Parents Can't Be Neutral

The gift of normative judgement

Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash

Jane Psmith

has a fascinating review of Sick Societies, (cw: serious sexual abuse of both men and women). The book takes aim at the idea that culturally conserved traditions (esp in “primitive” societies) are presumed to be adaptive and perhaps superior to modern ways of life. You see this attitude turn up in both right-wing coded (paleo) and left-wing coded (crunchy) spaces.

Psmith’s review covers some plainly (and violently) maladaptive traditions, including some that tribes were relieved to set aside as soon as they realized an alternative was possible or an outside authority allowed everyone to abandon a bad equilibrium in unison. She moves from the discussions of these particular, persistent errors to a thoughtful take on tradition:

There’s a certain kind of person who likes to talk about Chesterton’s Fence, and who will tell you that you should obey tradition because, being the distillation of centuries of human experience, it encodes tacit knowledge and gives you truths you couldn’t possibly reach on your own. This person, whom we may call the utilitrad, is rarely from a society that burns its widows…

[I]f you’re trying to figure out what’s actually good, you can’t just rely on heuristics like “has it been this way for a long time” — and certainly not “do primitive societies do it.” I regret to inform you that you actually have to do the hard work of making actual moral judgements. And to do that you need a robust anthropology — not in the sense of living for several years with people who wear bones in their noses, but a theory of what a human being is and what one is for.

Her conclusion strongly parallels how I ended my own The New Atlantis review of

Abigail Shrier

’s Bad Therapy earlier this summer. The book had two tracks that interested me. First, the democratization of therapy:

The broader expansion of therapy to non-professionals means it is common for therapeutic tools to be wielded by anyone, with no accompanying disclosure, guidelines, or code of ethics. The implication of therapy’s growing amateurization is that it is powerful but not obviously dangerous. It’s not so unlike the way that meditating and taking hallucinogens are increasingly regarded. There’s a certain level of respect for the way these experiences can alter the mind, but also a strong expectation that you can mess around on your own and avoid catastrophe. The risks of LSD and ayahuasca are relatively well known, but intense meditation also can trigger psychosis. Is a culture of therapy-speak the less-chemical equivalent of your friends microdosing the punch bowl?

But as I wound towards the end of the piece, I was particularly interested in why parents look toward the therapeutic tradition as the guide for raising a child:

A therapist begins by asking the patient what his or her goals are for therapy. Although Shrier suspects many counselors of having hidden agendas, professional practice is framed neutrally. If parents are increasingly relying on professionals to guide them in shaping their children, it may be because the parents are not confident they have a normative vision of human life to pass on. The rise of parenting influencers who offer scripts for talking to your child is a response to parents who don’t want to raise their children as they themselves were raised, but don’t possess a positive vision of their own.

It is hard to parent if you want your kids to have a good life but also feel the need to be scrupulously non-normative about what that good life consists of.

There’s a small scale example of this anxiety in a NYT feature today on the rising popularity baby-led weaning. (Full disclosure, this is what we do but, uh, with a lot less app uses than folks in the feature). The final words of the piece:

“At the end of the day, why are we, as parents, so hungry for all this information?” Ms. Best asked. “Because we don’t trust ourselves.”

But the distrust goes further: the parents don’t trust themselves or their own parents. They don’t believe they have something solid to pass on, nor that they can reliably discern what new thing is good for them or their children. (cf my review of MBD’s My Father Left Me Ireland for a particularly aching treatment of this absence). Without a strong articulation of the telos of human beings, it’s harder to make a ruling, more tempted to leave everything open ended.

I was chatting with another mother, a little older than me, who told me she feels terrible saying “No” to her toddler and tries to find alternatives. I told her, honestly, that this doesn’t bother me at all.

A good faith “No” is a gift to a child learning to map the world and her way of living in it. Think of the game of Twenty Questions, I told her—you’re hungry for nos, because you rely on them to navigate a way to the answer. Kids want nos (and yeses) even more desperately, and love generalizing a rule (often far past the parent’s intentions) as they try to understand the way things work.

What are your rules of thumb for testing tradition?

Where (if anywhere) have you cleaved to a tradition not originally your own?

How do you make a “no” a welcome guardrail? How do you teach children to distinguish it from an unfair limitation?