On the surface, it would seem that for parents of teens living in this decade, productivity is not necessarily, e.g. in the case of mommy-writers, associated with creating paperback novels or with contributing to pulp magazines, but with Internet stardom.

Contemporary kids’ behavior would suggest that today’s mommy-writers are “brilliant” social engineers not by dint of their pamphleteering prowess or even because they write expensive jingles for television, but since they get their name out on remote web locations. Moms who have URLs, to which their teens can point their friends, are superstars, are women who have actualized their fifteen minutes of glory.

The truth, however, is that such images tarnish, in children’s minds, long before a quarter of an hour is over. Our up and coming generation does not proportionately invest in externally validated “grandeur.” A bank manager mom might bring in the money, as well as might be responsible for an awful lot of that resource, but an artisan mom, or a stay-at-home mom, making little or no money, respectively, who might be equally as accountable as their career-motivated peer, for administering family resources, can also shine brightly to their offspring.

Being a hero is about acting in a special way, not about having the most expensive costume.

According to our world’s traditions of champions, someone painted with superlatives necessarily must be depicted as some sort of demigod. In practice, such women are rarely defenders of all passersby.

Sorting dishes, folding laundry and ferrying children to play rehearsals might, to us, constitute the stuff of laurel leaves and of trophies. Yet, our offspring better remember the five extra minutes we spent waiting with them at the bus stop, the late hours we spent listening to their tales of high school rivalry, and the weeks and months we spent driving them all the way across the city to pick them up from killer martial arts classes.

Analogously, teens usually do not recall (or care about) the professional rewards we received, the diets from which we graduated, or the methods we used to intersperse work with parenting.

To glisten to our children, we need not be absolute leaders (or villains). Whereas it’s great, for example, for mommy-writers to publish poetry, to pursue agents for novels, and otherwise to distribute their creative nonfiction to various audiences, it is more important for mommies to remember that the “poets, philosophers and rhetoricians” that teens value most are the adults with the “sensibility” to allow electric guitars into their homes, to encourage the company of their children’s friends at odd hours, and to realize that “semantic sensibility” means lucidly copying down cookie recipes.

While it is normal to struggle with the many appellations we moms of adolescents call ourselves, it is exceptional to consider that our children do not need us to topple states by force or to become exquisite political figures. Rather, our youth need us to notice their growth and to give them hugs during the few hours during which they are at home.

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