A man is supposed to take care of his children. If he gets a woman pregnant, he's expected to step up and take responsibility. But what if that man discovers that the child he thought was his own -- the kid he read to, cuddled and tucked in at night -- is another man's? Then who is responsible for the kid -- the biological father or the nurturing adoptive dad? That is the quandary increasingly being raised by DNA tests. As Ruth Padawer writes in a fascinating cover story for the upcoming New York Times Magazine, the rise of paternity tests -- bought on the cheap online or at local drug stores -- have revealed "just how murky society’s notions of fatherhood actually are."
Mike L., the lead subject in Padawer's piece, found evidence of his wife's affair with a coworker and decided to have L., his 5-year-old daughter, take a DNA test. The results arrived in the mail: He was not the father. "I ran upstairs, locked myself in the bathroom and cried and dry-heaved for 45 minutes. I felt like my guts were being ripped out," he says. Mike separated from his wife, Stephanie, and began paying her child support because, he says, she claimed Rob, L.'s bio-dad, had refused. Things continued on this way for several years, until he got news that Stephanie would be marrying Rob, and that was too much to bear. He asked a Pennsylvania court to relieve him of parental responsibility, but a judge ruled that Mike was the legal father, not Rob.
Padawer explains, "Once a man has been deemed a father, either because of marriage or because he has acknowledged paternity (by agreeing to be on the birth certificate, say, or paying child support), most state courts say he cannot then abandon that child -- no matter what a DNA test subsequently reveals," she continues. "In Pennsylvania and many other states, the only way a non-biological father can rebut his legal status as father is if he can prove he was tricked into the role -- a showing of fraud -- and can demonstrate that upon learning the truth, he immediately stopped acting as the child’s father." In Mike's case, the judge ruled that he was the legal father because he stuck around even after the DNA test -- in other words, because of love, not fraud.
"I pay child support to a biologically intact family," Mike says. "How ridiculous is that?" Pretty ridiculous when you consider that Rob gets to live with L. and play the role of papa; and Mike only gets to see her on the weekend. As vexing as this case is, though, we hardly want courts to devalue the unbreakable bond that can develop even in relationships without genetic ties. At some point, DNA can become rather irrelevant. The truth is that Mike's utter adoration of L. jumps off the page; he is a doting, indulgent father. L., now 11 years old, still sees him as her daddy and he wants it to remain that way -- he just doesn't want to pay child support to the woman who cruelly cuckolded and defrauded him. As far as the law is concerned, though, he can't have it both ways. There are many different ideas for how to best address the issue -- from limiting paternity challenges to the first two years of the child's life to widespread DNA testing at birth (I picture Maury Povitch being wheeled from delivery room to delivery room: "You are not the father! You are the father!") -- but all are imperfect.
Paternal uncertainty is one of the many biological inequalities of reproduction (see also: pushing a human being out of your vagina) and, as evolutionary psychologists tell it, getting stuck raising some other schmo's kid is a hard-wired male nightmare. But if you had any doubt that we humans are more than our base evolutionary imperatives, this article should convince you: For all his rightful resentment, men like Mike show that family is thicker than blood.
Dear Cary,
I've recently realized that I am atheist. Now being that atheists are 1 percent of the population, this could produce a lone sense in anyone. However, I feel especially alone. My husband's family -- I have no family of my own to speak of -- is intensely Roman Catholic and close-knit. I love them very much and have for many years, but their Catholicism is their identity. The holiday and social gatherings all revolve around a conservative Catholic faith and a conservative political base. I have always been the token liberal, politely placing counterpoints to their own. Or simply staying silent with the more reactionary members of the family. It is a somewhat lonely existence as a result of the only other liberal being a poorly read and largely ignorant knee-jerk friend of my husband's.
I just had a baby and do need the support of my husband's family but the constant silence and playing along is causing me depression. I have no real issue with religious people, I'm certainly not one of the in-your-face New Atheist types. But to be unable to share this with even my husband forces me to live an endless lie of church services and religious gatherings. I do not believe in the miracles they constantly trumpet or find comfort in the theological books they offer! I do not feel any kind of supernatural presence in my life or feel that birth control is inherently evil. Yet if I shared these beliefs I would be shunned faster and with more passion than a leprous Nazi with a rotting cheese on her head. I hear the passionate gossip they speak of other wayward family members all the time!
