Shrink-Wrapping Your Children: Parent Advice, Spa-Parenting, Recipes and Circus Horses Part I

The parent advice industry reduces children to the status of recipes or trick ponies or both. We parents are either told to add this and add that to produce a certain kind of child or to follow a set of steps to modify our child's behavior. Either way, the parent advice industry employs reductive reasoning, treats your child as a mechanism not as a free, unique human being, and never acknowledges that all children and parents are yearning for unique, authentic and meaningful relationships with each other. The industry completely ignores the spirits of children and parents. I argue in my book What Not to Expect: A Meditation on the Spirituality of Parenting, that when we use reductive logic on a child we have treated him immorally because we have reduced him to a means to our end rather than as an end in and for himself. The media does this all the time with children, and I urge my fellow parents to be aware of this and to point this out when they witness it. You can tell when your child is being reduced, literally shrunk into a bite-size package, when the parent pundit startes to enumerate. When parent advice is dispensed in list form or with bullet points, your child is being shrink-wrapped. Any segment of the Today Show on parenting and children does this. Look for it and when you see it, turn the show off. The producers have disrespected you, your child, and the relationship you have with your child.

Let's look at the latest issue of the glossy magazine, Parents (parents.com). The front cover of the November issue includes the headline TACKLE TANTRUMS: THE EASY WAY. Of course the word "easy" immediately suggests that the editors of Parents know how busy you are and how much tantrums are a pain and a distraction and they want to make parents' lives as stress-free and as care-free as possible. You could call this "spa-parenting" or "sparenting". The article is entitled "The Ultimate Good-Behavior Guide: Everything You Need to Know about Tackling Tantrums, Enforcing Time-Outs, and Raising Really Nice Kids." The title alone ought to make us morally sick to our stomachs. The child's moral soul has been reduced to a set of behaviors that can be programmed and the parent's role in moral education has been neatly outlined in 10 magazine pages. Written by someone named Donna Christiano, who appears with no credentials, we know we are in the hands of a child shrink-wrapper when we read her first section entitled "Taming Your Toddler." I shudder when I hear parenting experts use animal training metaphors to talk about parenting and teaching. It happens more than you think; be on the lookout for it. The whole parenting advice industry treats children like puppies. At least Ms. Christiano skips metaphors and just flat-out states that parenting is akin to taming a dog or an evil spirit--the accompanying photograph shows a little boy with devil's horns.

Turn the page and you get the requisite parent advice list. In this edition of Parents, Ms. Chrsitiano gives you a chart complete with a list of "solutions." Can't the editors of Parents see that to treat children as solutions is to see them as either broken machines or chemical mixes or subhuman problems. Human beings do not have solutions. They have spirits. They are mysteries. They are infinite complexes.

Once we forget this, we become cruel and inhuman ourselves. Look at what Ms. Christiano lists as one of her "Tricks to Keep up Your Sleeve." She suggests that when your child acts out you should take away the object that he loves the most, like his Teddy. First of all, whenever you see the word "tricks" in conjunction with parent advice, you know that your child is getting shrink-wrapped. Avoid that parent expert. As for this particular piece of advice, it is as if the editors of Parents never read D.W. Winnicot. Your child's special Teddy is a "transitional object" and it is her bridge to independence, love, compassion and connection. To even threaten to take away the transitional object only makes your child that much more anxious and distrustful and disconnected. Parents, tt is connection that makes us moral not by having our behaviors conditioned.

Parents be very careful and critical of Parents (the magazine that is). They do not treat your children as you would want to be treated; they see them as devils, as one-trick ponies, as pets who need training and taming. The metaphors we choose determine the way we see the world. The metaphors we choose for our children determine the kind of relationship we have with them. The kind of relationship we have with them determines who they will become. If everyone followed the advice of Parents, I fear for the society of angry citizens we will have the 20 years.

Speak Now - New Radio Show on Sirius

I was lucky enough to be a guest on the new Sirius Catholic Channel (Sirius 159) show "Speak Now!" with hosts Dave and Susan Konig. The new show and channel launch next month. I highly recommend "Speak Now!" to people of all faiths and/or no faith who are concerned about children and spirituality and morality and authenticity in an increasingly divided and chaotic world. Dave and Susan Konig are funny and down-to-earth but, at the same time, intelligent, serious, sincere seekers. I can tell that "Speak Now!" will become a national and international parkbench for parents to visit with each other, share stories and insights, and deepen their commitments to making the most meaning out of their relationships with the children.

