Begin Reading Table of Contents About the Author Copyright Page Thank you for buying this Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook. To receive special offers, bonus content, and info on new releases and other great reads, sign up for our newsletters. Or visit us online at us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup For email updates on the author, click here. The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. For Pa Boot and Augustus, Georgiana, and Atticus, my late-life loves Introduction: The Parent Paradoxes Why be a parent? Taking care of children is demanding and exhausting, and yet for most of us it is also profoundly satisfying. Why? What makes it all worthwhile? A common answer, especially for middle-class fathers and mothers today, is that you are a parent so that you can do something called “parenting.” “To parent” is a goal-directed verb; it describes a job, a kind of work. The goal is to somehow turn your child into a better or happier or more successful adult —better than they would be otherwise, or (though we whisper this) better than the children next door. The right kind of parenting will produce the right kind of child, who in turn will become the right kind of adult. Of course, people sometimes use the word “parenting” just to describe what parents actually do. But more often, especially now, “parenting” means something that parents should do. In this book, I’ll argue that this prescriptive parenting picture is fundamentally misguided, from a scientific, philosophical, and political point of view, as well as a personal one. It’s the wrong way to understand how parents and children actually think and act, and it’s equally wrong as a vision of how they should think and act. It’s actually made life worse for children and parents, not better. The parenting idea is so pervasive and seductive that it might seem self- evident, incontrovertible, and obvious. But at the same time that parents, most definitely including the parent writing this book, feel the pull of the parenting model, they also feel, often in an inchoate way, that there is something wrong about it. We simultaneously worry that our children are not doing well enough in school, and that they are suffering from the pressure to make them do well in school. We compare our children with the children of our friends and then feel despicable for doing it. We click on the latest headline praising or attacking some new parenting prescription and then say, perhaps a little too loudly, that we are actually just going to act on instinct after all. Working to achieve a particular outcome is a good model for many crucial human enterprises. It’s the right model for carpenters or writers or businessmen. You can judge whether you are a good carpenter or writer or CEO by the quality of your chairs, your books, or your bottom line. In the parenting picture, parenting follows the same model. A parent is a kind of carpenter; however, the goal is not to produce a particular kind of product, like a chair, but a particular kind of person. In work, expertise leads to success. The promise of parenting is that there is some set of techniques, some particular expertise, that parents could acquire that would help them accomplish the goal of shaping their children’s lives. And a sizable industry has emerged that promises to provide exactly that expertise. Some sixty thousand books are in the parenting section on Amazon, and most of them have “How to” somewhere in the title. Many of the parenting how-to books, of course, simply give practical advice about being a parent. But many more promise that if parents just practice the right techniques, they can make a substantial difference in the way their child turns out. The parenting model isn’t just something you find in how-to books, though. It shapes how people think about children’s development in general. I’m a developmental psychologist—I try to figure out what children’s minds are like and why they are like that. Even so, practically everyone who has ever interviewed me about the science of childhood has some question about what parents should do, and what the long-term effect of what they do will be. The parenting idea is also a major source of grief for parents—especially mothers. It helps fuel the never-ending “mommy wars.” If you accept the idea that parenting is a kind of work, then you must choose between that kind of work and other kinds of work (such as, for example, work). Mothers in particular become endlessly defensive and conflicted about whether it is possible to both successfully parent and successfully work at other jobs, and they feel forced to choose between de-emphasizing the importance of motherhood and forgoing their careers. But the same dilemmas affect fathers, all the more intensely because they are less acknowledged. Partly as a result there is a countervailing impulse to devalue the importance of being a parent—hence all the wry memoirs in which women self-consciously confess to their ambivalence about motherhood. After all, if being a parent is a kind of work aimed at creating a successful adult, it’s a pretty lousy job—long hours, nonexistent pay and benefits, and lots of heavy lifting. And for twenty years you have no idea if you’ve done it well, a fact that in and of itself would make the job nerve-racking and guilt-inducing. But if it isn’t a kind of work, why do we do it? If the point is not to create a particular kind of adult, what is the point? I’m one of those anxious, middle-class working parents myself, and all my life I’ve felt both the pull of the parenting model and the reaction against it. My three sons are all grown up, reasonably happy and successful, and starting to have children of their own. But I have also found myself perpetually assessing my responsibility—or should that be credit?