I look down at my son and realize I even must lie to him. I must parrot the tired myths to him or else risk the natural talkative nature of children to spill my words to everyone. While there is no real evil in living out religion, any more than there is deciding to dance in a circle in your yard with a flowerpot every day, it is not some truth. Nor is it a surefire cure for what ails you. To me it represents wasted time and effort. I do not know what to do because I love these goodhearted people. They are the only family I have. My constant silence and lies depress me greatly because I love them so much.
Thank you for your consideration of my issue.
Surrounded by Saints
Dear Surrounded,
Is faith a matter of choice? Is it an act of will? Are we therefore to be held accountable for the presence or absence of faith in our lives?
I don't see how that can be.
Is it not possible to be a person of goodwill who honestly has no faith? If people who profess to have faith cannot accept that, then it seems to me they lack some essential element of understanding.
How could people of faith accept as a miracle an event in which faith came unbidden to someone, and yet condemn the opposite but equally plausible event in which faith did not come unbidden, or departed unbidden never to return? Why should one occurrence be treated with reverence and the other with scorn, if they are both equally mysterious in this putatively mysterious, god-infused universe?
I would think that people of both good faith and goodwill would accept your atheism as simply another miracle.
But I am obviously not living in the real world.
If the people around you lack deep understanding and intellectual capacity, what is to be done? I do not know. Can they be educated? Not by you.
If they cannot accept your difference then that is their own personal hell; that is their tragic incapacity of perception.
If you would like something to read, let me suggest the estimable Terry Eagleton's small book, "Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate."
Let's hope that there is a God, and that she shows her hand in such a way that these people are struck with sudden holy forgiveness, and that they see, in this moment of wholly improbable struckness, how you, too, and your atheism, are part of their perfect godly world.
And let us hope that this merciful God tells them, in a few simple words, to leave you the fuck alone and not try to convert you.
Wouldn't that be a nice kind of God to have?
What? You want more advice?
Dear Cary,
In my family there are several women who have writing talent, one of whom is my mother. I believe they are born writers. They need to write, and often they write well. Usually I've enjoyed the many stories they write about other family members -- often a combination of history and memorial. Lately, however, I am sick of all these memories! These writers are now in their 70s, a time for looking back, but this "looking back" has been going on for 25 years. I understand that they are making a wonderful and welcome contribution to our family records, giving many family members a sense of who they are and where they come from, a blessing in this rootless modern world. But all this time spent on thinking of yesteryear and mythologizing everyone has started to weigh me down and I want to get away from it.
I'm 46 and dealing with my own "who am I and what do I do next?" situation. Perhaps it makes me want to live more in the now than constantly thinking of the past and those who are gone. I still believe many good things in life are ahead of me, and suddenly I want to walk away from all these tombstones. I've suffered some painful losses in the past decade, and while my memories are fond and I feel I've handled the grief philosophically and emotionally, all this memorializing makes me feel like no one ever lets go and moves on. I know these stories are appreciated by my family members, and their writing functions as "therapy" for themselves and others. Yet, is it OK if sometimes I want to yell, "Let people rest in peace and stop spending so much time in the past!"?
Too Many Writers
Dear Too Many Writers,
Writing is a powerful tool we can use to inscribe our reality onto the body of a family or nation or individual. Used in that way, writing is a phallic, aggressive medium. But writing is also a tool for community and for exposure, allowing ignored or unrecognized contents of conscious to come into being in the view of others, allowing individual truths to come out and make their complementary marks on us. Because of your mother's place in the family, and the other elders, it may seem to you that she is inscribing a whole outlook or viewpoint on your very skin, so that you cannot escape it, and so that whatever you might say about your own present and your own past is said within this already-inscribed circumference. Your mother has defined you in this way. You feel enclosed, trapped, muted, bound by it.
In wanting to make your own statement and define yourself, you are focused on this behavior of your mother's, which you see as an obstacle. It may indeed be an obstacle. But the way to overcome it is not to focus on destroying the perceived obstacle, but to develop your own equivalent narrative, to inscribe your own truth on your own body, or your own reality in your own book. Your task is to take up the pen and write a counter-narrative, not one that attacks your mother's view but one that balances her narrative, which is heavy with the past, with one of your own that is alive with what you see and feel in the present.
