When I see other parents planning their children’s futures, invested in certain outcomes (playing this sport, entering this profession, going to this college), I am reminded of my own experience of parental expectations as the first-generation daughter of immigrants. Growing up, I was acutely aware that I served as living proof of my parents’ competence and worthiness. I felt duty bound to produce a certain kind of success in order to reflect well on them, a scheme that exploded in all of our faces when it turned out I was queer. Now that I am raising my own child, I am deeply invested in not re-creating that kind of pressure for him. I have several avenues of identity through which I realize my self-worth; parenting is a role I take very seriously, but it is far from the only thing that matters to me. Redefining motherhood includes expanding our cultural idea of what it means for a woman to be a parent. The author and activist Rebecca Solnit has written that our society perceives motherhood as “the key to feminine identity,” ignoring the fact that “there are so many things to love besides one’s own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.” If we can expand beyond our notion that parenting is somehow mysteriously intuitive, effortless, and necessary for women to live full and meaningful lives, we could give all women more credit for the various kinds of work they choose to do in the world.
The Sin of Our Security
Yesterday, I sat with my wife and two friends as our boys frolicked in a neighborhood kids’ pool. Though it’s less than two feet at its deepest point, the primary appeal of the wading pool is its large play structure, with stairs, slides, and falling buckets of water; this creates the perfect environment for play-pretend, chasing, and splashing. There were a handful of other kids in the pool, including a little boy who appeared to be about five years old. He kept mostly to himself and didn’t draw my attention until he attempted to go down the slide hands first, Superman style, the way all of the other kids his size were doing. At this, his parents—who were sitting nearby—freaked out, both of them yelling at him until he flipped himself around. After he came down the slide “correctly,” they pulled him out of the pool for a stern talk. “If you do that again, we’re going home!”
My wife and our friends raised our eyebrows at one another, puzzled by what seemed like a disproportionate response to not particularly dangerous behavior. For one, this kid was wearing goggles and a Puddle Jumper (a flotation device that fits around the arms and chest). What’s more, the slide in question sloped gently and stood no more than four feet tall; it dumped kids out into about six inches of water, where a foam mat was affixed to the bottom of the pool to cushion landings. If all that weren’t enough to ensure safety, a lifeguard was stationed at the edge of the pool the entire time.
This is the core irony I’ve encountered by parenting within a middle- to upper-middle-class, fairly racially diverse, suburban milieu: the amount of fear present is disproportionate to the amount of actual danger. Most, but not all, of the parents Jill and I encounter are frenetic, obsessive, and overprotective. So when we find ones who aren’t, we befriend and cling to them like islands of sanity.
If I sound judgmental, it’s because I am—helicopter (or, as Jill calls them, “hovercraft”) parents drive me nuts. But worse than the parents themselves is the way the broader culture jokingly excuses their intense behavior, acknowledging that it is excessive and annoying but also insisting that it’s understandable—it’s because they love their kids so much! Except I don’t believe that it’s love driving the need to eliminate all potential dangers and alleviate all harm for one’s child; I believe it’s control—or rather the desire for control—that does.
We live in a society that hungers for security: airport security, online security, financial security, job security. In a 2015 podcast interview, Simone Campbell, nun, lawyer, and lobbyist, diagnosed our cultural mood: “I think our sin is our obsession with security. Our obsession that everything ought to work out perfectly for us … this obsession with having everything we need.” The word “sin” is one I traditionally eschew, for all kinds of reasons related both to my personal religious background and to my queerness, but here I find it extremely compelling. To sin is to transgress; but theologically, the meaning goes even further—to sin is to be separate from God. In the Western myth of the Garden of Eden, when sin first enters the picture, Adam and Eve’s punishment is to be sent away—they are estranged. I would argue that our obsession with security is likewise the result of estrangement: not necessarily from God (that’s not my argument to make) but from reality, the natural way of things, the truth of how the world works.
* * *
I grew up well protected; my parents didn’t baby me, but they didn’t exactly encourage adventurousness either. Many of the things considered formative and character building by white Americans didn’t make sense to my immigrant parents. We never went camping, for instance: the appeal of sleeping on the ground did not translate across cultures. Daring feats of physical exertion were also puzzling—no skiing, no marathon running—as one of the status privileges of becoming a “have” as opposed to a “have not” was not needing to use your body to make your living. Badminton, gardening, and walking were the only physical activities I ever saw my parents participate in. The only summer camp I ever attended was “nerd camp,” the Talent Identification Program at Duke University that requires a qualifying SAT score for admission and includes daily academic classes instead of lake swimming or archery. I had the earliest curfew of all my friends and there were many concerts and parties I wasn’t allowed to go to. Though I was encouraged to be brave with my thoughts (for which I’ll always be grateful), my parents cautioned me to play it safe with my body.
