Parents Can't Be Neutral
Parents Can't Be Neutral
The gift of normative judgement
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
’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.
I was an anthropology major so I am convinced by "most people in most societies throughout most of human history" arguments. For example, when I was skeptical of marriage I read Stephanie Coontz' "Marriage: A History." While she wasn't specifically pro marriage she argued that marriage shows up in almost every culture ever studied, and that, for me, was convincing that there's something to it. Perhaps being normative needs to one piece of a triangle, similar to a triangle I learned when vetting theology: culture, tradition, experience. I'm working on a piece right now about shared housing arrangements and also am inclined to say that single family dwellings don't meet the "normative through most cultures through most of human history" test (but welcome any insight on this). Is widow burning normative across cultures and eras? What about sexual abuse of children? When I use a normative framework, I'm looking for more of a larger sample and the existence of a way of being that can't possibly just be because we always have, or because the neighbors do it. The strongest example of this convincing framework , for me, is on the question of the existence of God.
For me it feels like parenting has been a process of sorting the wheat from the weeds. There are things I learned from my parents that I want to cling to, especially my Catholic faith. But even there, I have learned a lot about teaching the faith to children that my parents didn't have to give me and that I learned on my own as an adult. They did the best they could, but they were both the children of converts and to some degree that sense of the domestic church wasn't something they even had to pass on. For example, when I was growing up there wasn't really a family prayer time, other than grace at meals. So family prayer was something my husband and I had to learn slowly over time through trial and error. And we couldn't just imitate what we saw other people doing either because it turns out family rosary with everyone kneeling didn't work well with our kids' neurodivergence or our physical limitations. Both of us find kneeling physically challenging, so we've opted to pray while sitting instead of while kneeling.
And yeah there are many things our parents did that we don't want to pass on. I have learned a lot of parenting techniques and scripts from social media and online forums and therapeutic sources. Because I was raised in a home that had a lot of maladaptive adaptations for neurodivergence, by parents whose mental health challenges weren't diagnosed when I was a kid. I had to unlearn a lot of disciplinary techniques that were harmful and replace them with other ways of relating to my children. Sadly, I spent many years with undiagnosed anxiety parenting children whose autism and adhd and learning disorders were undiagnosed. I made a lot of mistakes. I needed to learn how to parent without yelling and without hitting. I needed to learn that anger was a symptom of anxiety. I didn't have scripts to follow from my parents. I had to seek elsewhere. So I'm less skeptical in general of therapeutic tools and scripts. And yet I have been very conscious in making sure the tools and scripts I adopt are in alignment with a very considered faith tradition and anthropology. I'm grasping at new tools not in a vacuum that lacks a positive vision but BECAUSE I have a positive vision, but was deficient in the tools I needed to realize that vision. When I was a young mother I despaired when I read about St Gianna Molla's vow to raise her children without physical discipline because I had no idea what that even looked like. I needed to find the tools to realize the new vision I was discovering.
I know my parents would have adopted those tools if they could have. They were doing the best they knew how and they did impart much that I want to carry away. The same father who struggled with anger management and who didn't know how to say he was sorry and for whose (probable) autism and selective mutism he didn't even have a name much less coping skills was also the father who told me when I was four that Jesus was my friend who was always with me and who I could talk to when I was lonely. He was the secular Carmelite who modeled intense daily private prayer and who went to daily mass and who later taught me how to pray the Liturgy of the Hours when I was an adult, but who didn't know how to give us the experience of family prayer when we were children.
I guess my rule of thumb for testing what was handed down from my family is precisely the Christian anthropology I learned from my wide reading when I was in college, from the saints and doctors of the Church and Church Fathers and from Christian poets and novelists and artists. Does this action align with what I know about God and human nature from the Catechism and the tradition of the Church? Those are the traditions I trust in faith and love. Does it bring me peace? Does it bring me/us closer to God? These are my guiding questions as I sift through materials about parenting autistic kids or oppositional defiant kids. And much of the time, probably more often than not, I find the scripts and tactics and gentle parenting approaches align quite well with what I believe about the child as a person created in the image and likeness of God with free will and a human nature that is bent and twisted by the Fall but also redeemed in grace.