—for the ups and downs of their lives. Was I overprotective when I walked my youngest son to school every day when he was eight years old? Or was I neglectful when I didn’t do the same when he turned nine? I wanted my children to follow their own paths and discover their own gifts. But should I have insisted that my oldest child finish college instead of trying to become a musician? I believed—and still do—that good public schools are best for all children. But when my older kids were suffering at the local public high school, should I have sent them to a fancy private school in the suburbs, as I did with my youngest son? Should I have forced my youngest to turn off the computer and read, or should I have let him master coding? How could I have made sure that my “gifted” middle child had lots of free time to play, and did his homework, and at the same time went to an advanced math tutor and ballet classes? Hardest of all, I got divorced when my youngest child finished high school. Should I have done it sooner or later or not at all? My professional expertise and knowledge about development has brought me no closer to answers than anybody else. Looking back on my nearly forty years as a parent, I suspect the best answer is that these are just the wrong questions. Reflecting on your own experience as a parent may make you skeptical about parenting. But reflecting on other parents and children makes the parenting model look unsatisfactory, too. After all, the members of my generation, the happily cocooned and prosperous baby boomers, aren’t actually a dramatic improvement on our Greatest Generation parents who grew up in the miseries of depression and war. And we all know people with terrible childhoods who grow up to become wonderful grown-ups and loving parents themselves, and good parents who end up with tragically unhappy children. The most telling, heartbreaking counter to the parenting model comes when we think about the parents of children who will never reach adulthood. In 2011, Emily Rapp wrote an immensely moving and much circulated article about her son, Ronan, who she knew would die of Tay-Sachs disease before he turned three. That made no difference to the intensity of the love she felt for him. Her son would never become an adult at all, and yet we feel that Emily Rapp and others like her are the most profound examples of what it means to be a parent. Is it important to figure out why being a parent is worthwhile? Worrying about parents and children is often relegated to the Lifestyle section and the Mommy blogs. But I’ll argue in this book that, in fact, those everyday worries reflect genuine and deep aspects of the human condition itself— tensions that are built into who we are as human beings. From a biological point of view, our exceptionally long and helpless human childhood, and the enormous investment in children that goes with it, is a crucial part of what makes us human. What purpose does that investment serve? Why did it evolve? Figuring out why being a parent is worthwhile isn’t just a personal or biological question, but a social and political one, too. Caring for children has never, in all of human history, just been the role of biological mothers and fathers. From the very beginning it’s been a central project for any community of human beings. This is still true. Education, for example, is simply caring for children broadly conceived. As with other social institutions, the way that we care for children has changed in the past and will continue to change in the future. If we want to make good decisions about those changes, we need to think deliberately about what caring for children is all about in the first place. What should preschool look like? How can we reform public schools? Who gets to make decisions about a child’s welfare? How should we deal with new technologies? Caring for children is a political subject as well as a scientific and personal one, and the tensions and paradoxes emerge at greater as well as smaller scales. There must be a way of thinking about children that goes beyond “how-to” on the one hand or wry memoir on the other. Taking the long view offered by science and philosophy might help. But I’ve recently become a grandmother, and maybe that view can give an even better perspective. Grandmothering provides a more empathetic kind of distance, both from the mistakes and triumphs of the young mother you once were (who couldn’t tell the two apart at the time) and from the struggles of your own children. So this book will be the work of a grandmother as well as a scientist and philosopher—a bubbe, as my own Jewish grandmother would have said—but a bubbe at