Single mom by choice and good parenting

By Kang Hyun-kyung

“I wish I had one more eye on my back.”

Japanese-born TV personality Fujita Sayuri, better known to the Korean public by only her first name of Sayuri, utters this bizarre wish for one more eye as she struggles to carry her four-month-old baby, Zen, on her back and tries to reach out at him with a teether toy. After several failed attempts from different positions, she eventually succeeds in getting it into her baby's mouth.

The above scene came from KBS 2TV's hit show, “The Return of Superman,” a reality TV show featuring several celebrities and examining their ways of parenting.

Calling herself “Mommy” in the third person, Sayuri talks to her baby.

“Mommy has become an early morning person because of you. Mommy wakes up at 4 a.m., which I think is good for Mommy's health,” she says in Korean with a strong Japanese accent.

She and her baby son joined the cast of the KBS2 TV show recently. They are like a fresh breath of air for an otherwise same-old show, amid several celebrity couples going through predictable parenting issues and methods.

Unlike other parents on the show, Sayuri is a single mom by choice.

Since last year, she has been at the center of media attention for her uncommon decision: she became pregnant through a sperm donation and gave birth to a baby last November.

The Japanese celebrity has pitted members of the Korean public against each other. Some disgruntled Koreans have uploaded their complaints on KBS' homepage, demanding that the national TV station cancel the casting of the unwed mom and her newborn baby. Some threatened to boycott the program. Some viewers even filed petitions at Cheong Wa Dae. Filled with hate speech, they claimed that the station was promoting misleading family values by casting Sayuri in the show.

Standing up to the campaign to antagonize the single mom by choice, some activists gathered in front of KBS last month, encouraging the broadcaster to continue featuring Sayuri on the hit TV show.

They claimed that the ratio of single parents has been on the rise, but that they are underrepresented on national TV and other networks, urging them to show diverse forms of families, including single mothers by choice and their children.

The clash of the two groups has prompted me to think both about notions of traditional parenting and raising children in times of change. We were taught that mothers and fathers should share in parenting, but with different roles in the upbringing of their children.

I wonder how many children are raised under such perfect parenting. Recent events in our society have made me skeptical about conventional understandings of parenting. Unspeakable child abuse cases are in the news almost every day, showing not only adoptive parents but also biological parents treat their children badly. Some exploit adoption and foster programs as a means to earn extra income from the government, leading to some adopted infants getting beaten to death.

These horrible incidents make me think that maybe it's time to think differently about parenting.

Maybe the discourse of parenting should start with the question of whether the people in question are prepared to raise their children or not, rather than whether they are married or not.

While watching her on TV, I was convinced that Sayuri is a well-prepared parent. The way she talks and responds to her baby boy, as well as her care of and loving attitude toward the four-month-old are not so different from other mothers doing a good job raising their newborn babies.

In last week's episode, Sayuri broke her silence about the unwed mother controversy surrounding her.

In a calm manner, she clarified her position of why she chose to become a mother without marrying.

“Some people treat me like a goodwill ambassador of single moms by choice, but I'm not representing them. I have no intention to do so. I believe that having both parents is best for a baby. But unfortunately, I was unable to have that picture-perfect family. However, I desperately wanted a baby, so I chose to become a mother anyway. I want to tell others that there are people like me. That's all.”

Sayuri is not the first celebrity to pay the price for her rare choice to become a single mother and to weather both criticism and encouragement from the Korean public.

TV show host Hur Soo-kyung stunned the nation back in 2008 with her announcement that she was pregnant via a sperm donor. At that time, she was single after her two previous marriages didn't work out. She said a doctor told her that she couldn't have a baby on her own, so she chose to have a baby through a sperm donor.