“The Bump is Back”: Celebrity Moms, Entertainment Journalism, and the “Media Mother Police”

[para. 1]: "“Mommy, why is Jamie Lynn’s mom bad?” This question was posed to me by my then eight-year-old daughter, who, after wandering into my home office, began reading the headlines of all the Hollywood magazines I had strewn about the floor in writing this chapter. Her eyes had been drawn to a cover featuring the familiar face of Jamie Lynn Spears, star of her favorite TV show, Zoey 101. As the pregnant teen sister of Britney, Jamie Lynn joined the roster of celebrity moms and moms-to-be that has become the mainstay of entertainment journalism. This particular issue of US Weekly (6 January 2008) offers a photograph of the unsmiling girl being hugged protectively by her big sister, with the caption “Destroyed By Mama” plastered below the image. The subheading “Shame on Lynne Spears” identifies the derelict mama who is accused, in a series of point-form bulletins, of aiding and abetting her sixteen-year-old daughter’s pregnancy (“Let Jamie Lynn’s boyfriend sleep over”) as well as of marketing the story for personal financial gain (“Lynne sees her girls as a piggy bank”). This incident in my office is not the first time my daughter has been drawn to my glossy hoard, delighted by the fact that her professor-mother has been amassing such a magazine collection."