The Parenting Mystique

Nightmare Turned Tragedy

There is nothing, and I mean nothing worse than watching your child suffer with a serious illness — except being falsely accused of having abused them. The story of the murder-suicide of Tiffany and David O’Shell after they were falsely accused of abusing their baby daughter is gut wrenching. It turned out she suffered from a rear genetic condition that caused her bones to break easily. 

This a really egregious example of how parents are deemed guilty until proven innocent. It should be a wake-up call for us to take a long hard look at the institutional consequences of rampant parental determinism an its human cost. 

N

It’s Open Season on Parents

Parents should not be above criticism, but the hysterical reaction to two stories, one about the cancellation of a Colorado Springs Easter Egg Hunt and bogus story about Park Slope Parents wanting to ban Ice-cream trucks tells us more about our current climate of intolerance than the problems with parenting culture.

The New York Times ran a follow up piece to the original New York Post story, interviewing Dorothy Scanlan, the unfortunate mother whose comments were published by  the article’s author, Michael Gartland, without her permission. 

Reading Ms Scanlan’s comments in context, it’s pretty clear that she is not advocating for a ban on ice cream trucks or anything of the sort. But she and other parents in the neighborhood been subjected to almost ritualized public condemnation.

“Dorothy Scanlan”, wrote one commenter in the Post, “You are what is wrong with society. I wish cancer upon you.!!!!!!” Another writes “Bad parenting blames disruptions on others. JUST DISCIPLINE YOUR DEVIL SPAWN - SO THE REST OF THE WORLD DOESN’T HAVE TO.”  One speculates “I bet the parents are young up tight Jews.” The level of vitriol seems completely out of proportion.

I was party to the original discussion on Park Slope Parents and while there were a few people who wished the ice-cream vendors could be banned, (in fact they aren’t allowed inside the playground) it seemed more like their frustration talking.

There are things that every parent would, in the dark night of their souls, ban if they could. For me it’s those wretched children’s books with attached plastic panels that make noises. It doesn’t mean I am incapable of telling my children to stop incessantly pressing the buttons (and mine) or that I am too pathetic to say ‘no’ to buying the book in the first place. It’s more that it’s just one more thing to deal with on an already overflowing plate. 

The ice cream vendors add another dimension. Children instinctively understand that the stigma of having a child who is behaving horribly in public allows them to put their parents under tremendous pressure to give in. At a time when parental authority is considered suspect any attempt to enforce that authority whether it’s with a raised voice or a smack on the butt will result in dirty looks and maybe even a visit from social services. Trying and failing to correct an errant child is even more humiliating. It’s no wonder some parents want to avoid situations like these all together. 

It’s hard to tell whether these latest attacks on parents are simply a product of our incredibly intolerant times or whether, given our tendency to reduce all societies ills deficiencies of parenting, I suspect the latter.

N

Vive La France!

My review of Bringing Up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman is the feature in this month’s Spiked Review of Books. Though this book is meant to be fairly light and journalistic - or at least it’s been sold that way, I actually think these cross cultural comparisons make a very valuable contribution to the debate about parenthood.

More reviews of the book have been published since I finished writing mine. I had a quick peruse this morning. It’s amusing how worked up some of the reviewers have become, maybe even more so than in some of the reviews of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. The silliest is this Ayn Rand-like diatribe in Forbes entitled “Bringing Up Bébé? No Thanks, I’d Rather Raise a Billionaire by Erika Brown Ekiel, which depicts Druckeman and the French as socialists, devoid of ambition for their children and ultimately doomed to a bleak future sans entrepreneurism. Read it. It’s a hoot.

It’s really striking about almost all the American reviews of Druckerman’s book is the obsession with “outcomes”. Outcomes? These are the last refuge of the scoundrel. Focusing on outcomes perpetuates the idea that parenting leads inexorably to particular conclusions. In reality our adult lives probably have more to do with the immediate forces we encounter in the course of leading our lives. There are things we can’t always control, like economic conditions and social dynamics and there are those we can, like how to respond to our circumstances, whether we passively accept them, seek individual solutions or band together with others to shape our collective destinies. When all that goes out the window, we’re left to understand the world through the prism of some all important childhood as in trying to figure out which parenting technique led to China’s emergence as an economic power or how Mexicans raised children who are somehow prone to emigrate to the United States. As absurd as that sounds, it’s the logical trajectory of this sort of thinking.