Depending on how adventurous you are, and how much you want to involve your mother in this, you might try writing in a group with your mother. The Amherst Writers and Artists method might serve this purpose. If you knew of a facilitator of such groups in your area, you and your mother, and perhaps other family members, might join it and write together at the same time in the same room and thus reveal to each other, through this medium, the things that are important to you. In that way you would not have to destroy her narrative to make room for your own; there is room for all these narratives. And the method, if followed closely, allows within its framework for such a thing to occur without any additional explanation or attention. No one need know that is what is happening.
The AWA method follows a set of guidelines that eliminate hierarchy and accord equal value to each participant.
Families are hard to corral into such a thing, and indeed if it required corralling it might not be advisable, as it would then be tinged with a spirit of coercion. But it would be very interesting to do, if there was a general enthusiasm for it. If members of your family are interested, it might turn out to be an amazing, eye-opening experience.
I want to make clear that this method is not therapy. It is a method for writing. But I can imagine its being used to allow certain truths to emerge in a group of people such as a family, without those truths being challenged or criticized. It has been used in analogous fashion to allow members of silenced minorities to find a voice for their truths. So why not the members of a family, especially if certain members feel that they have been silenced by the more outspoken and powerfully inscribed narratives of another?
But the chief thing is for you to ask yourself what stories you want to be heard, and create your own counter-narrative. You have begun that with this letter. I suggest that you continue it. Write your own truth, in other words. Use writing, which is an ancient and powerful method of bringing knowledge and stories into the world, to bring into being this narrative of your own life that you feel is being ignored or trampled.
What? You want more advice?
Dear Cary,
First let me say, I really enjoy the depth, creativity, non-judgmentalness and thoughtfulness of your advice. I am a writer, too (poet), and also read your columns from that perspective; but this question isn't about writing.
I don't know if my situation is one that can be improved based on advice -- maybe it's just something I have to come to myself -- but I have to check because I am in a very uncomfortable position and would love your perspective. I have moved across the country with a man I don't want to be with anymore, mainly because we have a small child together and I felt that to stay in the town where I was (where I was happy) would be to become responsible for separating my child from her father ... so I'm trying to "make it work" which, as a Leo, I must say is quite unlikely (if a Leo's heart isn't in it, it's over, period; yet I must also be ambivalent to have stuck it out like this).
What I am wondering is this: Is it ever the right thing to stay with someone for reasons that have not so much to do with one's personal happiness? What reasons are good enough for leaving someone -- just because you want to be happier? Are relationships really about happiness, or growth?
I feel like I have been placed on a path, since the unplanned birth of my child, that is about making other people happy instead of myself; it's about hard work and drudgery and the ideal of the "family" rather than passion. Cary, I am not enamored of this path (understatement) or skilled at it -- but it seems like one I must embrace in order for my heart to grow bigger and that is what's so confusing. I am frequently angry at my 2-year-old and resentful, though I am also loving and nurturing toward her when I can feel it in me, but the "angry" times are more than I would wish (and I feel that raising her would be much easier with a better, more involved and supportive partner, if there was a space for one to show up); and I am sick of living with someone (my boyfriend) who is also frequently angry and resentful and negative (he's an Iraq vet with PTSD ... and he won't get help with it, no matter how much I suggest it -- we've done couples therapy, too); it feels like living in a pressure cooker or walking on eggshells constantly.
This is the same way I felt about my parents in my childhood home. I feel no passion for this person anymore, which to me matters a great deal. I am usually angry with him and I think we bring out the worst in each other, at this point. But I also feel I have to be bigger than this, though I can't seem to be ... he suffered so much at war and doesn't have a family (father is dead, mother mentally ill) ... I feel somewhat responsible for his happiness and also, for his relationship with his child and this idea of being a family.
