Small Animals
Page 9
“I think it’s your fault, Mommy,” he said, impaling a raspberry on his little finger, then popping it into his mouth. “I think it’s Mommy’s fault.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Join the club.”
* * *
Of course, he was right. What was happening was my fault; or, at least, there was a clear relationship between action and fallout. Let kid wait in car, get in trouble. There was a simple cause-and-effect sequence no one could deny. In a strange way, I appreciated the clarity of it. By that stage in the parenting game, I’d come to understand that any mistake or miscalculation I made could and probably would have grave consequences. If I didn’t breast-feed long enough, I’d be robbing my children of top-notch immune systems. If I let them have too much screen time, I’d inhibit their social-emotional development. I’d accepted the idea that actions and choices that didn’t even seem like mistakes at the time could prove themselves to be mistakes days or weeks or even years later. In this way, I began to see how a good parent served as a kind of oracle, sensing and anticipating dangers long before anyone else could perceive them.
I first came to appreciate how important this skill was midway through my pregnancy, when I suggested to Pete that perhaps we should take a childbirth and parenting class, considering how little we knew about, well, parenting.
“A class?” he said. “Like something that will cost money?”
“No, let’s just find a stranger on the street who will give us advice for free. Yes, something that will cost money.”
He reminded me of how little of that we had.
I told him I understood, but that this wasn’t like the usual things I wasted money on; this was the well-being of our child. “Plus,” I said, “don’t you think it would be nice to meet some other soon-to-be parents?” I had only to glance at his face to know the answer, but I didn’t relent.
The next Tuesday, we began attending a class for pregnant couples at a yoga studio that specialized in family health and wellness. We shelled out a month’s worth of grocery money to sit on loom-woven floor cushions once a week with eight other couples while a doula not much older than myself, a woman with indigo tattoos on her wrists, a nose ring, and a perfectly tousled side braid, lectured us on the many ways that childbirth, an experience with the potential to be beautiful, transcendent, profound, even orgasmic, might quickly turn into a hellish cascade of unnecessary medical interventions if approached incorrectly. When I remember this woman now, she seems common enough. I feel like I’ve seen her a hundred times in the nutritional supplement aisle of Whole Foods, and yet at the time, there was something about her calm, self-assured, authoritative manner that I found seductive. If she’d ever experienced any of the anxieties I was feeling about motherhood, she’d found a way to push them deep into her being or encase them in steel. I could surely learn a thing or two from a woman like this, so I forced myself to consider every word of warning she offered.
Mostly, these warnings related to the sacred but surprisingly vulnerable process of mother-child bonding, a process that, as she described it, was under constant threat by interlopers eager to interfere with what should be a natural and immediate union. For the next month, examples of such interference emerged as the main theme of the course. Medical professionals could interfere by imposing unnecessary and even dangerous procedures. Pediatricians could interfere by being insufficiently supportive of nursing or by creating anxiety about baby’s weight gain or feeding schedules. Even one’s own family members could interfere with bonding by imposing their own ideas onto impressionable new parents who lacked the confidence to erect a clear boundary around themselves and their child. To illustrate her points, she showed the class a video produced some years ago in Scandinavia of a baby who, immediately after being delivered (naturally, natch), was simply deposited on the mother’s belly. Not given an Apgar test or azithromycin drops in the eyes. Just placed on Mama’s still-heaving belly. This little thing, almost more rodent than human, after an hour or so, scaled its mother’s frame without any assistance (though would a little assistance have killed it?), found her breast (this is why areolae grow darker during pregnancy), and started, no doubt to its infinite relief, to chow down.
You see, the teacher and the video said, nature knows what she’s doing. People have been having babies far longer than they’ve been having interventions. This is how much a newborn can do on its own. Now just imagine what it can do with just your love and care.
