Ahhh, Sunday Styles. The gift that keeps on giving.
If you're dying to know what's new in the hyper-parenting set, there's nothing like the Sunday Styles section in the New York Times. It is a style section, after all, so it tries to keep up with the buzz. It tries to feel the pulse of the (upper-middle-class, East Coast, anxiety ridden) planet. It tries to lasso the Zeitgeist and bring it down like a wildebeest. So, for those of us who aren't always in that hunt, it is a great gift.
Am I being sarcastic? A little, because I think parenting is a task that should be beyond, or above, fashion. Parenting is a task best performed with gentle delivery but firm conviction; if you don't know what you're doing, you'd better go to your therapist, your mother, or your pastor and figure out why it's so hard to be sure of anything. But people in the Sunday Styles parenting articles are never sure of anything; they just fret about the one and only "right way" to parent, which always eludes them. Did it ever occur to any of these people that there is no one right way?
The case in point this week: free-range kids. ("Why Can't She Walk to School?" by Jan Hoffman, New York Times, 9/13/09). The article reminds us that it was not too long ago that Lenore Skenazy set her 9-year-old kid free by himself in the New York City subways, and then wrote the book Free Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry, based upon her actions as a parent and the furious public reactions to her actions. Skenazy encountered the proverbial firestorm of condemnation about what a terrible mother she was, and the parenting world is still talking about it. How do we decide when to let our kids go places alone? How old is old enough? How much protection is overprotection, and how much protection is prudence? Hard questions, to be sure. Just last month I was interviewed on the subject of "free-range kids" by a very sweet reporter from Philadelphia, who interviewed me for an hour and listened with interest to my relatively complicated views on the subject, and then quoted me in the paper in a sentence (which, by the way, made me sound like a nitwit. I understand space limitations, really I do, but I speak with all my heart to all you parenting reporters out there when I say: if you're really only going to use a sentence and make me sound like a nitwit, don't keep me on the phone for an hour, okay?)
I am so exercised about this article on free-range kids that I am going to address it in a series of posts. Today, I just want to re-state the obvious: parenting is about values, not facts or rules. One mommy-blogger in the Sunday Styles article, complaining about the difficult choices parents face, asked sadly, "What are the rules?" Dear Mommy: there are no rules. There are choices made as a result of values, but values are not the same as rules.
In this case, a parent has to make a tough choice between assuring kids' safety on one hand, and encouraging their independence and self-confidence on the other. You can drive the kid to school until he can drive himself; you can wait with her at the bus stop until she is as big as you are. Okay. If you are the kind of parent who needs to do that to be able to sleep at night, then go ahead. "Better safe than sorry" is a perfectly respectable value statement.
And, if you value self-reliance, and you would feel terrible if you fostered a child who was not self-reliant, then you choose the free-range option. You decide that you can live with a little worry, and that the risks are manageable, but having an over-dependent child is not manageable, for you. So you decide to give your child more freedom and independence earlier, based upon that value. Also perfectly respectable.
The point is you make a choice. And when you choose Option A, you give up Option B. What many of these parents are saying is "It is so hard to live in a world where one has to know oneself and one's values and make a choice. I want a world where I don't have to make a choice. I want a world in which I can have a completely independent, self-reliant child and I never have to let him take any risks!" Put more simply, this is a way of saying "I want it all!"
If I sound out of patience, I am. Some years ago, after the terrible tsunami in South Asia, I was called and interviewed by a parenting reporter (this one in Boston) who wanted to know how to help parents talk to their kids about it. It seems she was talking to a bunch of parents who wanted their kids to feel compassionate about the plight of tsunami victims, but who also did not want their kids to feel anxiety about living in a world where tsunamis happen. They did not want their kids to feel insulated, and possibly callous regarding the plight of the world's poor, nor did they want their kids to feel anxious, guilty or upset about....the plight of the world's poor. So, I was asked, "What's the right way to talk about this with our kids?" Sorry. There is no right answer. One can choose to help children feel totally safe and protected from the terrible realities of life on Earth (and risk them turning out to be a little smug), or one can choose to clue them in (and take the risk they will decide to be missionaries by the time they're 13). One can, of course, try to aim for the middle ground: that's the place to aim for. But the wish to have rules which guarantee that kids will feel both things (totally safe and totally compassionate) is just another way of saying, "I want it all! I want everything! I want the chocolate ice cream and the vanilla! I want the BMW and the Saab! I want public school and private school! I want the buzzy-buzz-buzz of Manhattan and the comfy-cozy-crickets-chirping-me-to-sleep of Outer Greendale!"
While wanting it all is an understandable wish (especially in these United States) it is not really a grown-up wish. Parenting is about being grown up and taking responsibility for another human life. That's what it is. Trying to get an expert to tell you the one right thing to do, the thing that will let you have it all, is an abdication of that responsibility. This task requires knowing who you are, knowing who your child is, and doing the best you can, and living with the consequences. No expert- not me, not anyone- can do that for you.
Next post: reducing your own anxiety by exercising the busybody option, or, how to impose your own values on everyone else.