Berkeley, a grandmother who runs a cognitive science laboratory and writes philosophy papers in between telling stories of the olden days and making blueberry pancakes. Grandmother scientists and philosophers have been rather thin on the ground in the past, so perhaps combining both perspectives can help us understand the value of being a parent in a way that takes us beyond parenting. From Parenting to Being a Parent If parenting is the wrong model, what’s the right one? “Parent” is not actually a verb, not a form of work, and it isn’t and shouldn’t be directed toward the goal of sculpting a child into a particular kind of adult. Instead, to be a parent —to care for a child—is to be part of a profound and unique human relationship, to engage in a particular kind of love. Work is central to human life; we couldn’t do without it. But as Freud and Elvis both remarked, apocryphally at least, work and love are the two things that make life worthwhile. The particular love that goes with caring for children is not just restricted to biological mothers and fathers, but includes all the people whom academics call caregivers and the British, more elegantly, just refer to as carers. It’s a form of love that is not limited to biological parents, but is at least potentially part of the lives of us all. We recognize the difference between work and other relationships, other kinds of love. To be a wife is not to engage in “wifing,” to be a friend is not to “friend,” even on Facebook, and we don’t “child” our mothers and fathers. Yet these relationships are central to who we are. Any human being living a fully satisfying life is immersed in such social connections. And this is not only a philosophical truth about human beings, but one that is deeply rooted in our very biology. Talking about love, especially the love of parents for children, may sound sentimental and mushy, and also simple and obvious. But like all human relationships, the love of children is at once a part of the everyday texture of our lives—ubiquitous, inescapable, and in the background of everything we do—and enormously complicated, variable, and even paradoxical. We can aspire to love better without thinking of love as a kind of work. We might say that we try hard to be a good wife or husband, or that it’s important to us to be a good friend or a better child. But I would not evaluate the success of my marriage by measuring whether my husband’s character had improved in the years since we wed. I would not evaluate the quality of an old friendship by whether my friend was happier or more successful than when we first met—indeed, we all know that friendships show their quality most in the darkest days. Nevertheless, this is the implicit picture of parenting —that your qualities as a parent can be, and even should be, judged by the child you create. If being a parent, especially a parent of young children, is a pretty awful kind of work, it’s a pretty great kind of love, at least for most of us. The love we feel for our young children and the love they feel for us is simultaneously unconditional and intimate, morally profound and sensually immediate. The most important rewards of being a parent aren’t your children’s grades and trophies—or even their graduations and weddings. They come from the moment-by-moment physical and psychological joy of being with this particular child, and in that child’s moment-by-moment joy in being with you. Love doesn’t have goals or benchmarks or blueprints, but it does have a purpose. The purpose is not to change the people we love, but to give them what they need to thrive. Love’s purpose is not to shape our beloved’s destiny, but to help them shape their own. It isn’t to show them the way, but to help them find a path for themselves, even if the path they take isn’t one we would choose ourselves, or even one we would choose for them. The purpose of loving children, in particular, is to give those helpless young human beings a rich, stable, safe environment—an environment in which variation, innovation, and novelty can blossom. This is true both from a biological and evolutionary point of view and from a personal and political one. Loving children doesn’t give them a destination; it gives them sustenance for the journey. The Paradoxes So being a parent is simply about loving children. Except that love is never simple. Volumes have been thought, spoken, written, sung, and sometimes screamed about the paradoxes, complexities, and unique craziness of erotic love. Our love for children is just as intense, just as paradoxical and complex, just as uniquely crazy. But the discussion of relations between parents and children, particularly young children, is almost entirely confined to the how- to books or the memoirs. In this book I’ll focus on two kinds of paradoxes: paradoxes of love and paradoxes of learning. These paradoxes are built into the evolutionary nature of childhood itself. The parenting model just can’t deal with them. They emerge when we think about childhood scientifically as well as personally. In fact, the most recent scientific research makes these paradoxes especially vivid. But they aren’t just abstract scientific and philosophical questions. They’re instantiated in the real-life tensions