Children Look for Constraints
Turning Red and choosing a rule of life to cleave to
This week, I’m talking about children’s stories and the battle between positive and negative freedom. Later this week, I’ll have a roundup of your comments about chronic illness, competency, and whom we exclude from our definition of what it means to be human.
I have not seen the new Pixar film Turning Red (which is about a girl who has inherited the power to turn into a large red panda from her mother), but I’ve appreciated some of the peripheral discussion.
One of my favorite comments came from Noah Millman, who enjoyed it, but had a sharp observation:
It’s not clear precisely what the panda is supposed to represent—sexuality? creativity? anger?—and that’s a good thing; it’s a metaphor, not an allegory. But the one thing that is clear about it is that it is powerful, and therefore difficult to control. And yet, Mei gets control of it almost immediately. […] And that just bugged the crap out of me. That’s not what my experience of sexuality, creativity or anger is like, nor is it how I experience anyone else in whom those currents course powerfully.
[…]
A message that you don’t have to cut off, cut out or otherwise deny a part of yourself to become mature, that you don’t need a cure for developing secondary sex characteristics or for the emotional ructions of puberty—that’s a message that might have quite a bit of resonance in our era. But I think minimizing the challenges of deciding to live fully seriously undermines the message’s persuasiveness. And I suspect kids can tell when they’re being sold a fantasy.
It’s possible for your parents to have the wrong guardrails for a powerful part of yourself, and for the solution to be not the absence of constraint, but a better way to keep that part of yourself alive but not untrammelled.
In some ways, Millman’s comment pairs well with the biography of Maria Montessori that I recently read. When Montessori began observing small children, she was surprised by the way they loved routines and work. While donors to her classroom wanted to bring toys to the children, the children wanted to get to push the broom or wash the windows. They wanted to do hard things, to explore the edge of their mastery.
I’ve been baking with my toddler (prodded a bit by this good column from Liz Bruenig), and it’s quite stressful for me! At any moment, there can be a big mess, and it removes a lot of what is relaxing about baking by myself. But I’ve been impressed with how determined my two-year-old is to learn to bake rather than to just express herself messily with the flour.
When I tell her we need to mix gently, and that we want the dry ingredients to stay in the bowl, she listens. (Though her application combines gentle stirring with yelling “Stay in bowl!” to the flours and sugars).
Discipline isn’t automatically repulsive to children—it can be an exciting way to move through the world, to learn what your strength is for. The katas of everyday life don’t get cheesy 80s training montages, but many children do find them attractive.
Which leaves me curious about what stories (on film or otherwise) for children are about choosing the right limits (and possibly learning your parents have chosen the wrong ones).
The first thing that comes to mind for me is A Wrinkle in Time, where Mrs. Whatsit tells Meg, “Stay angry, little Meg. You will need all your anger now.” Meg isn’t called to let her anger take hold of her completely, but she finds the right way to use it, which is ultimately still subordinate to love.
To your first question, my almost 2yo really likes Umbrella by Taro Yashima. Umbrella is the story of a little girl who gets an umbrella and boots for her 3rd birthday and is SO EXCITED but has to endure many days of nice weather before it finally rains. On a sunny day, she tells her mother she needs her umbrella because the sun bothers her eyes; on a windy day, she tells her mother she needs her umbrella because the wind bothers her eyes. Her mother says, "You know you can enjoy the sunshine better without the umbrella" and "the wind might blow your umbrella away" along with, "Let's save it for a rainy day." Finally, it rains, and the protagonist gets to use her umbrella. A savvy reader also notices that she matures as well. The book is wonderful for a number of other reasons, too, but to your point, the boundaries she gets from her mother are perfectly reasonable and help her understand how to live in the world, how to act in different kinds of weather.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about motherhood as my daughter gets older, and I finally settled (maybe?) on the idea that my daughter is my apprentice. We don't do a lot of baking but I have this really adorable photo of her standing on a chair stirring the scrambled eggs in the pan. She helps me with laundry, too; I hand her things from the washer and she puts them in the dryer.
Discipline is a tricky thing. There are a lot of people/programs/ideas that demand discipline in a way that I don't think is healthy, these exercise and nutrition/supplement regimens or productivity programs that require a lot of discipline but they seem to treat the body as a tool or machine that needs to be controlled or forced into peak condition, without respect for what the body is, and without room for weakness (which isn't necessarily under your control). As someone with multiple chronic illnesses occasionally slowed down further by difficult pregnancies, these programs generally made me feel ashamed of myself for not "getting it together" until I learned to think/feel differently. Discipline in general is good, but it can go off the rails if it's aimed toward the wrong ends. Choosing the right discipline is as much about the goal as it is about methods.
To circle back - when I see my toddler daughter as my apprentice, that gives me a focus for how I discipline her and what boundaries I set. I want her to be able to live as an adult, which includes skills like making scrambled eggs and attitudes like respecting other people. So I think about what she can do now (physically & mentally) and what is the next step toward getting her to the goal. That guides my decisions about what to include her in (and how to include her) and what kinds of things merit a time-out.
I loved Turning Red. In particular, I think Noah overstates the extent to which Mei’s decision to keep her panda is an uncomplicated one. There is a moment, after her decision is made, and while she is still in the spirit world, when she looks at her ancestor who started the family connection to the red panda and asks “I won’t regret this, will I?”
In the film, this becomes a positive moment: her ancestor is clearly overjoyed to have a descendant who wants to keep her gift. But, to me, it nevertheless suggested that Mei might still struggle, sometimes — but that having that powerful connection to her heritage would be worth it.
Turning Red echoes Moana in having a heroine whose coming of age is less about repudiating what went before and more about returning to it. In both cases, this framing is perhaps partly demanded by respect for the underlying culture. Certainly, it would have been deeply culturally insensitive to have a Polynesian Disney heroine whose main arc was about breaking with her ancestors!
I really like it, as a trend, though. Finding your own way doesn’t have to be about finding a completely new way. Sometimes it can be about finding your connection with something much older.