Obviously we all care what kind of people our children ultimately become. We all want them to be relatively happy, successful and productive members of society. But to lay the sole responsibility for this on the shoulders of parents is unfair, not just because it asks far too much of parents, but because it stops us from taking a critical look at what really shapes our lives. More importantly, I think, it removes our children from the calculations. They are no longer the authors of their own fates but outcomes of what other people do.

So the next time you find yourself constructing the familiar calculation: parenting technique + experience = X, (as we all do), stop and consider whether this is really a realistic way to think about things. After all, X is not an outcome. X is our child.

N

NY Makes Kids Alone in Cars Illegal

Parents are imbeciles. Apparently. New York State has just passed a bill to make it illegal to leave kids under eight alone in a car for any length of time. You can read more about it here. The bill is supposed to stop us from leaving our children in cars where they could perish from hyperthermia.

It will do nothing of the sort. When my oldest son was very young, there was a horrifying story about a man who forget his ten month old son in the back of his car outside his office. The child died. It was a terrible, tragic story and one that I had, a tangential connection to. He and his wife were connected with an Internet forum I was also connected with. They had struggled with fertility issues, so their little son was really a sort of miracle. 

i remember looking at the website they’d put together for friends and family. There were tens of pictures of him, They were so happy and amazed in the way first time parents are - in the way I was at the time.  

The circumstances leading up to their son’s death were even more heart-breaking. The boy was waking in the night and his father had been up with him for hours so that his wife could get some rest. He meant to drop the boy off at day care, but he was so out of it, he went on “auto pilot” and drove to work as usual completely oblivious to the sleeping baby in the back seat. By the time someone noticed the boy in the car, it was too late for paramedics to do anything. News reports described the anguished father weeping in the parking lot. 

The story tore at my heart and I felt nothing but sympathy for the man and his wife. That’s why it came as such a shock to find so many people ready to condemn them. “What kind of a parent forgets they have a child in the car?” Answer: a bad parent, a stupid parent, a self-absorbed parent. 

I just couldn’t fathom the callousness of the responses. So I went away to find out everything I could about babies being left in cars. This tragedy occurs 3-4 times a year. It’s usually with a very young child who has fallen asleep in the car. The parents, who haven’t been parents very long simply forget they’re there. 

I do not know of any research to back this up, but I believe we are particularly vulnerable to routine. There are times I have driven to work in my car and found I have no memory of what the drive to get there was like. The motions are so ingrained that it’s as if part of my brain shut off. Another example - trivial but still on the same point - is what happens when you switch the contents of a drawer in the kitchen to a new place. I did this about a year ago and still find myself looking for items in the old location. 

The point is, I know in my heart of hearts, this could have been me. Forgetting is forgetting. I do not think legislation would have made me remember. Reading about these tragedies it seems obvious is that we need to develop a sort of alarm that alerts parents that there’s a baby in the car, much in the same way it tells us we’ve left keys. How hard could it be?  Some people I’ve raised this with speculate that on one would manufacture a device where the price for its failure would be so high. This seems perverse.

Now, I realize there is a case to be made about children in cars. Horrible things have happened when kids are left in cars - these things range from kids being taken in would be carjackings to - more commonly injuries caused when they managed to put the car in to gear so that it rolled over them or sent the car careering in to traffic. But these incidents are rare. More importantly, the vast majority of parents are perfectly capable of deciding whether it is safe to leave a child in the car reading a comic book or sleeping while they run into a shop to buy milk. They are also capable of taking the steps - lowering windows - removing keys, etc. to make it much less likely that kids can get into trouble. 

But rather than starting a conversation about how to leave kids in cars, New York State has chosen to outlaw it all together. We are not apparently reasonable people capable of learning (as if it weren’t obvious) that leaving kids in the car on a hot day or with the motor running is not a good idea. And as for forgetting babies - as Lenore Skenazy pointed out on Free-range Kids, the whole point of forgetting is that you forgot - in other words it wasn’t something you had control over. 

The memory of the couple who lost their baby all those years ago has stayed with me but I have another memory too. I remember how angry and hysterical the reaction was at first - much the same way that some people have reacted when anyone has dared to be critical of this bill.