If You Meet a Parenting Expert on the Road of Life---Ignore Him

As an educator and fellow parent, I have witnessed four elemental styles of parenting:
1. The dutiful parent sees the ordinary rounds of parenting to be the chores every parent ought to perform to raise healthy children. In this way of viewing the ordinary, parents are administrators whose job it is to provide all that is necessary for the care and feeding of their young ones.
2. The narcissistic parent sees himself reflected in every aspect of his children’s lives. This kind of parent continually refers back to his experiences as a child. The narcissistic parent either wants to recreate the conditions of his upbringing because he idolizes his own parents or he wants to upend his upbringing because he demonizes his parents. In either case, children of narcissistic parents are not seen as individuals but as characters in the psychodrama of their parents; the ordinary chores of parenting become reenactments of the sentimental or the horrific scenes in this drama.
3. The aesthetic parent sees the extraordinary in the ordinary rounds of parenting. Like an artist, the aesthetic parent sees beauty in diapers, in mixing and mashing pears and apples for baby food, in the pattern of the spill of tomato sauce on the father’s apron, in the tantrums of toddlers. This kind of parent romanticizes childhood. Their house is adorned with photos of the silhouettes of children running naked on a beach at sunset. Aesthetic parents are romantic poets who believe that infants are wise and that children should be the teachers of adults. Usually, the aesthetic parent becomes demoralized as her children grow older, exhibit complexity, and reveal the ugly parts of the family’s soul.
4. The religious parent sees parenting as a mystery. The religious parent primarily feels awe, respect, and reverence. She does not worship her child, as the narcissistic or aesthetic parent might. But she does worship, in a sense, the miracle of the cycle of life and is humbled by it. Mirroring the techniques of Zen meditation, the religious parent fully focuses on the moments of parenting. Religious parents are right there, tending to their child as a fully realized other. Their children are not abstractions or projections of their own fantasies and anxieties. By “religious” I do not mean any kind of institutional religion. I mean a spiritual feeling of connection to something beyond ourselves and beyond our understanding. The book reviewer Louis Bayard said recently “Religion is at heart a closed system-a ring of certainty.” I think he gets this just exactly wrong. The religious impulse is to embrace uncertainty and to position one’s self inside the circle of something we can never hope to understand intellectually. The end of spirituality and the religious institutions that hope to foster a community of religious seekers is indeed this “Peace that passeth all understanding.”

Dutiful, narcissistic, and aesthetic parents share a common trait. They each view the value of the child through the lens of an external criterion. This benchmark may be their own lives, a notion of beauty, or ideas about what is “best.” The religious or spiritual parent does incorporate the best practices of all the various parenting styles and philosophies. The difference is that the spiritual parent beholds his child--as she eats, sleeps, plays, misbehaves, fails and succeeds--from a reverential mindset of awe and wonder. His work as a parent flows directly from a core understanding that he is part of something much larger than the ciurcumference of his own ego. Hence, spiritual parents combine humility and confidence. Parents and children walk together as free and distinct individuals against an infinite horizon that frames their every movement and at the same time liberates them to constantly grow and to become.

Modern parents tend to think good parenting is really a matter of following a recipe, if only they can find the right mixture of ingredients. You discover the precise ingredients that create successful children; you distill these ingredients to a do and don’t list; you follow the list and recreate the conditions that will lead to a gaggle of Ivy League athletes and subsequent investment bankers. You then get to retire-theoretically happy and content. Modern metaphors for parenting, as evidenced by the legion of parenting advice books, employ the same language to describe raising children as auto-repair manuals or investing brochures or cookbooks. This is the language of reductive reason, that is, the language of logic and analysis at its most simplistic. If we use simplistic analytic patterns to talk about our kids, we will eventually forge simplistic, sterile and reductive relationships with them. Notice how many parenting advice books organize their ideas into “bullet points.” The bullet point is one of the formatting tools writers use to boil down their complex subjects to digestible bites. The visual metaphor of a bullet speaks for itself.

My concern is not that the children themselves will be harmed by the simplistic language and methodologies of parenting books. Children are resilient and free and wonderfully individualistic. The problem is that the language of the parent advice industry is not rich enough to give parents the vocabulary to appreciate and behold their children in all of their miraculous complexity, ambiguity and holiness. Reductive, elementary guidelines about parenting give us a two-dimensional world; they are also inaccurate. The same parents who gobble up and quote parenting advice books, will also tell you that parenting is difficult because it is an activity that refuses to yield to analytic advice. Which is why, paradoxically, we buy these books, for we all seek a secure, safe and understandable port in the storm.

In response to the unpredictable nature of children, the effective parents I have witnessed in my career are pragmatists-they use aspects of each parenting style mentioned above as called for by the moment at hand. One case may necessitate the need to follow their duty, while another may call on them to compare and contrast how they were brought up, while at other times they know to sit back and admire the beauty of their children and allow them to develop according to their own logic and passions. We all need a tool bag of different approaches because children are, however much this may scare us, radically free human beings.

Whatever Happened to Recess? And 100 Other Questions on Parents' Minds These Days

I've signed a contract with Crossroad Publishing to write a new book entitled Whatever Happened to Recess? And 100 Other Questions on Parents' Minds These Days. The book is a memoir of sorts--organized in a question and answer format--of my career as a school administrator. Each question represents an actual conversation I have had with a parent. As such, the book not only dispenses advice, but also illustrates the state of parenthood in our day and age. The book will be published in 2007.

What Not to Expect: A Meditation on the Spirituality of Parenting

What Not to Expect was named the best book on family life for 2006 by the Catholic Press Association.