Review: Gummi Bears Should Not Be Organic

Gummi Bear Should Not Be Organic: And Other Opinions I Can't Back Up With Facts

By Stephanie Wilder-Taylor

Gallery Books April 2015

256 pages

Read via Netgalley

 

Stephanie Wilder-Taylor is a mom to three kids. Parenting can be a tough gig, especially when you are constantly bombarded by a new method or trend every week. "There are more experts, books, and parenting philosophies than you can shake a positive EPT stick at, and a lot of them have differing views. Should I force my kids to play the violin until their fingers bleed while yelling at them in Mandarin and Cantonese, a la the Tiger Mom? Or, as per the French, should I be raising my kids on three buttered croissants a day while smoking, drinking red wine, and having a menage a trois?" She proposes that maybe we all need to relax and go with whatever works.

In this book, Wilder-Taylor invites us to reflect on our need for every child to be gifted, our fixation on family dinners, and the ridiculousness of forced volunteering at your kid's school. She writes about attempting to give her daughters some independence as she let them walk around a room of the museum and waited at the entrance. It was only moments before another mother marched her daughter back to her, as if she had abandoned her in the middle of an intersection.

Wilder-Taylor is endlessly snarky and willing to point out any idiocy or hypocrisy she sees in parenting styles. But the good news is that she isn't above admitting her own foibles too. You probably won't read anything life-changing here, but it's nice to feel like someone is in the trenches of parenting along with you. Gummi Bears Should Not Be Organic will make you laugh and allow you to relax for a moment as you realize that you are probably doing just fine as a parent.