of suburban women as a barren wasteland makes for better television. After all, who has the time for bed-hopping or pill-popping when you’re planning lessons or correcting homework?

Of course, “better television” isn’t synonymous with “reality” or “truth”—yet another reminder that if you want to know why you’re feeling desperate, the tube is the last place you should look.