Each week, I was drawn back to the studio, where I found myself listening attentively to this woman, nodding at everything she said. Gradually, each warning, each caution, seemed increasingly plausible. I felt a new strain of anxiety passing between me and teacher—anxiety not about the health or safety of the child I was carrying, but about the distance that would materialize between us when I gave birth, the need that would suddenly emerge for me to manage and minimize this distance, to keep others out. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but this was the first iteration of stranger danger, a theme that would reemerge again and again in the years that followed.
* * *
A while back, an acquaintance of mine, not a parent herself, was telling her mother how many of her closest friends seemed to lose their minds after having babies. It wasn’t just that they were exhausted or overstretched or even a bit depressed, which would all have made sense. It was more that they seemed to be freaking out about everything. Rational, levelheaded women, who had a decade or more of adulthood under their belts and had always seemed adept at managing and tempering their emotions, suddenly were convinced that every single infinitesimal decision they made regarding their babies would determine whether it became secretary of state or a toothless meth head. My friend’s mother listened as my friend offered various examples of this behavior, and then said, quite matter-of-factly, “I think you’ve all lost your minds.” She went on to explain that when she had been a young mother in the seventies, it wasn’t easy, but everyone just did the best they could, helped each other out when possible, and didn’t worry about the rest. “The way you talk,” she said to her daughter, “I can’t tell if these women are having babies or running corporations.”
Nostalgia, of course, is an easy trap. The women of our mothers’ generation might not have had our problems, but they surely had other problems all their own. That said, for anyone observing the arc of parenting norms from World War II to the present, it’s impossible not to notice two distinct, parallel waves of anxiety, both of which seem to have reached peak madness over the past ten years. The fear emerges from a particular set of historical and cultural changes, each impacting the lives of families in unique but often mutually reinforcing ways.
I’ve come to think of one strain of this fear as motivating fear, and it is a form of anxiety that was intensely familiar to me from the moment I learned I was pregnant. Motivating fear is fear that compels a parent to do something for or with or on behalf of her child. The inner dialogue of motivating fear goes something like this: If I don’t enroll in an expensive pregnancy and infant-care class, I might end up delivering prematurely by Cesarean section, with all the neonatal health problems that entails.
Or:
If I don’t breast-feed enough, my baby will lack important antibodies and healthy attachment skills and maybe even IQ points.
Or:
If I don’t play with my baby enough or give it the right amount of stimulation or do the right kind of sleep training or feed it the right type of food or enroll him in the right kind of pre-school or offer him the right sort of enrichment or buy him the right kind of toys or give him the right kind of attention or provide the right sort of discipline or sign him up for the right amount of sports or extracurricular activities, then surely there is a moderate to very good chance that my child will end up_________.
I offer only a blank here, because the second conditional clause seems to go on without end. In his book Paranoid Parenting, the sociologist Frank Furedi argues, accordingly, that “today, parent
ing has been transformed into an all-purpose independent variable that seems to explain everything about an infant’s development.” He goes on to chronicle specific examples in which parenting decisions are put forth as a primary cause of a growing number of undesirable outcomes: the terrible twos, failure to bond, failure to thrive, development of speech impediments, development of orthodontic problems, dyslexia, student anxiety, failure in school, depression, low IQs, violent behavior, eating disorders, and overall psychological damage. He describes the various manifestations as a kind of “parental determinism” that begins at conception and extends into adulthood. This determinism leads parents to take on the job not just of loving, feeding, and teaching their children, but of providing them with endless opportunities for adult-directed play, entertainment, and enrichment. As Furedi explains it, in the modern American family, parents dissect almost every parenting act, even the most routine, analyzing it in minute detail, correlating it with a negative or a positive outcome, and endowing it with far-reaching implications for child development. “It is not surprising,” he writes, “that parents who are told that they possess this enormous power to do good and to do harm feel anxious and overwhelmed.”