But I’ll never forget how the everything changed when a very wise mother I know admitted “I thought it was inconceivable that anyone could forget their baby in the car and  was outraged, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I was reacting the way I was as a sort of defense mechanism. It was something that I could forget, that could happen to me. It could happen to anyone.”  

Her honesty was like flipping a switch and suddenly the mood changed from outrage to sadness, which is what I think we were all feeling anyway. It was a horrible tragedy made worse because it was so close to home. Tragedies tug at our hearts precisely because they seem so random and because with one or two “if’s” things might have been completely different.  

I think we could use a little more honesty and common sense in the way we discuss this law.

N

Evil Parents Spoil Easter Egg Hunt

It seems that an Easter Egg hunt in Colorado Springs has been cancelled because organizers can’t cope with “helicopter parents”.

Last year’s hunt was held in a open field where there weren’t very many places to actually hide the eggs.The organizers simply distributed them on the ground then roped off the area and lined up the kids up to begin the “hunt”. It’s then that things get a little murky. There was a staticy public address system and a bull horn. Parents weren’t supposed to help their tots to gather up the eggs but they either didn’t get the message or they simply ignored it, jumped the ropes and started grabbing eggs for their kids. It was all over in a few minutes. You can read more about the carnage here. The organizers decided they could not deal with the onslaught of helicopter egg hunters again and cancelled this years event.

As a veteran of many hunts and more importantly hunt disputes in my beloved Park Slope I have a view on this.  But first, let’s please just cut the crap. This is not really about pushy parents so much as complete organizational incompetence. Easter egg hunts work best when they are small and the kids participating are close in age. Even then, some kids will run ahead and find the majority of the eggs and others will wander around shell shocked and be lucky to find one or two. This is the inevitable law of the hunt. The only consolation is that as kids get a little older and gain a little more experience, they join the ranks of the successful hunters, until they join a group with older kids, in which case, the cycle starts all over again.

Organizational Incompetence

No one who has ever hunted an egg should be surprised about what happened in Colorado Springs last year. Organizing - and I use this verb ironically - the event the way they did guaranteed a free-for-all. And then to add cynicism to organizational incompetence, the organizers had the gall to cancel this years hunt and to blame local parents. Let’s think about this for a moment. They didn’t simply decide not to organize the Easter Egg hunt, they actually issued a press release to let it be known that the problem was parents. 

This is a cheap shot, not just because it’s a pathetic example of shifting the blame but because there really is a problem with parents and Easter egg hunts. It just wasn’t the main problem with this particular hunt.

Every year there are thousands of successful Easter Egg hunts take place across the country, attended by children and parents who are pretty much the same as children and parents in Colorado Springs. And yet, somehow they manage to muddle though how ever imperfectly without canceling or alerting the media. The difference is… the organizers have actually organized them. They have kept the size manageable, they have at least made a pretense of hiding the eggs and they have found a way to deal with parents - sometimes even enlisting their help. 

The Real Problem with Parents and Easter Egg Hunts

Now, there is definitely a problem with Easter egg hunts and parents that bears looking at but it’s slightly different. We parents are far too invested in them. We are now so gravely concerned about our children’s potential disappointment that we lose sight of the whole point of the hunt - which is to have fun looking for eggs. Our instinct is to level the playing field so that every child finds approximately the same number of eggs lest one be devastated. 

In the postmortems of Easter Egg hunts I’ve been party to (yes, I’ve done postmortems on Easter egg hunts), the overarching theme is disappointment. Sometimes kids don’t even find a single egg. Sad, particularly if you’ve contributed a dozen filled plastic eggs to the communal pot, but not exactly surprising. Three-year-olds don’t find many eggs - even if there are dozens of them strewn around in plain sight. I speak from experience. Are they disappointed? It depends on the child. Is it permissible to point out a few eggs for them. Absolutely. Is it reasonable to expect all kids to get approximately the same number of eggs? No.

It seems we suffer from a collective and selective amnesia. We’ve either forgotten that we were once the kid with no eggs (or we simply don’t remember because we were too young) or we’ve rediscovered an ancient psychic wounding from an Easter egg hunt, poured salt on it and convinced ourselves it was one of the defining moments of our life.   