Problematically, my own early associations with family are far from positive or simple, as my home was full of physical and verbal abuse; and I suspect that this has more to do with my relationship problems, and whom I am drawn to, than anything else -- yet my friends and family have always disliked him and are very clear that they don't think he treats me well or respectfully (in terms of being loving, compatible and supportive; and my answer is always "he really loves me but often can't show it well; and we have a child together" which is definitely true but sounds like an excuse).
You can see how complicated it is. I want to leave, but don't know how or if it is "right" or when it would be. I know I'm able to do so and survive; I have left a marriage, in the past, to a man who was nicer to me. I know I can be on my own. But I have never done this kind of shift with a small child also relying on me. So the main question, recapitulated: Is it worth sticking it out until I am really, really sure; should I look into my early family stuff first (I've been in and out of therapy for 15 years already); should I just split it off (I have tried to do this several times already -- before I moved with him, we had lived apart for months), even though I just made a cross-country move with him? What do you think would be a useful way for me to frame this situation when I am thinking about it, to bring greater clarity and joy not just for me but for everyone involved?
On Eggshells, Internal and External
Dear Eggshells,
Sometimes, despite my allegedly poetic tendencies, I would like to be Dr. Phil. That way, when you say you moved across the country with a man you don't want to be with anymore I could say, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, stop right there, young lady, you did what? and we could all have a collective moment of generalized self-righteousness.
But I do not represent the conscience of America's status quo. I have heard too many stories that start out with such revelations but which when told to completion make a difficult, riveting, beautiful sense. That is why at Salon we run such letters at such length, because we have faith in the ability of adults to tell their whole story until it does start making sense.
So you told the truth, and you asked the big questions: "Is it ever the right thing to stay with someone for reasons that have not so much to do with one's personal happiness? What reasons are good enough for leaving someone -- just because you want to be happier? Are relationships really about happiness, or growth?"
What do I think? I think it is legitimate to act according to your deepest and truest necessities, because your deepest and truest necessities do not spring from you and are not controlled by you; they spring from where you exist in the world; they come to you as instructions from the world and are thus not selfish and narrow as you might fear; they are broad and universal and thus poetic and heroic.
They are bigger than any narrowly conceived right-or-wrong principle.
You were happy in that town you left. You said so yourself. It met your deepest and truest necessities. Yet you left that happy town because you thought you had to follow a narrowly defined principle of loyalty to a man and protection of your child.
In a broader sense, you can be loyal to this man, protect your child and also do what you feel driven to do. These things can be in harmony. At some point, at a point in the exact center of the frame we have put around this picture, they are indeed in harmony. They converge at the center of this picture.
This framework I suggest says: Trust in the community of things beyond you; be in harmony with your deepest self, because that is the bigger way of truth; it is the bigger way; it may seem full of tragedy and apparent misstep, of apparent moral failing; it may bring down upon your head the judgment of others, of family and loved ones and later your own offspring; it may make you seem to be a person of questionable judgment; it may cause you to be an outcast. But if it is true to your destiny in this deep sense -- which can only be discovered by relentless self-inquiry and relentless allowing-in of the necessary, by allowing the earth to move you toward the place you belong, by trusting that it's not just about you and your decision but about where the world requires you to be -- then I think in the end there is some justice in whatever decision you might make.
Some people will say you have to remain with the man and with the child because that is the way it is. Some people will say, Whoa, young lady, stop right there.
So here are a few things I believe to be true: Kids can grow up in a variety of ways. Kids can grow up with two parents who love each other, or who stayed together in a bleak simulacrum of relationship "for the children" and who therefore offer to their children a model of distorted and repressed relating; they can grow up with the uncertainty and chaos of a parent who follows her heart in a narrow, selfish way without regard to larger principles at work and thus does not provide what the child needs; they can grow up with at least one parent who is fully a provider, who finds in the world what her child needs, whether embodied in a single partner or in a community of people, some of whom may become significant guides for the child, and who collectively provide safety, continuity and support.
Children can grow up all kinds of ways. They're going to be wounded by life no matter how they grow up. They will be unprepared for certain things by definition. So you set the stage for the child to do what the child has to do: to learn the world and acquire confidence and safety and grow strong.
