Funny how one topic leads to another. Over the past few weeks I’ve been following two stories, one on Alpha Moms, hotly debated at Blogher.com . The other, on Alpha Girls, just heating up, appeared in The New York Times, and then was picked up in the Washington Post .

Goodness, how we get excited!

Both labels, Alpha Moms and Alpha Girls, use a term employed by business folks and politicians which has come to mean leaders or consumers who others seek out for advice. Both address what happens to these leaders when they switch fields – from high-charging career focused woman to family-focused Mom… do they lose their Alpha status? Maybe.

A fine quote from the first article , on Alpha Moms stated:

Alpha moms have emerged as the generation of college educated woman who take their experiences from the workplace and apply them to parenting with the same intensity.

In the second, on Alpha Girls, comically enough, the opposite is proclaimed.

“In many ways, caring for children is the exact opposite of ambition,” writes Dr. Anna Fels in Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives. “It occurs primarily within the nuclear family; it does not involve skills that require high levels of training…and it provides extremely low levels of recognition. It’s not just that our society does little to recognize mothering skills”

So… do Alpha Girls not grow up to become Alpha Moms? I’m confused and somewhat skeptical.

Today I spent some time with a friend of mine, who is trained in non-violent parenting and involved with The Center for Non-Violent Communication . An ordinary parent who decided she needed some additional tools; like me, like many of my friends. And that is how we take the skills we learned in the workplace and apply them to parenting.

What both of the above mentioned articles missed is that one of the skills that all Alpha Girls and Alpha Moms learned is “educate yourself”. Prior to entering the workplace, those intent on establishing a career receive an education. In the workplace, continual training is common and a requirement on the upwardly mobile career track.

Involved parents, Alpha or not, recognize that too! Moms attend birth classes and La Leche League . They get involved in Attachment Parenting groups, home schooling organizations, and parenting classes. They go back and acquire degrees in Human Development, Early Childhood, Child Psychology and Education, or take classes part time.

The True Alpha Moms, that is, those that other parents look to for advice, will not be those with an Ivy League education necessarily, but rather, those who have taken the time to educate themselves on parenting techniques.

[tags]alpha girl, alpha woman, alpha women, leadership, parenting techniques[/tags]
Photo graciously provided by M Dot, under a Creative Commons license