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.