Here is how I would frame it. You thought of your child's needs, which is admirable, but you lodged them in their symbol, i.e., you lodged your child's need for the masculine in the narrow body of your boyfriend. Your child needs a relationship with the male principle, the masculine, which is balanced and rooted; your child needs to sense that you are rooted and safe and cared for; you need to care for her and give her rootedness. But that can be found in the world. It need not be found in one specific romantic partner who is, as you indicate, wounded in his own way and in need of care, and resistant to care, and thus weakened. Because he is wounded and resistant, he may not be the best person to help you care for this child. He needs care of his own. So it might be best for all concerned if you go back to the place you were happy, and let him seek the care and the rootedness that he needs, and then if you are getting what you need, the child will also get what she needs.
Everyone will get what they need. Maybe not what they want, but what they need.
Get grounded. Go back to your town and stay there. Find support there. Have a routine. Get time to yourself. Get physical separation from your boyfriend, but keep him in the picture. Provide a stable home for the kid. Get yourself connected with other mothers. Stay true to your passionate nature. Sing to your baby. Rock your baby in a rocking chair and sing to your baby. Sleep. Get a place with a porch. Have your family visit.
That's how I would frame it, not in terms of right and wrong but in terms of needs, and what is available to the child. And in a more general sense, thinking of the child's need for a father not as embodied in a particular man but embodied in masculine properties of rootedness, strength, competence, at-homeness in the world. It might be that the community will be the father, in a sense.
The child needs initiation into the world of competence, steadiness, mastery over the forest and the machine, confidence, simplicity, camaraderie, practicality, soldierly discipline. This is interesting -- that the village might be the father.
And what of the actual father and his rights? Who is he and what does he need? Obviously he is wounded. His father died and his mother was not stable; she was disarranged, not present, unavailable, strange and perhaps frightening. So he went to war. He went to war and was further wounded. So he is a wounded man, capable of love but angry, uncared for, resistant to care, perhaps resistant to reliving or refacing the true horrors that exist in his mind. It may seem like a cliché, but we can often do people a favor by setting them free. He needs more than you can give him.
To speak of the nation's political actions as the actions of a unified psyche is pushing it, definitely. Yet there is something glimmering on the edge of this picture about the distorted relationship to masculinity our nation has evolved. Sure, I'm conflicted about masculinity. But it's not just me. We have evolved as a nation, as a result of complex social changes, a distorted and unhelpful view of masculinity, of fatherhood, of the beauty and grandeur of the masculine. It manifests itself in many ways. One way this manifests itself is the way an army on a religious crusade has come to substitute for the missing family. Another way is in the rise of disembodied techno-combat, the killing of phantasmagorical monsters with fingers on a button. As nationhood itself is a crumbling anachronism, what are our orphaned, stateless, villageless young men fighting? Some phantasmagorical Other. Always the Other. Because we have a problem with the Other in our own souls.
Thank you for indulging me one paragraph of speculation on a matter about which I probably should not speculate.
Also one more paragraph about the therapy you have been in, and then I am done. Over the past year my thinking about therapy has evolved, as I have experienced the difference between therapy practiced primarily to help the individual adjust to a society's demands, and therapy practiced to help the individual discover her deeper nature, confront it and find the courage to live according to it. I sense that the work you now need to do involves some kind of transformative, somatic reexperiencing and embodiment of the powerful wounding in your past and in your boyfriend's past. I'm not sure where you are, or who is available. So I say: Genuinely ask for help, and find a path to a therapist who has a poetic soul, who has been through the fire, who has a grounding in archetypal patterns. After all, you are a poet. So you need a therapist who can guide you across the river, no matter what you find on the other side.
Finally, do this for me, OK, today: Picture yourself being OK. Find an image of being OK. How can you be OK for today? Is there a place you can sit on the steps in the sun and be OK for a while? Can you wheel your child through a leafy park and be OK for today? Find a way to be OK just for today. Then maybe repeat it tomorrow, and the next day, as you make your plans to return to the town where you were happy.
I picture your going back to your happy town with the child and establishing a stable place there, in community, and providing your child what she needs of the masculine, not necessarily embodied in a specific man, but in certain qualities. I picture you being OK. I picture the reconciliation of apparent opposites. I picture some tiny dot of justice in the center of the frame.
What? You want more advice?