Why are we so frightened of disappointment? Surely these little failures - yes, failures are part of life’s rich tapestry. We project our own feeling on to these events and lasting tragedies of the sort dissected on therapist’s couches. In reality it’s probably more likely that our kids just experience a momentary disappointment in part of an a day that was generally good fun. Truly, let’s give our kids some credit and trust in their resilience and capacity to be better at hunting Easter eggs next year. 

N

Thought Experiment: Parents: Teachers First?

There are a number of things we could question about parenting culture today but the most fundamental is the assumption that nature the parent-child relationship is primarily educative, that being a good parent means understanding that everything we do teaches our child something. Good parents are mindful of this “fact” and so adjust what they do  accordingly.  It’s an idea that is actually most clearly illustrated and perhaps owes something of its in public policy.

It’s pretty clear that for policy makers at least, the parent-child relationship is highly deterministic. The best example of this comes from Early childhood policy. The quality of parenting is thought to determine a child’s chances of success or failure later in life. It is assumed, and backed by evidence of correlation, that the children of affluent educated parents turn out the same because of the way their parents related to them. Early childhood programs seek to replicate this experience.

It’s not primarily a matter of academics, though many early childhood education programs do teach children things like reading, colors and numbers far in advance of their contemporaries. The greater emphasis is on inculcating so-called “soft skills”. These are things like perseverance, the ability to delay gratification and the ability to get along with other people.

Early academic gains tend to fade out by third grade but the positive impact of Head Start, as analyzed by Nobel Prize winning academic, James Heckman, lasts a life time. Graduates of Head Start and its precursors do better than their contemporaries by almost any measure, from lifetime income to health.

It’s with this in mind that the trend in policy circles, best exemplified by Obama’s “cradle to career” education strategy, is to intervene even before children or born to shape the parent-child relationship.

How is the parent-child relationship to be shaped?  The main aim and end of these very early programs is to transform the parent-child relationship into one that is primarily educative. The means that parents must be made aware that any thing they do will have an educative affect on their child.

So, if a parent is negative about an unusual vegetable in the supermarket, their child learns not to try new foods. If a parent reads to their child daily that child will learn to love reading - and perhaps to have higher confidence and self esteem because their parent has chosen to spend time with them.

Early childhood programs like those advocated by foundations like An Ounce of Prevention actually take young parents on “field trips” to the local supermarket where they are encouraged to use the experience as a series of teachable moments. This means the parent takes the opportunity to give their child an orange to hold while cooing something like “This is an orange. The orange is ROUND. How does is feel? Is it SMOOTH? See how it is BUMMPY? 

There are all sorts of problems with this approach at the level of social policy seeming from the temping but highly dubious tendency to want to reduce complex social and cultural and economic phenomena to the level of the interactions between parents and their kids, i.e. is the problem poverty a matter of parenting or do long-term social and economic trends play the larger role in shaping a child’s prospect and expectations. my main concern however is the impact on the parent-child relationship.

The assumption that the relationship between parents and kids should be primarily educative puts a terrible burden on parents. Let us suppose for a moment that the parent-child is a rich, dynamic reciprocal relationship that evolves over time. If this relationship is primality educative, it means we can take nothing for granted. The time we spend with our children becomes a series of interactions that are more or less effective from the point of view of educating them. 

It puts parents in the awkward position of evaluating their actions, before, during or after the fact. What parent hasn’t experienced that self-doubt wondering “what am I teaching my child by: losing my temper, indulging in ice-cream two days in a row, allowing them to watch/not watch television, making them stick with or allowing them to quit ______?”

Not only does this hugely complicate the fairly banal decisions parents make in the course of a day and encourage self consciousness and self-doubt, It opens the door to evaluating every other parent’s behavior in the same way. Parents often talk about feeling “judged” by others but what we often miss is the far that we are judging our own actions on the basis of assumptions we never question. 

On some level I think most parents believe that it is simply common sense that our relationship with our kids is educative. My argument is not that we do not learn things from our parents. We evidently do. It’s more to question a) whether that therefore means our relationship is primarily educative b) whether this requires any self-consciousness on the part of parents and c) why we have elevated the parent-child relationship above all other relationships on our children’s lives.

