I've come to a very heart-felt but, my inner critic tells me, close to indefensible thought. A thought that, in my mind, right now, almost takes the place of an axiom, i.e., a statement whose truth is taken for granted, not questioned or analyzed. Here it is:
Children Do Not Owe Anything To Their Parents And Teachers And Mentors
I've been moving this around in my heart for a while now. Perhaps it started when I witnessed a brief conversation between my youngest son and his second grade teacher. She was reviewing his weekly homework and then told him "you owe me two daily math sheets." He was quiet. I was quiet--inside I was furious. Yes, furious, it happened that quickly.
"He owes you nothing," I wanted to say.
"Do you believe," I wanted to say, "do you believe he will actually learn to understand that his work is for him, if you tell him that he actually owes it to you?"
"And besides," I wanted to say, "besides, what really is his daily math sheet to you?"
"Do you realize," I wanted to say, "that, with one sentence, you have turned learning and schooling into a banking transaction?"
"And if it is a banking transaction," I wanted to say, "did you make sure he knew that by accepting the math sheet from you, he had entered into an investment/credit agreement with you?"
"And if so," I wanted to say, "could he have refused to enter said agreement simply by saying 'I'd rather now owe you something, Mrs. X?"
So, perhaps it started there. But as is the case with so many things, it likely started a lot earlier. First exchanges with money come to mind. And, maybe even more strongly, a sense of responsibility for my younger sister. I felt I owed my parents responsibility as a principal way of approaching the world. This was a responsibility for her and, of course, for myself.
It is difficult for me not to see such statements of "owing"--whether they come in a teaching, parenting, or mentoring context, as a person's narcissistic strategies to be reassured that they are doing a good job as parents, teachers, mentors. And even, if his teacher had said: "Gabe, it makes me sad when you don't turn in your homework, because it makes me worry about you." I would have balked. Because, whether we parents, educators, mentors use anger or sadness to make this point, we are still being narcissistic. We're still diverting the child's/student's growing sense of responsibility for himself to be a responsibility towards us.
The narcissistic responsibility we put on our children to make and keep us, their parents, happy is immense. As parents our sense of pride, self-confidence, accomplishments, etc. all depends on how our children perform. As a culture we're quick to blame parents for their children's lack-luster approach to school, criminal engagement, drug involvement and much more.
I wonder how to place this phenomenon historically. Have my parents simply copied their parents' ways of parenting? In other words, has parenting always been about the parents' happiness with their children's performance? I wonder, if this was much more a class issue, i.e., middle-class families worried about status among many things and how their children would live up to that status.
I do not know the answer to these questions and do not want to speculate about them either. One thing I can say with relative certainty is that families often seem to struggle with their children's independence and wish to move into the world. This struggle is often accompanied by a great deal of shame and shaming on both sides.
The story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden comes to mind here. So, they ate from the tree. And they are ashamed, not just of their mutual nakedness, but also before God. It is worth saying, though, that God does not shame them. There is no statement that suggests God may have said "Shame on you, Adam and Eve, you owed it to me not to eat of the tree." The only thing that happens is there are consequences. I like to imagine a God who is not mad or sad, but can say without much superfluous emotion "I see, you two, you made your choice." Was God secretly waiting for a choice, not the right choice, simply a choice?
And, by the way, we also don't owe God anything. That we would owe God anything, though reinforced by theologians throughout the last twenty centuries, is faulty logic. If god is creator of the world and everything in it, including us, then it may be possible for that creation to sing God's praises, but such praise most certainly is not something creation owes to God. And if God created us such that we would feel we owe something to God...well, then, I'd be done with God anyway.
And, God was proud of God's work! "It was good!" Does that mean it was no longer good when Adam and Eve began to make their own decisions? Does it mean that creation was only good as long as Adam and Eve were clinging to God rather than going into the world independently?
Parents often talk about being "proud of their children" as a goal of their parenting efforts. The trouble with this is that parents tend to have quite limited ideas of what their children should do and how they should go about doing it to make them proud.