My mother is a worrier, a worst-case-scenario person. She has had a lot of difficult and hard things happen in her life: her mother died when she was two, her relationship with her father fell apart when she married my dad, and my parents struggled for nearly fifteen years to have a baby, enduring several miscarriages along the way. For her, the world is scary and dangerous—and to be fair, the world is scary and dangerous. But the world of my particular childhood bubble was not. In the grand scheme of things, and certainly compared with my parents’ own upbringings, I was incredibly sheltered. I did not endure hardship. And when I look back at my childhood, I see a much more timid version of the person I am now. I did not care much for novelty or new experiences; they made me nervous. There are many things that I said “no” to that I now wish I had not. Throughout my adult life, I have worked hard to make myself more risk tolerant, to fight against my own need to be good at everything I do, my fear of getting hurt or embarrassing myself. I understand my mom’s desire to protect me and I do not blame her for it. My parents were guided by a credo that many first-generation kids know by heart: We want you to have a better life than we had. But who defines “better”? And what do we sacrifice when we gain privilege and eschew hardship?
Privilege tends to breed entitlement. And entitlement—the sense “that everything ought to work out perfectly for us”—is a pathway through which we fool ourselves and our children into thinking that we are in control. Judgmental as I may be, I have to acknowledge my own participation in this form of thinking. After all, the whole premise of adoption is that adoptive parents can offer a child a better life than that child’s birth parents. But again, who defines “better”? In our son’s case, Jill and I give him a level of access afforded by economic privilege that his birth mother could not provide. But we still can’t guarantee his safety, not any more or less than anyone else can. Herein lies the tension of parenting within privilege—while it makes sheltering possible, it also makes those sheltered children potentially less resilient and less prepared to cope with events that will inevitably challenge their privilege: sickness, death, heartache, frustration, failure. Everyone, no matter how much privilege they have, will someday have to reckon with what poet David Whyte calls in an interview the question of incarnation:
Being he
re in your body … the more you’re here and the more you’re alive, the more you realize you’re a mortal human being … will you actually turn up? Will you become a full citizen of vulnerability, loss, and disappearance, which you have no choice about?
When I was twenty-three, I watched my father go from seemingly healthy to completely incapacitated and on a ventilator in the course of two weeks. I went from living with no conscious thought of my father’s mortality to signing a DNR and standing at his bedside while he died. That experience drove home every cliché I’d ever heard about how human beings have no guarantees yet live as if they do. I, too, had lived this way.
Five years later, my wife, Jill, was diagnosed with cancer. She was in her late forties, and only because she pinched a nerve in her neck did doctors discover the shadowy mass beneath her breastbone. Like my father, she went from perfectly healthy to completely vulnerable, her body wrecked first by chemo, then open-chest surgery. Unlike my father, she survived. But in the time of uncertainty that her illness brought, the fear that is always lurking around the edges of life was invited into the center of our relationship, shared our intimate space. The work, we learned, was neither to ignore that fear nor to let it take over. And though the immediacy of that fear receded when Jill’s doctor proclaimed her “cancer free,” we have continued to live with the knowledge that it could return at any time, in ways we can never predict, and for no reason at all.
* * *
Affluent twenty-first-century parents seem to believe that if we just find the right parenting blog or book, or buy the correct swaddling blanket and diffuse properly sourced essential oils, we can guarantee our children’s happiness and well-being. All around me, parenting looks like following your children around on the playground in case they fall or need help, paying a professional baby-proofing service to round each sharp corner in your house, cutting grapes in half, and covering your kid in safety gear to ride a tricycle that stands less than two feet off the ground. In a Time magazine editorial, actress Jemima Kirke referred to this as a “culture of overprotective methodology and vigilance” that “makes us believe that if we do things correctly, if we have all the information, we’ll be safe and our children will be safe.”
This mind-set also means taking credit when what we do seems to work, as I did when Shiv was a baby. Being an adoptive parent, I feel myself cheerleading for team Nurture, wanting to affirm the work Jill and I did as parents and the choices that we made. Shiv took to a schedule well, slept through the night at three and a half months, ate everything we fed him, loved reading books. He was not fussy, never demonstrated stranger anxiety—he was what other parents called an “easy baby.” But how much of that temperament came with him and how much of it was encouraged by us? It’s easy to feel superior and become judgmental of others when you have a baby like that, though I’m quick to switch allegiance to team Nature, when it comes to Shiv’s temper; his outbursts of anger and frustration can be made to fit into a narrative that would mirror what little we know about his birth father’s temperament. Of course, we’ll never be able to sort all this out definitively, and that’s not even the point. What my camp switching reveals is how eager I am to tell a story in which I am the one responsible for my child’s fate—a figure who is necessary, needed, the one in control. In doing this, I ignore the fact that at the most basic level, the world is dangerous and unpredictable, and we humans are profoundly not in control.