Imagine if we applied the same criteria to our romantic relationships. Suppose we ditched all this sentimental slop about reman it chemistry and friendship and the pleasure of sharing a life together and decided that the real purpose of our romantic relationships is mutual responsibility to education one another? Imagine we assume that primary influence on our thinking and behavior was our interactions with our partner? What if we subjected every action in the course of a day to the same lines of thinking we take in regard to our children? “What am I teaching my partner by sleeping late, or drinking too much wine, or following the New York Yankees?” Or, because a romantic relationship is mutual, what in God’s name is my partner thinking eating two slices of pie? 

It seems fairly obvious that this sort of thinking would undermine our relationship if not destroy it. By reducing everything to a matter of cause and effect, we not only rob our relationships of their complexity and spontaneity we also diminsis our partner’s potential for autonomy and their capacity to  express various aspects of their personality.

Even children, at their most dependent have the potential for autonomy, to consider a thing and to decide how to act on it. When these deterministic assumptions begin to dominate our thinking, we start to see our children differently. So our children are not “ready” to walk to school because we have not taught them how to do it, or their refusal to eat broccoli is not simply a personal preference but because we failed to teach them to appreciate vegetables. 

There’s much more to say on this - I could probably write a book about how the way we view the parent-child relationship today confuses the relationship between children and teachers and parents and schools. In the meantime I hope this provokes some thought and discussion.

Nancy

Parents vs Society - Not An Easy Leap

I just returned from the Battle of Ideas Festival in London where I was invited to appear on a panel about Tiger Mothers, or more correctly the row about Tiger Mothers.

The Battle, which is in its 7^th year, is truly on of the most inspiring events going. It not only attracts the best and the brightest speakers from around the world, but the audience is always incredibly smart, articulate and young.

I am no worshiper of youth but I can’t help but feel this is one place at least where there is a genuinely intergenerational striving to grapple with big ideas. The ideas matter, not in a usual academic sense, but because of the participants, from most accomplished speaker to the youngest participants (some in high school) sense their capacity to the change the world. This lends the whole event a unique sense of seriousness and excitement.

I can’t help but contrast it to the Occupy Movement, which seems content to flirt with the vague, lofty platitudes ascribed to it by the press while spending the rest of its time wallowing in the minutiae of organizing collective food preparation or managing the excesses of the drum circles. But I digress.

I shared the platform with Stephianie Calman, a broadcaster, author and founder of The Bad Mother’s Club, Decca Aitkenhead, a journalist for The Guardian and G2 and the wonderful Tim Gill, of the Web site Rethinking Childhood, author of No Fear: growing up in a risk-averse society and a man who has probably done more to promote playgrounds the importance of play over safety in playground design than any other man on the planet.

It was a good session only slightly marred by the fire alarm that went off during my speech and required us to vacate the building. Fortunately we were able to return in 5 minutes. The content of the speeches are being transcribed for Spiked so I won’t go into them here but I was really stuck by how hard it is to move this discussion forward.

What I mean by this is that it is very difficult, perhaps more than with any other subject, for people to make that subtle intellectual separation between their own experience and what is going on with parenting culture and childhood at the level of society. Of course it’s fine to bring personal experience to bear up to a point, but in this case, it tends to really reinforce the focus on the parent/child relationship.

This combined with a tendency to focus on the poor means that many of the really horrible institutionalized aspects of parental determinism are excused because “we all know” there are parents out there (read poor people) who really need these remedial lessons in relating to their children (how to read to them, feed them, discipline them, etc.).

I don’t think this is an accident. I’m amazed at the number of mainstream trends in parenting culture today which have their intellectual origins in discussions of what used to be known as “social issues”, poverty, child abuse, inequality. So for instance, researchers look at the language children hear in early childhood in a middle class home and use that as a model for how parents in a working class home should speak to their children.

It has the insidious effect of making middle class parents feel superficially superior, though it ultimately makes them self-conscious about how they speak to their kids. For poor parents it promotes the fantasy that simply by exposing their children to different language they can single-handedly overcome systemic factors like long term economic stagnation, poor schools, etc. And if they fail… well naturally they need help – with their parenting! 

I think it would be useful for parents to experiment with taking themselves out of the equation. Anytime we hear a policy discussion about parenting we should askif parents weren’t here, how would we do this? I think we’d find that there are a number of different areas where parents are being brought in to compensate for the decline of some other way of doing things, whether that’s the loss of sidewalks.