The historian Peter N. Stearns analyzes the historical and societal changes in the post–World War II years that set in motion this brand of determinism. In the 1940s and 1950s, the expansion of child-focused consumerism and commercialism introduced parents to the idea that they could impact their children’s happiness and growth not only by what they did for them or said to them, but by what they bought for them. Growing commercialism—the suburbanization that made spontaneous play and independent movement more challenging—became “symbiotically intertwined” with an emerging belief that parents had a responsibility to keep children entertained. “Parents,” Stearns writes, “were increasingly rated not for their ability to discipline or promote morality, but for their good humor and willingness to keep children amused.”
At this same time, education shifted away from rote academics toward the skills of socialization needed in corporate management and a social economy. Academic performance came to be measured in softer ways—more emphasis was placed on group projects and classroom participation over strict skill mastery—and achievement in such categories came to be seen as essential for overall, future success, offering parents new motivation to ensure and facilitate their children’s future. Alongside these changes arose what the sociologist Martha Wolfenstein called “a new fun morality,” in which the idea of entertaining children and preventing child boredom became a new parental responsibility. Paradoxically, the rise of fun morality occurred simultaneously with the spread of suburbanization and the rise of car culture. Just as experts were warning parents of the dangers of child boredom and lack of attention, many families were moving to suburban homes, where “yards were often isolated, limiting the capacity of children to join in the kind of spontaneous cohorts that had earlier formed in small-town America.” The result of this was a parenting culture and experience more demanding than ever before.
These pressures continued to build well into the seventies and eighties, when what psychotherapist Nathaniel Branden referred to as “the psychology of self-esteem” infiltrated most areas of middle-class parenting culture, informing parents of the importance of doing whatever was necessary to instill in their children a fundamental sense of confidence and self-worth. From here, the trends continue, and it’s not difficult to draw a line to the kinds of hyper-organized, overscheduled, micromanaged childhoods that have become so common. When my friend’s mother observed that it seemed as though our generation had lost its mind over kids, what she really should have said was that the boomer generation, dazed by a postwar economic surplus from 1947 to 1949, and shaken by vast social changes, such as divorce, women’s en masse entrance into the workforce, white flight, and suburbanization, began the process of losing its mind, and we, a generation or two later, were finishing the job.
I myself had certainly played an active role in the mania of motivating fear. As my own mother recounted to her friends that afternoon in Virginia, “There’s the baby sign language, the breast-feeding on demand, the co-sleeping, the mommy-and-me classes…” There was baby language immersion and baby yoga, an endless expanse of services and products for a concerned parent to buy. But strangely, the more I bought, the more I did, the more there was, it seemed, to buy or do; perhaps because fear tends to feed on itself, drawing parents into an ever-accelerating arms race of devotion. When it seems everyone is shelling out for lessons, tutors, high-end birthday parties, and educational consultants, who wants to be the parents who tell their kid to go entertain himself or to figure it out? As William Deresiewicz says of the scramble that comes later in that final, all-important parenting step of securing a desirable college placement, there comes a point when “the main thing that’s driving the madness is simply the madness itself.”
I participated in this madness. From the moment I stepped into that nurse’s office to the moment I returned home from Virginia, I was fully on board, a full adherent of the extravagant anxiety of modern American parents. What I didn’t know, though, what I didn’t realize, was that there was an additional realm of parental fear with which I had scant experience, a wave of fear that had started later, not long after I was born, in the early 1980s; a kind of fear that was still evolving, but that had already proved equally transformative for American parents and American children.
* * *
So much has changed in a single generation when it comes to the raising of children, and most of us have a favorite memory that illustrates the distance we’ve traveled. My father, who grew up in Utica, New York, during the fifties and sixties, recalls his mother sending him to the store on a regular basis at the age of eight or nine. “A loaf of bread, a pint of milk, and a pack of Pall Malls.” These are fond memories, he tells me. He was proud that his mother trusted him to bring back such necessities. He felt a sense of accomplishment when he returned with correct change and a bag of what was needed. Other friends of my generation might not have been sent to the store for parents’ smokes, but we remember walking to school, to swim or soccer practice, riding bikes to the houses of friends, trick-or-treating on our own, playing on our own. Waiting in cars while our parents ran errands. My friend Megan remembers how, as a girl of twelve, she and her friends would play a game in which they’d walk to the main road and pretend to be hitchhikers, then run away laughing if a car ever slowed down. Friends who grew up in cities remember riding buses and subways on their own. Those who lived in the country or suburbs recall long walks through the woods, secret clubs, afternoons spent building and scaling constructionally unsound forts made out of whatever they could find in their parents’ garages.
