- IF THERE’S ONE thing I learned in graduate school, it’s that the poet Philip Larkin was right. (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad, / They may not mean to, but they do.”) At the time, I was a new mom with an infant son, and I’d decided to go back to school for a degree in clinical psychology. With baby on the brain and term papers to write, I couldn’t ignore the barrage of research showing how easy it is to screw up your kids. Of course, everyone knows that growing up with “Mommy Dearest” produces a very different child from one raised by, say, a loving PTA president who has milk and homemade cookies waiting after school. But in that space between Joan Crawford and June Cleaver, where most of us fall, it seemed like a lot could go wrong in the kid-raising department.
Let's look up the whole poem: I dated a psychoanalyst's daughter for four years. His sentiment was the same as the poem: "It's not if you'll fuck up your kids, it's how badly." So what are you gonna do? My approach has been to minimize the blowback but accept that I will screw some things up. Far more important to live my life and let my daughter live hers. That's something I've noticed about parenting, American-style: it's awfully presumptive. This article is a perfect example: it's about parenting, but doesn't even bother mentioning kids. It BLOWS MY MIND. My daughter is a complex system who will gladly give me many outputs for every input. She's interactive as fuck. And you can directly see the outcome of everything you do. Mostly, my daughter enjoys interacting with pets, people and inanimate objects in that approximate order. She does so in a charming and predictable manner. She tests her boundaries with regularity, and if she feels that the boundaries are not in the right place, she throws up warning flags (the last time she tried to eat my iPhone while I wasn't looking, she cried out "NOOOO!" very loudly so I would know to stop her). There isn't a lot in her that I didn't put there, and the stuff that's new to me is a joy to discover. And yeah - she cries when I put her to bed. And yeah - she throws food for no (socially acceptable) reason. But all she's doing is testing her boundaries and asserting her wants. She trusts me enough to know that what she gets is safe. "Fish sticks or grilled cheese?" this is not an Omega Quandary. This is a "you are eating one of these things or you are not eating" decision. I keep coming back to Bringing Up BeBe. The idea that being a parent is about subverting yourself to parenting is just… awful. My kid likes playing in her room by herself unsupervised for 20 minutes at a time and she just started walking yesterday. What is it about modern parenting culture that tweaks people out so much?
Overparenting is one thing. You can certainly just "let be" a lot more. But the other problem is simply first-world-woes: we have it so fucking easy that we never really get the light and shade that people living closer to the ground yet. We don't have to fight for our education, our freedom, our rights. We don't live in war torn countries. We don't have high childhood disease/mortality. We don't feel happy because we never feel justifiably miserable or terrified from a valid external cause. Instead we get "stressed" about our desk jobs and feel "unfulfilled" and "just not happy" like the idiot in the article. That therapist should be telling her to get off the fucking couch, go and volunteer among people who are actually disadvantaged, or some sort of constructive project that builds something, or even just read a damn good book. Throughout that entire article what I never once see is any suggesting of exposing children to anything outside their own sphere. One thing that has always stuck in my memory is how Princess Diana took her young sons to visit AIDS patients. I don't know how much impact that has had on their lives, their compassion, their sense of gratitude for their own comfortable lot in life. But I suspect it has done something.
kleinbl00 Edited wtih my comments: Giant eye-roll. What is so bad with kids having occasionally damaged self-esteem? Why must we be 100% secure, 100% of the time? In some of our most important careers, like those in the sciences, we encourage doubt. It's bad to be convinced that you're right all the time. It's bad to walk into an arrangement thinking you know the conclusion. I wonder how this applies to dating. Or if it can."It damages their self-esteem."
“They can’t bear the thought that saying yes to one interest or opportunity means saying no to everything else, so they spend years hoping that the perfect answer will emerge. What they don’t understand is that they’re looking for the perfect answer when they should be looking for the good-enough answer.”