We like to think of "good parenting" as a set of rules built in common sense and human decency, the kind of thing that should be universal, rather than subject to fashion or trends. Yet scratch the surface and all of us know that is manifestly false. The single biggest thing upper-middle-class suburban parents of "Mad Men" and John Cheever stories (with their highballs, drunk driving and wayward dry-cleaner bags) may have in common with their '70s counterparts (peddling "Free to Be You and Me" and natural foods) or today's much-maligned "helicopter parents" (obsessing over private preschools and stranger danger) is that each group was probably more complicated than their stereotype. And when you extend those differences across class, region or even country, the differences become even wider.
For this reason, I was fascinated by two pieces this week: One in Time magazine on an Italian family accused of child abuse for coddling their 12-year-old son too much; the other, a piece in today's New York Times about how yelling seems to be replacing spanking among affluent, educated parents. Taken together, these two stories seem to point to the way culture shapes our perception of what "normal" parenting standards look like.
Child abuse, by definition, most often involves parents who neglect or hurt their children. But one Italian family -- a mother who was raising her young son in an extended family with the child's grandparents -- is being prosecuted because their love for the boy was deemed "so intense, it could be considered a form of child abuse." How intense? According to prosecutors, the boy -- aptly named Luca, which fans of '80s music might remember as the name of the title character in Suzanne Vega's song about an abused child -- was not allowed to "play with other children, go to church, participate in sports or leave the house before or after school." Also, he was sent to school with his food pre-cut into "bite-sized portions" and was so "physically and psychologically stunted from such around-the-clock doting" that, according to the lawyer on the case, "he had the motor skills of a three-year-old child."
It's hard to tell from the details given whether this is the case of a (perhaps criminally) over-zealous prosecutor or a genuine case of parents inflicting harm on a child. (If it were the latter, the operating term wouldn't be too intense "love," but the kind of "control" that is an aspect of many abusive relationships -- well above and beyond the level of control that is an aspect of healthy parent-child relationships.) But what is interesting about this case is that it taps into a cultural fear that is apparently widespread in Italy: that overly indulgent mothers are raising a nation of sissified "mama's boys" -- called mammone in Italian.
The fear of the overbearing, castrating mother reached its apotheosis in the United States in the '50s and '60s, when stay-at-home mothers were the preferred middle-class norm. Their darker version was the mother pathologically attached to her sons who, in extreme cases, could even be blamed for "turning" her son into a gay man. (Both "Rebel Without a Cause," released in 1955, and "Psycho," released in 1960, owe a great deal of their plot to playing on the Freudian fears of the time.) In the post-feminist years, our bad mothering narratives have shifted, if anything, toward the dangers of too little mother love (though, mark my words, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the latest crop of stay-at-home mothers brings back a new, surprising version of this fear).
But in Italy, the fear of the emasculating power of mother love is still going strong. A full 37 percent of men between the ages of 30 and 34 still live at home with their mothers, according to a study published last year in Psychology Today and quoted in the Time article, and two Italian economists tell the magazine that they have found parents who "will actually pay their grown children not to move out." (This was particularly interesting to me, because my boyfriend grew up in a close-knit Italian-American family in New York, in which the family tradition was for children to live at home, often through their 20s and early 30s, until they were married or bought a house. Both of us had always assumed this came out of the New York immigrant tradition, but it was fascinating to think that the roots might go even deeper than that.) In this, Italian parents differ dramatically from parents in other parts of Europe, according to Henriette Felici-Bach, a Paris-based child psychologist who specializes in ethno-clinical psychology, a field that looks at cross-cultural differences in human development. "In Germany, children are educated early on to [execute] a task on their own from beginning to end. In Southern [European] countries, children are dependent on what people tell them to do." This makes a kind of practical sense, according to Felici-Bach: Italy was traditionally a "poverty-stricken place with weak governments, meaning the family was the only source of protection and economic support for people." When you can't rely on Uncle Sam to take care of you, you can always rely on Mom.
