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I Don't Do Parenting
I am not a stodgy old coot. In fact, I pride myself on looking for new and fresh ideas and ways of thinking. But I just don't understand our generation's compulsion to throw away the tried and true and reinvent the most basic of ideas. The topic of the day in this regard is the whole notion of "parenting", and the idea that, since Dr. Spock, we could figure out new and better ways of raising our children that haven't been tried in the 20,000 or so years of human civilization.
Let's start with the term itself: Parenting. This word did not exist thirty years ago. It could, with some justification, be viewed as just one more casualty in the ongoing verbalization of American English. But try for a moment to read just a little more deeply into the change from "raising children" to "parenting". Parenting completely changes the focus of the relationship from the children to, well, the parent. Parenting is not something one does for the children, parenting becomes something one does for oneself, using the children as tools in the process. The focus of almost all the advice one reads in parenting magazines is on how to be a better parent, not how to raise better children. This may seem subtle, but I think it is meaningful. It implies that parenting is a generic skill that can be learned and successfully applied with minimal practice, much like driving a stick shift. It is the perfect mind set for a generation that prefers to view raising children as a part time job. Parenting is also a wonderfully neutral and biologically nondiscriminant term. It is difficult to make the transition to the wonderful diverse new family world while we are encumbered with role-limiting terms such as "mother" and"father".
In the process of inventing Parenting we have cheerfully ignored many valuable lessons passed down from our forebears, preferring instead to latch on to the vapid musings of any self-proclaimed expert possessing a word processor. The inspiration for this column was the back of a Cheerios box which proudly advertised the creation of www.cheerios.com, a wonderful new parenting resource just one click away! On the radio while driving to work I heard about www.pampers.com, with even more fantastic parenting tips. Aaaaarrrgh! Has it really come to this? Are we now ignoring the sage advice of our grandmothers, preferring in their place the wisdom of cereal and diaper merchants? I just don't get it.
While we are on the subject, let's examine a couple of other silly notions that have hitched a ride on the Parenting band wagon.
Quality Time. I doubt that there has ever been a more transparently self-serving concept. The idea is that it is not the quantity of time a parent spends with a child that matters, it is the quality of the time that is spent. In theory, a child who spends less time with his parents but spends more of it communicating, bonding and sharing will be better off than the child who spends more, but less communicative or sharing, time with the folks. Nice fit for a nation of part time moms and dads with guilt complexes, isn't it? I personally have concluded that exactly the opposite is true. Children don't require a close "relationship" with their parents nearly as much as they require a sense of love, of belonging, of safety, of "place". A parent who pops in ocassionally to spend a little quality time simply cannot provide that. A parent who is almost always there provides this crucial sense of support. In addition, the way we truly get to "know each other" is through the countless mundane, seemingly meaningless interactions of daily life. A mother who spends most of her time with her children will know them, and be known by them, in ways unachievable to the "Quality Time" mom.
Independent Thought. The latest trend in parenting fashion appears to be the desire by parents that their children be "independent thinkers". This trait is apparently more important that decent behavior or common courtesy. It is also once again tailor made for the part time parent. You want Junior to be creative enough to rustle up some chow if Mom and Dad get hung up at the office. Once again I am afraid I have to come down onthe other side of the fence. I cannot think of a scarier thought than a teenager who is actively encouraged to be an independent thinker, unless it is an eight year old independent thinker. There is a reason that human children do not leave the nest until they are 18-21 years of age. It is because it takes that long for them to learn all of the complex rules and knowledge and logic they need just to get by in a dangerous world. Asking them to be independent of mind before that mind is ready is like putting a kitten out in the wild and expecting it to survive through its wits and hunting skill. Bad things will happen. One cannot be "independent" unless one has some intellectual and moral bearings, a base of certainty to move away from in one's quest for knowledge, and to return to when the need for certainty beckons. Independence in the absence of this "base" is nothing more than random meandering through the intellectual and moral plane. My kids deserve better than that.
Raising children is not nearly as complex as the experts would have you believe, but it does take time and effort. It is a damned difficult job to do well on a part time basis. Just ignore the back of cereal boxes and avoid picking up any "parenting" books or magazines. Instead just listen carefully to your heart, your children, your parents, and the echo of your grandparents, and you'll do fine.