Such limitations are inevitable. But against them comes the powerful developmental push from our children: "Let me be!" The bible suggests a truly important concept which we might want to implement when it comes to the ideas we have about who our children are:
When Moses asked God to tell him God's name. God said "I am who I am." There are many ways to interpret this. One of them may be "Buzz off, Moses!" Another may be the claiming of God's radical uniqueness. What would parenting be like, if we, the parents, would heed those two things more often and more kindly
Our children are not only a surplus of ancient genetic material (meaning what genes come to fruition is a crab-shoot) they're also constantly bathed in a surplus of ideas and influences to which we, the parents, are only marginally exposed (and even if we were, we wouldn't absorb them anyway).
My hope is that our children will be proud of themselves, not that we will be proud of them. My hope for us is that we will always find ways to tap into our capacity to respect our children.
Marx and Engels pointed out something that
When I was 16 I very much wanted to go to the US for a year. My parents said no. And to this day I remember the reason: this is the time when we can "enjoy the product of our labor." "The product" that was me. Their "labor" that was parenting. It made all the sense in the world to me at the time. Now, it's quite hard for me to sympathize with it. It feels almost equivalent to the idea that the eldest son must stay and continue the family farm.
That, of course, is the choice made by one of the two brothers in the story of the Prodigal Son. He stays. While his younger brother leaves.
The story is one of my favorites. Can parenting work in this way? I ask myself. Can we let go of our children because we recognize their freedom. Can we say "of course" to their wish to leave, because we value independence? And can we celebrate their return after the first defeats without glee and a moralizing "should have stayed home?" The parent's unconditional love in that story is overwhelming (which is, of course, why we believe the parent is God and not a human being).
But what if parenting could take its cues from that story?
I often finish my retelling of this story by adding a few lines:
And after a month of staying on the farm, of spending some lovely times in conversation with his father and brother, the son said: I must leave again. And the father says: of course, you must. You have my blessing."
Because, son, you don't owe me anything! You must be prodigal in order to become prodigious!
In this also lies the story of human growth. In nature humans are the only beings who are actuallly growing, from one generation to the next. Other beings, animals and plants, are cloning themselves, but they really are not growing. Yes, there are mutations, there is evolution, there is change on a horizontal level. But there is no growth compared to how human beings have grown over the last 2000-5000 years.
Attachment and separation between parents and children is key to this growth. Such growth can take place only, if children can detach enough. And yet, without proper attachment such separation/detachment could never happen in a way that really sustains growth. Father and son, in the story of the prodigal son are well-attached I would argue. He can leave the farm the way he does, because he trusts his father not to balk. And there is no curfew, no demand made to come home after a certain time. There is simply trust that, either way, the son will grow, will learn, will find himself in and through his independence.
1 comment:
Thank you for this post, Martin -- I wholeheartedly agree. Another way of putting this is that parenting should be 'unconditional' -- love (and countless other things) provided without any expectations in return. Not even expecting *love* in return, I think. Which many parents would find horrific.
Of course, this is with the understanding that children are built to love anyway, and will love their parents (even when their parents abuse or otherwise maltreat them, as we know).
But I think it must be our approach.
I do think that the relationship of parent and child is sui generis in this way -- and hence that other relationships, like teacher and child, do not have the same requirement of unconditionalness. Not to say I don't agree about the very interesting observations about the financial language of 'owing'... and, in fact, I do think it should be a goal of teachers to *emulate*, as closely as possible, the unconditionalness of the parent-child relationship. (Hard to do when contemporary society is founded on constant comparison, competition, evaluation -- beginning with grading! But it's a long discussion.)
Of course, I don't have children! Easy for me to say. And I think asking such things of parents -- such as not to hold the prodigal son back when he's 16 because they will MISS him too much -- is nearly impossible. And yet necessary, so we should be working as much as possible toward a society where parents feel comfortable with unconditional behavior (where they are *supported*, for instance). Especially when most of us were raised in deeply *conditional* environments, this can be particularly hard to fulfill -- what we learned as children is stored in our bodies, so to combat that is to combat everything in us...
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