Although this generation of American parents has taken a lot of flak for closely supervising their children (see: "helicopter parents"), the parenting model we hear most about is closer to that of northern European parents. Sure, kids may walk to school less often and have more supervision of their homework and scheduled activities, but the major goal of professional-class parents tends to be toward breeding intellectual curiosity and independent thinking, with the ultimate goal of sending a kid off at 18 to live semi-independently at the college of his or her choice (even if Mom and Dad do stalk them on Facebook). But this isn't always true across class lines. To speak in vast generalizations (the only kind available when speaking of great swaths of people, though these conclusions are supported by the work of many sociologists), professional-class American parents tend to be more likely to emphasize internal standards, self-directed learning and critical thinking, and be more tolerant of nonconformity and egalitarian about gender roles; whereas working-class parents tend to be more likely to emphasize external standards, deference to authority and conformity. (As a not-completely-random aside, this made me wonder if the fashion for rewarding underachieving students with cash payments for improving their schoolwork, which I wrote about a few weeks back, might have something to do with educators' canny -- or prejudiced -- view that working-class kids are more likely to identify with a clearly defined external reward for achievement.)
Just reading those comparative lists of traits, one might be tempted to further classify the former as the values of more liberal, educated parents and the latter as the values of more conservative, traditional parents. But given that researchers themselves are almost always, by definition, members of the professional class, one has to wonder if there's no small amount of class bias involved in even the way one frames the question. Just as a German parent might look at an Italian parent as an excessive coddler and an Italian parent might see a German parent as excessively cold, what a parent sees as "enlightened" can easily be seen by another as "overly permissive."
Which brings us to spanking. Although it was a common practice among even middle-class parents at mid-century, physically disciplining one's children has been frowned upon by middle-class parents for at least a generation and is, for the most part, verboten in this generation of American parents. But Amy McCready, the founder of Positive Parenting Solutions, tells the New York Times today, "I've worked with thousands of parents and I can tell you, without question, that screaming is the new spanking." According to one survey quoted by the Times, two-thirds of parents reported that yelling at their kids was their greatest source of parental guilt, and according to another, 88 percent of parents reported "shouting, screaming or yelling at the kids at least once (though it didn't specify how many did it more often) in the past year."
My first reaction was: Only once? I'm not much of a screamer (though my mom, who adamantly opposed physical discipline, certainly was), but it still seems rather far-fetched to think that any parent could refrain from raising one's voice 100 percent of the time (and to be honest, I had a rare-ish shouting match with my daughter this morning when I was trying to get her out of bed for school). But the Times piece seems to suggest that yelling is a hallmark among this generation of high-achieving parents. And this makes me wonder: Are we yelling more because we are spanking less? Or is yelling just one more thing to be added to the list of things parents can't do without feeling guilty about it?
Parenting has many moments of undeniable frustration, anger and hostility, and it seems counterintuitive to expect that a "good" parent is one who is able to repress those feelings in every instance. What's more, it's hard to imagine that a parent who could wouldn't produce the unfortunate side effect of raising an emotionally stunted zombie (though another cultural stereotype, that of the emotionally repressed WASP, certainly comes to mind).
So are good parents ones who express their feelings, or teach their children emotional restraint? Ones who shelter their children from harm or give them the means to protect themselves? Ones who sacrifice a good part of their adult lives to tending to their children, or ones who model strong independent adulthood? Parents, as individuals, differ from one another as much as one would expect from any group of diverse adults. But societies undeniably construct models of bad, better and best behavior. And as much as we like to think of grand categories of universally "good" human behavior, these models seem to be as much situational as anything else. When affluence and safety are taken as a given, it may make more pragmatic sense to encourage risk-taking in a child; when resources are scarce, thrift and tradition might give that same child a better chance. Weirdly enough, the analogy that comes to mind is the history of drugs: When women were expected to stay home and care for children, they were given Valium to calm them and speed to pick them up; when they were expected to juggle many roles, anti-anxiety meds ruled the day. Sure, parenting is about knowing yourself and your child. But maybe it's an awful lot more culturally constructed than we like to think.
In the new movie "The Boys Are Back" (which, for the record, I haven't seen), Clive Owen plays a young widower, Joe, figuring out how to raise a 6-year-old son, Artie, on his own. His "chosen style of child rearing," writes Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly, "is distracted permissiveness. Bedtimes are indistinguishable from playtimes, meals are indistinguishable from delivery pizza, and if his younger son wants a joyride on the hood of a car, Dad is happy to get behind the wheel." When Joe's son from a previous marriage, Harry, arrives to visit for the summer, the apparent strictness of his upbringing is contrasted unfavorably with what Artie's getting from freewheeling Dad. But, says Roger Ebert, Joe's parenting style, presented here as liberating, actually reads as selfish, and "[s]ome of the film's more successful passages involve the ways Harry becomes the father his poor little brother doesn't have."
