[Vision2020] A Childless Bystander’s Baffled Hymn

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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March 30, 2013
A Childless Bystander’s Baffled Hymn By FRANK
BRUNI<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/frank_bruni/index.html>

MODERN parenting confuses me. The vocabulary, for starters.

Take the word “last.” Usually it means final. Last exit: there are none
beyond it. Last rites: you’re toast.

But the “last chance” for a 4-year-old to quit his screeching, lest he get
a timeout? There are usually another seven or eight chances still to go, in
a string of flaccid ultimatums: “Now *this* is your last chance.” “This is *
really* your last chance.” “I’m giving you *just one more* chance. I’m not
kidding.”

Of course you are, and your kids know it. They’re not idiots.

But they’re also not adults, so why this whole school of thought that they
should be treated as if they are, long before they can perform such basic
tasks of civilization as driving, say, or decanting?

Why all the choices — “What would *you* like to wear?”— and all the
negotiating and the painstakingly calibrated diplomacy? They’re toddlers,
not Pakistan. I understand that you want them to adore you. But having them
fear you is surely the saner strategy, not just for you and for them but
for the rest of us and the future of the republic.

Above all I’m confounded by the boundless fretting, as if ushering kids
into adulthood were some newfangled sorcery dependent on a slew of
child-rearing books and a bevy of child-rearing blogs. The counsel keeps
coming, from every possible corner and from unexpected shamans. The actress
Jessica Alba just produced a book, “The Honest Life,” which includes her
take on mothering, and she noted pointedly in a recent interview that it’s
more relevant than the tidbits proffered by the actress Gwyneth Paltrow in
her online newsletter, goop.

Seemingly everyone has parenting opinions, so I hereby present mine, which
are those of someone who isn’t in fact a parent and maybe has a valuable
distance and objectivity as a result. Instead of the battle hymn of a tiger
mother, it’s the baffled hymn of a cubless bystander, his thoughts turned
toward children as the calendar reaches yet another holiday when we shower
them with attention and chocolate.

While I have no kids of my own, I have many I can (and sometimes do) lease
for the weekend: 11 actual nieces and nephews, whom I’ll be with this
Easter Sunday, and perhaps twice that number of honorary ones. I have put
in my time around tots and teens, and enjoy them. I have seen my share of
parenting, and am not certain what to make of it.

Just a few decades ago, parenting wasn’t even a proper verb or gerund. Now
it’s a *compound* one. There’s of course helicopter parenting, which
hovers, and “free range” parenting, which doesn’t, but only by principled
choice.

As the Me Generation spawned generations of mini-me’s, our rigorous
self-fascination expanded to include the whole brood and philosophies about
its proper care and feeding.

About the feeding: explain to me what’s gained by the voluminous
discussions, within earshot of little Edwin or Edwina, of what he or she
probably won’t eat or definitely won’t eat or must somehow be made to eat,
perhaps with a bribe. Any food that lands on the table after that much
tortured preamble is bound to be eyed with suspicion and ultimately
spurned, in part because it has ceased to be a vessel of nutrition or an
answer to hunger at that point. It has become a power struggle: the
parents’ wishes versus the child’s defiance. And the battle seems to end
one and only one way. With chicken fingers.

I’M equally confounded by the all-encompassing praise. Not every kid is
gifted at every endeavor, and I wonder about the wisdom of telling him or
her that a bit of doggerel is Shakespearean or that a wan patch of warbling
is an “American Idol” audition waiting to happen. I wonder why everybody
has to be a winner. You can eliminate the valedictorians from high school
but you can’t eliminate them from life, which metes out Super Bowl rings
and stock options with an uneven hand, and is probably best tackled with
some preparatory girding for that. Do today’s parents provide it?

There’s a line between filling a kid with self-esteem and larding a kid
with delusions, just as there’s a line between making your children feel
that they’re the center of your universe, which they most definitely should
be, and making them feel that they’re the center of *the* universe, which
only Honey Boo Boo is.

Help me out here. Why is an adolescent’s TV watching patrolled more
scrupulously than his or her iPhone use, which can lead to infinitely
greater trouble? For that matter, why does an adolescent need an iPhone in
the first place?

Yes, I know, it enables your kids to stay in touch with you, and vice
versa. But 13-year-olds in my era didn’t have iPhones, and we got home.
Eventually.

Parents routinely surrender control when they shouldn’t, replacing rules
with requests, and children are expected to chart their own routes to good
behavior, using the faulty GPS’s of their flowering consciences, I suppose.
Families are run as democracies. Parents forget: in the political realm,
you don’t get a say until you’re 18. There’s a reason for that.

Then parents turn around and try to grab control over circumstances that
don’t readily yield to it, responding to children’s setbacks or
shortcomings with insistences on diagnoses, accommodations, remedies. They
can’t seem to bear the inevitability that their children will suffer
disappointments and will have to reckon with inadequacies. They cling to
the possibility of perfection, and seem to hold themselves responsible for
it.

That part I do get. When you love people, really love them, you do
everything you can to protect and help them. To give them a leg up. And in
a world in which the competition grows ever crueler and the jockeying for
advantage more intense, parents feel it’s more incumbent on them than ever
to leave no stone unturned and to play an error-free game. They walk on
eggshells and torment themselves.

But from my vantage point, watching the kids of my three siblings and of my
many peers grow up, I’m struck less by the genius or folly of diverse
child-rearing techniques than by the way most of the children matured into
who they seemed, from the get-go, destined to be.

Some of them were held to early bedtimes and some weren’t. Some had their
own computers and some shared. Some had nannies and some didn’t. Some of
their parents were yellers, and some of their parents were brooders. All of
them ate too many chicken fingers.

And while they were indeed coaxed toward better or worse etiquette and
cleaner or sloppier rooms, they weren’t, generally speaking, transformed.
At age 8 they were essentially larger, more articulate versions of who
they’d been at age 4, and at age 13 they were larger and more articulate
versions still, with iPhones affixed to their palms. What had always been
wonderful about them remained so. What was difficult did, too.

This suggests to me that there’s something more consequential than Kumon or
Montessori, a Ritalin prescription or rugby practice, attachment parenting
or minimalist parenting, Alba’s doctrine or Paltrow’s dictums. Nature gets
its say. Always has and always will.

So parents: cut yourselves some slack. Take a deep breath. No one false
step or one missed call is going to consign your children to an entirely
different future. Make sure that they know they’re loved. Make sure that
they know their place. And make peace with the fact that you don’t hold all
or even most of the cards. There may be a frustrating sense of helplessness
in that realization. But there’s a mercy, too.

•

I invite you to visit my blog <http://bruni.blogs.nytimes.com/>, follow me
on Twitter at twitter.com/frankbruni and join me on
Facebook<https://www.facebook.com/frankbruninyt>.



-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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