| Who's the Kid Here, Anyway? |
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The heart of parenting is setting limits with love Once upon a time — roughly prior to 1956 — raising kids was simple, which is to say straightforward, which means child-rearing was the subject of not much thought and even less talk. A parent was something you were, not something you did; the verb "parenting" (it didn't exist) would have drawn the blankest of stares. It was a time, says poet and culture sage Robert Bly, when kids "in grade school knew to sit down, to behave, to repress sexual impulses, to hold their bodies stiffly, to salute the flag and stand up when a teacher enters the room." Social critic Michael Ventura says this all changed in a single moment in 1956, when Elvis Presley gyrated his pelvis to music on national television. "All the parents in the United States lost their children in a single night," Ventura writes. By the end of the 1960s, a new generation was no longer willing to live "by fear, by internalized superintendents, by shaming, by workaholism," Bly continues. "It felt as if human beings were able for the first time in history to choose their own roads, choose what to do with their bodies, choose the visionary possibilities formerly shut off by that ‘control system.' " As liberation movements proliferated during the 1960s and 1970s, children joined the growing ranks of America’s oppressed, put there by advocates who asserted that children were little people who had been deprived of a voice in their own destiny. In this view, the child deserved equal standing in the social world; adult rules and boundaries were unnecessary infringements on the child's liberty. Extreme, perhaps, but an idea that's become sufficiently diffused into the culture of parenthood so that all too many parents no longer feel free to tell a child what to do. Instead, they engage in what one writer calls a “tot-level Socratic dialogue" that starts with the abnegation of parental authority, whether about when the child should go to bed or whether he or she would go to school on any given day. "All right, you tell me what you think you should do," a parent now asks, praying that the child will come up with the "right" answer. Flash forward: spring 2002. A northern California mother named Ellie and a father named Frank, who had both seen Elvis Presley gyrate on TV four decades earlier, ruefully describe what Ellie calls their "utterly bizarre" response to learning that their teenage daughter Susan had stopped attending French class. "Her teacher called and asked Frank and me to get on the phone together," Ellie recalls. "I was floored when I learned that Susan had just dropped out. My immediate silent reaction was that Susan would have to return to class. [But] with that thought came a sharp twinge of guilt. I felt I was somehow betraying my daughter. When I finally spoke into the phone, I heard myself say something about how her father and I had tried to raise Susan to make her own decisions." "My own gut response was the same," says Frank. "Susan needs to know it's important in life to finish what you start. But something kept me from forming those words. I declared myself in agreement with Ellie — Susan to needed to decide for herself. The most amazing thing was the lack of anger or urgency in our voices. It was like we both didn't feel we had the right to tell our adolescent daughter that we expected her to get an education." Ellie and Frank aren't alone, says Oakland psychologist Diane Ehrensaft, author of Spoiling Childhood: How Well-Meaning Parents Are Giving Children Too Much — But Not What They Need. "The baby boomers are a generation of self-involved, self-indulgent parents, who go to extremes in pursuit of our personal happiness and professional fulfillment. But we are also a generation with a tremendous commitment to being good parents, who often go overboard in providing what we think will be the best for our children. This is the lethal combination that puts so many of us at risk for spoiling childhood." Ehrensaft believes several factors are simultaneously at work. In previous decades there were dominant directives about raising children — for instance, the 1930s advocacy of early habit training. These days parents typically find themselves frantically hopping from one child-rearing approach to another — democratic to autocratic, permissive to authoritative, indulgent to withholding. Furthermore, parents are stretched not only between family and work but between changing assumptions about parental roles. Mom is expected to be in workplace, but also at home; Dad is supposed to achieve mightily in work, and also be a caring father. “The structure of the workplace; the changes in family life; the increasing unpredictability of the environment — social, and political world; and the sensibilities of a society that puts profit first and families last all have had a deep psychological effect on the men and women conceive and raise children today,” Ehrensaft says. All crucial elements, yet none of them quite gets to why or how Ellie and Frank came to think of adult limits and boundaries as unnecessary infringements on their daughter’s sovereignty. Robert Bly thinks it's because we're fast becoming a nation of siblings. "In many ways, we are now living in a culture run by half-adults," he writes in The Sibling Society. The poet and social critic believes Elvis signaled the beginning of a long overdue shift from a paternal society dominated by "the bald, the severe, the cabined, the icebound, the squat, the cramped, the dinky, the narrow, the scanty, the roped-in, the meager, the bad, the tame." By the late 1960s, he says, "the superego took its hands away from the throats of young people, or so it seemed, and the whole nation relaxed, felt less depression, endured less repression. But things went too far, Bly declares. Today we’re fast becoming a culture of siblings in which impulse is given its way at every turn. In such a society, “it is hard to know how to approach one’s children, what values to try to teach them, what to stand up for, what to go along with; it is especially hard to know where your children are.” Harvard psychologist Dan Kindlon traces many of today’s parenting woes to the marked ambivalence that took root in the 1960s spirit of protest. "Our generation came up with the bumper