Although the film is drawn from a memoir by Simon Carr and is thus, as they say, "based on a true story," Schwarzbaum notes that the movie version "dulls whatever edge the story has in conveying the bewilderment of an overwhelmed single father." In other words, what we're seeing is the typical Hollywood version of fatherhood -- wacky, childish and occasionally dangerous -- minus the standard killjoy Mom for balance.
Judah Schiller, writing in the London Times this weekend, offers a much more realistic portrayal of unexpected and tragic single fatherhood. After his wife died from complications of giving birth to their third child, Schiller struggled not only with profound grief, but the realization that he had, until that point, been nothing like an equal partner in parenting. "A friend took [baby] Satya every day for a solid year while I was at work. But I had to learn how to be a parent and not merely a working father who lets the mother do all the parenting ... I had failed to appreciate how hard [my wife] had worked to raise the children and take care of the house. Many men grossly undervalue their wives' contributions. So I tried to pay attention to that: How do I reinvent my life to be a better person?"
Schiller was charged with raising three children and becoming a better person while mourning his beloved wife, an element of the story that's often elided from the Hollywood version of loss, or at least glossed over. In "The Boys Are Back," Joe has conversations with his dead wife, as both real and fictional people will, but thanks to movie magic, the wife is right there with him, diminishing the sense of loss. (Ebert: "please, please, give us a break from the scenes where the ghost of the departed turns up and starts talking as if she's not dead.") Schiller, on the other hand, writes that "for the first six months, it was difficult for me to cradle Satya without tears streaming down my face, silently screaming that his mother could not hold her baby." Like many grieving people, he was overwhelmed by an outpouring of support -- but only at first." After three months, however, the support died down, and the number of people who remembered grew fewer and fewer. I felt isolated as a father among mothers, and seeing families together was so poignant. I didn't go to the mums' groups. I think mothers found me difficult to approach, so they just got on with their lives." As it turns out, widowhood isn't just a 24/7 party with no stinky girls allowed.
I haven't read Carr's memoir, but reviews suggest it, too, is far more truthful about the grief, frustration and fear that went along with his "manly" neglect of tidiness and refusal to be overprotective. In an age and culture where we routinely shame both "helicopter parents" and those trying to raise "free-range kids" -- and where mothers usually bear the brunt of that shaming, feeling pressure to do not only what they believe is right for their children but what will be perceived as right -- such a perspective from a single father can add much to the conversation. Is it really such a sin to leave the living room a mess? To let the kid play on the monkey bars even if he might fall off? And why are we so likely to give men a pass on those things, yet mothers who evince a similar laissez-faire attitude are demonized? These are important, interesting questions about parenting, gender roles, how we see ourselves and what we teach our children. But when an honest memoir about single fatherhood gets shellacked, as Schwarzbaum puts it, "with a gloss of sunshiny affirmation," what we're left with only reinforces the same old stereotype of the contemporary dad: Bighearted yet intractably doofy, and so congenitally ill-suited to adult responsibility, a stabilizing (read: buzzkilling) female influence is necessary to save his children from malnutrition and suspicious hygiene, if not death by misadventure.
Moms and dads alike, single and partnered -- not to mention their children -- deserve more than this myth that women instinctively know what they're doing with kids while men, left to their own devices, will neglect their young at all times except at playtime. In reality, the world contains terrible mothers, amazing fathers and a whole lot of people in between, just trying to do their best. As long as we keep promoting the fiction that women are naturally nurturing and capable, and men are naturally reckless and self-centered, moms won't get all the help they deserve -- and dads won't get all the credit they do. Even casting single fathers as heroes for stepping up and becoming primary caregivers when the only alternatives would be unthinkable to most, is disturbingly patronizing. Under the circumstances, says Schiller, "How could I do anything but step up and try to be an amazing parent?"
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