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.
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.
posted by Dr. Keith Frome at 11:07 AM
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