Timeless tale of family still resonates today
Reading Little Women can help you be a better parent, Anna Nordberg writes.
As I was watching director Greta Gerwig’s glorious adaptation of Little Women, the film felt like a revelation.
Gerwig has not updated the novel, she’s simply illuminated it. There’s so much worry in modern parenting that it’s comforting to realize most of the problems we face aren’t new; Marmee, the fictional matriarch, faced them back in the 1800s.
Here’s what all parents can take away from Louisa May Alcott’s portrayal of family.
THIS IS A FAMILY THAT KNOWS HOW TO HAVE FUN
Put simply, the March family delights in one another. Every evening, they sit together as a family. They laugh a lot and rejoice in one another’s successes. Of all the advice I’ve been given as a parent, the most helpful was to take the time to delight in my kids. The other work of parenting — teaching right from wrong, sharing a system of values, giving children the skills to become independent — flows from that foundation.
MARMEE SEES EACH GIRL AS AN INDIVIDUAL
Parenting four daughters is not for the faint of heart, and you could forgive Marmee for just trying to get through the day.
Instead, she supports each child through their challenges — Jo with her topsy-turvy emotions, Amy with her vanities and Beth with her shyness. When Meg, the oldest at 16, goes on a trip to a wealthy friend’s family home, she overhears gossip about how her mother must be angling for a good match for her, and Marmee’s response, when a devastated Meg asks her if it’s true, is a marvel. “My dear girls, I am ambitious for you, but not to have you make a dash in the world — marry rich men merely because they are rich, or have splendid houses, which are not homes because love is wanting,” Marmee says. “I’d rather see you (unmarried) or poor men’s wives, than queens on thrones, without self-respect and peace.”
While the focus on marriage speaks to a time when women had almost no career opportunities, the core idea of this speech — that a life driven by perceived status rather than purpose and love will not be a happy one — holds. It is the message Meg, who Marmee knows has a good heart but also envies her wealthier friends, in particular needs to hear.
What’s perhaps most admirable about Marmee is that she never signals that she prefers one girl’s temperament over another. Marmee helps each girl grow into who they are.
WE NEED TO GIVE OUR CHILDREN SPACE TO FAIL
In the chapter Experiments, the girls decide for one summer week to abandon all of their work and responsibilities and just laze about. Marmee allows it, though she warns, “I think you will find ... that all play and no work is as bad as all work and no play.”
The house is in shambles, the days feel bewilderingly long and everyone is out of sorts. The “experiment” is such a comical failure all four daughters return to their duties with energy and relief, having learned a lesson. Marmee gave them the space to fail, knowing that’s sometimes the best way to learn.
MARMEE IS THE MODELER IN CHIEF
When I read Little Women in high school, Marmee’s amazing mothering skills felt as fixed as some laws of the universe, as if goodness and sense came naturally to her. Until Gerwig ’s adaptation, that’s pretty much how she was portrayed on the screen, too.
What’s so surprising upon rereading the novel now is that Marmee had to work to overcome her shortcomings, and that experience is key to her parenting success. She can help her girls with empathy and lack of judgment because she understands their struggles. After Amy falls through river ice because Jo, who was angry at her, wasn’t watching her, Jo seeks out her mother. “It’s my dreadful temper!” she wails. “I try to cure it, I think I have, and then it breaks out worse than ever! Oh Mother, what shall I do?”
Marmee counsels her to remember this day, then says, “Jo, dear, we all have our temptations ... and it often takes us all our lives to conquer them. You think your temper is the worst in the world; but mine used to be just like it.” Jo cannot believe it; she has never seen her mother angry.
“I’ve been trying to cure it for 40 years, and have only succeeded in controlling it,” Marmee says.
“I am angry nearly every day of my life, but I have learned not to show it; and I hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another 40 years to do so.”
The gift Marmee gives Jo is not some speech about how to transform herself into a different person who doesn’t feel anger. Instead, it’s a road map on how to get to a place where anger doesn’t control her.
The anger in parenting is real — whether it’s 7:48 a.m. and no one has their shoes on, or you learn someone is bullying your kid.
What Marmee offers Jo in her moment of struggle is the validation of shared experience.
And reading this book more than 150 years after it was published, I feel the same way.
The Washington Post