Modern life does its best to fool us into thinking we do have control, particularly if we live with certain economic means. Our lives are full of choices—how many times have I stood, frozen in an aisle at Target, dazzled by just how many kinds of toothpaste are for sale?—and we are likewise encouraged to give our children choices, to encourage their autonomy and sense of self. We are planners and calendar keepers; we sign up for day care when our babies are still in utero, enroll them in elite private schools before they can form a sentence. Projecting into the future, we map out their lives decades in advance, fully expecting their success and our carefree days as blissed-out grandparents.
What’s ironic is that while our money affords us physical security—safer neighborhoods, professions less demanding on the body, access to quality medical care—existentially, we are far removed from our status as mortal creatures. And to live so far removed from the inevitability of sickness and death is to become more vulnerable. We think we can control or limit the amount of difficulty that will come our way, which only makes us less equipped to deal when it does.
* * *
Even before I became a parent, I saw overprotective parenting play out in the classroom, where the concern is more about psychic than bodily harm. Working with seniors at a college prep school in an affluent part of Houston, I am intimately familiar with what nearly two decades’ worth of protective parenting can look like. I see students terrified of failure, terrified of answering a question wrong, terrified that one step in the “wrong” direction will send their lives down a path of despair. They have been raised on a narrative that promises that if they do what’s expected of them—curate the perfect college application, get into a “good” school so that they can have a “good” job—happiness will magically manifest.
By age sixteen or seventeen, they have, for the most part, debunked some of the myths they’ve been fed about happiness. At the same time, they have little practice with mystery and ambiguity; it makes them incredibly uncomfortable. They want clear answers, clean narratives. They want guarantees. They want to pick their college roommate the second they find out they’ve been admitted, utilizing camp friends and social media to help them match with someone they think they’ll like, try as I might to convince them of the value of learning to live with someone you don’t particularly like or who doesn’t particularly like you.
As it turns out, the mystery and ambiguity of existence are not resolved when students make it to that dream college or move in with the painstakingly chosen roommate. (In fact, it’s often the students who don’t get into their dream school who end up thriving, as they are forced to make a reckoning between what they’ve been told to want and what they genuinely want, who they’ve been told to be and who they genuinely are.) Second-semester seniors get all of the blame for being unmotivated and entitled, but haven’t we parents and educators reaped what we sowed? We talk out of two sides of our mouth, one proclaiming the gospel of learning for learning’s sake and growth, creativity, and risk, but that side is quickly drowned out by the sound of the voice that pushes achievement and status and conformity and compliance and test scores and padded résumés. So I do not think we should be surprised when suddenly our college-bound seniors are not so sure what all of that work was for, cynical about the hoops they jumped through and parts of themselves they compromised. When they wonder a little bit about the bill of goods they’ve been sold and what else they’ve been fed that might also be bogus.
Not all my students were raised inside of a matrix that shelters them, nor do I place sole blame on parents for perpetuating the idea of a golden ladder that leads to happiness. As Rebecca Solnit puts it, “The idea that a life should seek meaning seldom emerges; not only are the standard activities assumed to be inherently meaningful, they are treated as the only meaningful options.” So often, I find that students have not been asked what they care about, what they value, what kind of person they want to be. We do not encourage them to interrogate the standards of our society, preferring instead that they accept them as offered. Then, when the system fails them, they are left thinking it is they who failed.
Freshman year of college is hard for most people; I remember spending most of September and October of mine being terribly homesick. I was far from home on 9/11 and didn’t know anyone well enough to hug. I had never spent so much time on my own. And yet, though I spent a lot of time alone, I didn’t feel lonely. Though at times I was sad, I was not unhappy. I was learning a tremendous amount about myself, about my capabilities. A deep part of me knew that the only way ou
t was through; I could feel myself growing and strengthening. As I emerged from the other side triumphant, I was deeply empowered by the fact that I’d figured out how to weather a difficult time. I knew the truth of what the poet Kahlil Gibran so famously said: “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
Too often, Americans equate hard or sad with bad and wrong, a feeling that we need to dispel. Our relentless obsession with happiness above all else—I just want you to be happy!—offers no tools for creating any kind of long-lasting meaning or satisfaction in our lives. As parents, we sometimes dismiss hurt when all it needs is to be acknowledged, given space. We tell our children not to cry, not because crying is bad for them but because it makes us uncomfortable. We want things to turn out okay, but to pretend that something will be okay when it clearly isn’t is to make the classic parental mistake of issuing promises we can’t keep. Sadness is a natural occurrence in any human life; surely it would be better to equip our children to cope with it than to push it away.
I came to resent this I just want you to be happy / everything’s going to be okay / don’t be sad mind-set when my father died. Grieving gave me a useful vantage point for observing how we, as a culture, deal with death—namely, we don’t. Though I seemed to merit an extra layer of sympathy for losing a parent so young, about six weeks after my father’s funeral, the default response of those around me was to resist or try to “fix” my grief. “I know you’re sad right now, but you’ll get back to your happy self again soon!” one well-meaning friend wrote.
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