Similarly, the novelist Mona Simpson writes, “I wish I could give my son the freedom I had as a child, though even now, I’m not sure of what that consisted. Perhaps it was the land, the sheer size and range of it, the way we could run until we dropped down with our hearts knocking like bells in our chests and the sky carousing above us. There were few boundaries. I don’t remember ever being told we couldn’t cross the highway or the railroad tracks. But perhaps it had nothing to do with the outdoors. Perhaps it was the luxury of being unnoticed, of being left alone.” And in an article in The Atlantic titled “The Overprotected Kid,” the journalist Hanna Rosin writes, “Like most parents my age, I have memories of childhood so different from the way my children are growing up that sometimes I think I might be making them up, or at least exaggerating them.” Rosin, like me, was born between 1970 and 1980, the last decade before a radically new construct of vulnerable childhood began to take hold.
* * *
The world is supposed to make sense. We want and need the things that happen to us and to those around us to adhere to laws of order and justice and reason. We want to believe that if we live wisely and follow the rules, things will work out, more or less, for us and for those we love. Psychologists refer t
o this as the Just World Hypothesis, a theory first developed by the social psychologist Melvin Lerner. Lerner postulated that people have a powerful intuition that individuals get what they deserve. This intuition influences how we judge those who suffer. When a person is harmed, we instinctually look for a reason or a justification. Unfortunately, this instinct leads to victim-blaming. As Oliver Burkeman writes in The Guardian, “Faced with evidence of injustice, we’ll certainly try to alleviate it if we can—but, if we feel powerless to make things right, we’ll do the next best thing, psychologically speaking: we’ll convince ourselves that the world isn’t so unjust after all.” Burkeman cites as evidence a 2009 study finding that Holocaust memorials can increase anti-Semitism: “Confronted with an atrocity they otherwise can’t explain, people become slightly more likely, on average, to believe that the victims must have brought it on themselves.”
So what happens when the victim is a child, a little boy walking to school, a little girl riding her bike, a baby in a car, victims impossible to blame? Whom can we hold accountable when a child is killed or injured or abused or forgotten? How can one take in this information, the horror of it, and keep on believing the world is just?
In his history of childhood in America, the historian Steven Mintz defines a “moral panic” as the term used by sociologists to describe “the highly exaggerated and misplaced public fears that periodically arise within a society.” Mintz suggests that “eras of ethical conflict and confusion are especially prone to outbreaks of moral panic as particular incidents crystallize generalized anxieties and provoke moral crusades.” The late 1970s through the early 1990s was a period in American history rife with sources of ethical conflict and confusion.
Mintz describes how worldwide recessions and the Great Inflation produced anxieties that the United States was in economic decline. In the span of a few years, just as the echoes of the Vietnam War were beginning to recede, America was confronted with crack cocaine and AIDS—and the general response to both demonstrated a profound, practically homicidal ignorance of how to address these issues. Environmentalists publicized the potential destruction of population growth, pollution, and resource depletion, and looming above all this was the omnipresent threat of the Cold War’s turning hot. Unfortunately, just as there is little individual Americans feel that they can do today about the threats of climate change, rising income inequality, and the dehumanizing effects of automation and globalization, people in the 1970s and 1980s felt they could do little to protect themselves from what seemed to be the encroaching disasters of the day. “Focusing concern on threats to children,” Mintz suggests, “may have provided a solution to this psychological dilemma. Anxiety about the future could be expressed in terms of concerns for children’s safety,” which, after all, feels more manageable.