sticker 'Question Authority,' Kindlon writes in his book, Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age. "Having grown up under the influence of Vietnam, Watergate, and other cultural cataclysms of the '60s and '70s, many parents today are more distrustful of authority than their parents were and as a result they are less comfortable wielding power over their children, including setting strict limits. You can clean your child's room in 10 minutes, but it may take you a half an hour of struggle to have them clean it themselves. Guess who usually cleans the room? Kindlon believes boomer parents are more likely than previous generations to depend on their children to give meaning to their lives. “It’s kind of a childhood-as-Prozac phenomenon. We use our children’s happiness to make us happy, so we are reluctant to be strict about their behavior in ways that would upset them or jeopardize our relationships with them. And because families tend to be smaller now, each child becomes that much more precious. We want to protect our children from all kinds of pain; we hope they’ll have perfect lives, devoid of hardship and pain. But their happiness as adults is largely dependent on the tools we give them, tools that will allow them to develop emotional maturity be honest with themselves, to be empathetic, to take initiative, to delay gratification, to learn from failure and move on, to accept their flaws, and to face the consequences when they've done something wrong." Kay Hymowitz, author of Liberation’s Children: Parents and Kids in a Postmodern Age, emphatically shares Kindlon’s concern. “The same forces that have liberated today's kids from want, settled life paths, and confining traditions have also ‘freed’ them from the moral and spiritual guidance that has always come from parents, teachers, and the culture at large,” Hymowitz says. “The result is not that today's kids ‘have no values,’ as pundits often tell us. On the contrary: American children develop Victorian-size superegos dedicated to the command to realize themselves through work. They hear endless moralizing about the virtues of tolerance and open-mindedness. The problem is that these virtues, important as they are, cannot help the young person build a self. Unmoored from all inherited structures of meaning, they tell kids not to judge, but not what to believe. They tell them to embrace all, but not what matters. They tell them to choose, but not why or how. in short, liberation's children live in a culture that frees the mind and soul bv emptying them.” Eager to understand how indulgence, affluence and character development are related, Kindlon conducted a study of well-to-do adolescents. He was interested not only in headline problems like substance abuse and eating disorders but also emotional problems, including depression and anxiety. He and his research assistants gave questionnaires to 650 teenagers asking them things such as are they happy, do they get along with their parents, do they drink or take drugs. The researchers also asked what kinds of things the kids owned — for instance, do they have their own cell phone, a car, how much allowance do they get. Kindlon was especially curious about what was required of the teenagers by their parents. Were their parents strict about having them keep their rooms clean, or helping with the dishes? Do they have a curfew? A similar survey went to over 1,000 parents, with questions asking whether they think their children are happy, did they buy them a cell phone and how strict they are. This sample included not only parents of teenagers but also parents of younger children. Approximately 40 percent of the teenagers Kindlon studied described themselves as seriously depressed, but when researchers asked the parents if they thought their child was depressed, very few thought they were. As for anxiety, about one of every four teenagers was classified as "very worried." Around 60 percent of the kids had used tobacco, alcohol or other illegal drugs during the past month. One in four had very permissive attitudes toward premarital sex. The majority of parents — around 60 percent — stated that their child is spoiled and a significant number of their children agreed with them. Moreover, a near majority of parents also acknowledged that they are less strict than their parents were. "About 12 percent of the kids didn't have any of the problems we studied," Kindlon notes. "There were five factors that distinguished them from everyone else. Their families frequently ate dinner together, their parents weren’t divorced, they weren't allowed to have a phone in their room and they regularly did community service. "So many parents are so lost. They don't know what or how to do. They are so stretched. Caught by the choices they have made." Elise Webster is musing about the changes she's seen in parenting over the many years she's been working to "show kids they have everything it takes to save the world, and the world needs them more than ever." That sounds grandiose, but it is actually her simple way of describing how she conveys to the preschool children she teaches that they are "welcome and worthy." “What I try to communicate is my expectation that they can make a tremendous difference," says Webster, director of Children's Cultural Center of Marin. "I convey my absolute certainty, no question about it. Last week, there was a 10-pound bag of carrots that needed moving. I asked a 15-month-old boy to carry the carrots over to the refrigerator. He dragged it and loved doing it and felt enormous satisfaction, looking around for what else needed doing. The word 'chore' never got mentioned. Kids to love to contribute. They're never to young to contribute in the household, to put a place mat on, laundry in the machine." Webster says she sees “a deep sorrow, something so missing in the family dynamics in our culture now. It's a vicious circle. Time is at a premium. But I believe parents would create more time, if they found more pleasure in their family lives. The key is expecting appropriate behavior from the very beginning, and reinforcing for respect. To build in a child a sense of team early is critical. Kids need to know they are part of the tapestry of life and they are needed and necessary and appreciated." Bonnie Romanow smiles when a parent asks which is more important in raising a child: love or discipline? She likes this question because it gives her a chance to answer "yes." She doesn't accept the premise that genuine discipline and authentic love are somehow at odds, or even fundamentally different. "The word discipline is derived from the Latin word disciple," says Romanow, parent education coordinator of Parents Place, a division of Jewish Family and Children's Services in Santa Rosa, California. "And to be a disciple is to follow a person or activity out of admiration and love, with a desire to learn from and emulate. We know how open and accepting children are. What our kids need more than anything else is an unmistakable and ongoing sense of engaged presence." Romanow says she respects the impulse of so many parents to see that all parts of their children's lives are taken care of. The paradox is that doing this successfully requires knowing when not to do something for one's child, which in turn means learning to be a skilled observer of subtle aspects of your kid's behavior. "Think about two different ways to structure an infant's relationship with a rattle," Romanow suggests. "On the one hand, you can choose to always place the rattle within the baby's reach. Over time, this teaches infants that what they want will always be within their immediate grasp, which can lead them to believe that parents — or someone parent-like — will always be there to help out. On the other hand, you can put the rattle just beyond the infant's reach. This gives babies practice in stretching, extending themselves both physically and psychologically. But this can be difficult for parents, because babies make distress sounds that often cause parents to come to the rescue." She emphasizes of course that assisting is not always bad and adversity is not always good. "The real goal is to develop and trust your capacity to tune into your child's authentic needs, and your child's capacity for autonomy in life-affirming relationship with others." An important key is balance, says Romanow, a former Waldorf preschool teacher who found her own experience as a young mother with two little girls echoed in isolation, confusion and uncertainty experienced by many parents. "Balance in our lives rarely means exactly 50/50. What works and what is needed changes over time as our family unit grows and changes." In her private Romanow frequently finds herself encouraging parents of young children that it's OK to stand as an authority to their children. "Our own fears of being too controlling like our parents, or squelching our child's sense of individuality can prevent us from providing the structure and boundaries a child needs to feel safe and confident," she says. "Naturally, we want our children to be free, but freedom is a heavy burden for a young child. Your child wants you to be firm and certain, which in the final analysis is not different from a loving sense of inner rightness and a spirit of adventure that I the call parenting from the heart." Yet “inner rightness” is precisely the factor that so often proves vexing for baby boom parents who have a hard time sorting out their own needs from those of their kids. Such parents "vacillate wildly between catering to their children as the center of the universe," says Diane Ehrensaft, "and seeing their sons and daughters only through the lens of their own needs." An issue of People, for instance, reported breathlessly on two recent midlife mothers, Geena Davis and Julianne Moore, whose achievements in giving birth were described in terms suggesting these two actors are big-time role models for the rest of us, simply by existing. “She never had one problem during her pregnancy, not one bit of morning sickness," gushes Bill Davis, Geena's dad. "And Geena said the birth was no big deal. She was in labor something like four-and-a-half hours. For a first-time birth, and at her age, it's amazing. She’s amazing." Speaking of absolutely fabulous, Julianne Moore ranks pretty darned closed to the top herself. “Juli says having babies gets addictive because it’s so exciting," says her boyfriend and the father of her 2-week-old daughter Liv. "Age isn't an issue for her." Giving birth in your mid-40s is a notable physical accomplishment. And, to be fair, these characterizations of the birth process are secondhand, attributed to the two mothers by men who are understandably thrilled. Still, it's hard not to scratch your head at the unabashed narcissism of the People accounts. Who knows, maybe Davis and Moore will be exceptional parents. At the very least, it would be interesting to hear their answers, a year from now, to the deceptively simple question Diane Ehrensaft asks of boomer parents in Spoiling Childhood. "Who am I doing this for, me or my child'?" It would be equally interesting to hear how, the new dads handle the same question — given the subheading of a 1996 Parenting magazine article: "A father searches for himself in his newborn's face." Maybe Ehrensaft's question should be the equivalent of a driver's test, geared to determine the suitability of prospective parents. (Not to judgmental or anything — but perhaps the test could be administered before couples conceive.) Near the end of The Sibling Society, Robert Bly gives a stirring vision of the larger challenge our culture faces, at the frontier between generations: "What is asked of adults now is that they turn to face the young siblings and the adolescents. One can imagine a field with the adolescents on one side of a line drawn on the earth and adults on the other side looking into their eyes. The adult in our time is asked to reach his or her hand across the line and pull the youth into adulthood. That means of Course that the adults will have to decide what genuine adulthood is. If the adults do not turn and walk up to this line and help pull the adolescents over, the adolescents will stay exactly where they are for another 20 or 30 years. If we don't turn to face the young ones, their detachment machines, which are louder and more persistent than theirs, will say, 'I am not part of this family,' and they will kill any real relationship with their parents. The parents have to know that." No small task; but first things first. Boomer parents, myself included, need to look their children in the eye and get absolutely clear who’s the kid here. All the rest will follow from how we answer that. |