The Today Show featured a story on “mother-daughter bonding boot camp”, a group therapy business, where mother-daughter pairs pay to go and share stories, light candles, play games and work out their angst with 100 or so other mother-daughter pairs.

Seriously.

The last night they roast marshmallows; the final morning they light candles and say one meaningful word to each other.
The same day CNN carried a story about the newest, most pathetic trend: parents, predominately mothers, going with their college age and college grad children to their job interviews, waiting in the waiting rooms or, when possible even going into the interview with them and answering questions on their behalf.

I have previously written elsewhere about the popularity in particularly affluent communities of “baby sleep coaches” who camp out in the home to “coach” mommies on getting their babies to sleep.

“Thumb-sucking dependency” (the polar opposite of the virtue I celebrate: self-reliance) isn’t new in America. It’s just increasingly dominant.
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