and dilemmas that bedevil the lives of parents. And they’re at the root of the difficult moral and political decisions that arise when we try to care for children as a society. The Paradoxes of Love The first dilemma comes from the tension between dependence and independence. Parents and other caregivers must take complete responsibility for that most utterly dependent of creatures, the human baby. But they must also transform that utterly dependent creature into a completely independent and autonomous adult. We start out feeding and changing diapers and physically holding our children most of the day, and doing all this with surprising satisfaction and even happiness. We end up, if we’re lucky, with the occasional affectionate text message from a distant city. A marriage or friendship that was like either end of our lives as parents would be peculiar, if not down-right pathological. Children move from a dependence that is far greater than that of the neediest lover to an independence that is far greater than the most distant and detached one. In the early part of a child’s life we have more control over the details of their lives than they do themselves. Most of what happens to a baby happens through a parent or caregiver. But if I’ve been a good parent, I’ll have no control at all over my child’s adult life. This tension becomes particularly striking during adolescence. Not only are our children independent and autonomous from us, they are also part of a new generation that is independent and autonomous from the previous one. Infancy and intimacy go together—we hold our babies close, literally and metaphorically. Our adult children are and should be foreigners—inhabitants of the future. A second tension comes from the specificity of our love for children. I care about my children in a special way. We feel that the welfare of our own children is more important than just about anything else, even the welfare of other children or our own happiness. We can be—we even should be— ruthless about advancing it. Think about a poor mom in a terrible neighborhood who scrimps and saves to send her child to a good private school, a school out of reach for most of the other kids around. She’s heroic, not selfish or foolish. But it’s a unique kind of heroism. The classical ways of thinking about politics and morality turn on the idea that moral and political principles should be universal. Fairness, equality, justice—these ideas are supposed to apply to everybody. The very idea of a law, for example, is that some principle applies equally to all. But I care about and am responsible for my own specific children, far more than children in general. And so I should be. Where does this specific commitment come from? It isn’t just a matter of genetic affinity. Almost anyone who cares for a child will come to love just that specific, special miracle. How can we accommodate the dramatic specificity of our love for children within a broader politics of child-rearing? And what would this mean for public policy? The Paradoxes of Learning A second set of paradoxes concerns the ways that children learn from adults. In a world where schooling determines success, a lot of parenting focuses on getting children to learn more, learn better, and learn faster. The parenting model is also the default model for much of education. The idea is that adults teach children what they should know and so determine how they think and act. Again, the idea may seem obvious, but both science and history suggest otherwise. A first paradox concerns play and work. It’s a truism that children learn through play. But how do they do it, and why? By definition, play is an act of spontaneous exuberance that isn’t designed to accomplish much of anything in particular. And yet the ubiquity of play in childhood suggests that it must be serving some special function. In fact, just about everybody thinks that children should have time to play. But playtime is one of the first things to go when we start legislating children’s lives. Recess is replaced by reading drills, and wall ball and hopscotch give way to soccer practice. The parenting model gives us a long list of activities that children should do. From Mandarin classes to Kumon math practice to SAT prep, there simply isn’t much time left over for kids to just play. We feel bad about it, but we don’t quite know what to do. Conventional moral and political systems are all about the stern and earnest business of human work. They are about how individuals and societies should think, plan, and act in order to accomplish particular goals. But children and childhood are all about play. Why do children play? And how should we value play, not only personally, but morally and politically, too? Just as children must move from being the most dependent of creatures to the most autonomous ones, they must also move from being people who (mostly) play to people who (mostly) work. This transformation requires profound changes in children’s minds and brains. Parents, caregivers, and teachers must somehow manage this transition in a way that both preserves the benefits of play and enables the benefits of work. Schools, the main institutions we use to manage this transition, arguably do a pretty terrible job