Your children are not you

I was talking with Debbie a couple of weeks ago, and she was telling me with sorrow about how things are going in their house. (You remember that she lives with her daughter Mattie, with Mattie's husband R., and with their two little boys—Debbie's grandsons.) There have been other conflicts before, but many of the longest-lasting frictions seems to be related to the ways that Mattie and R. raise their children. Of course Debbie says that she understands it's none of her business and she has to back away. But it all makes her very sad.

Mattie and R. appear to be very demanding parents. But I'm sure they would never believe themselves to be cruel. They are good liberals in many of the most stereotypical ways, so I'm sure they think that parental cruelty is Something Bad that Other People do. I'm sure they just think that they just have high standards.

Fine, but are they cruel, in reality? I haven't observed enough to be sure. But you can ask other questions that help delineate that space. For example: ….

Are they dogmatic? Absolutely. 

Inflexible? No question. 

Tyrannical? We only use that word for people who are inflexible about Bad Things; as long as they are Our Sort of people, we prefer to call them "reliable" or "committed." Or to put it another way, I'm sure Debbie would go to great lengths to deny that Mattie and R. are actually tyrannical. It would be easy for me to say it, because they're not my family. What's odd is that I don't get the idea that this tyranny is intentional for them. It feels to me more like they just honestly can't imagine that there is any other way to do things than the way they are doing them.

And this brings me to my title. I think parents are often guided (in their parenting) by introspection. How would I feel if my parent did that to/for me? But this is a poor metric to use, because your children are not you!

So for example, their older boy is six, and goes to school. (I forget if he is in kindergarten or first grade.) When he comes home, he has to spend a certain amount of time online learning a foreign language. This is the language that his grandfather (Debbie's ex-husband) grew up speaking, before he came to America: Mattie speaks it, and Debbie speaks a little. The boy is told that this is "his choice," but Debbie describes his behavior to me and it is obvious that he hates doing it. But he does it anyway because he realizes that the "choice" is fictitious. He has as much "choice" as the subjects of a dictatorship have when it's time to re-elect Dear Leader.

If the boys get giddy at the table, they are counted. ("One … two … three" with consequences if the counting gets to "three.") But giddy seems to include laughing and being silly.

Coincidentally (or maybe not?) this same boy—again, aged six—still doesn't sleep dry through the night. Invariably he wets the bed, sometime during the night. The last time I visited them (a visit in October that I mention briefly here) we talked about this over dinner one night. Mattie explained that they were waiting patiently until her son's brain starts telling his kidneys to make less urine at night. I talked about how Wife and I had handled that issue with Son 1 and Son 2—not that we did anything brilliant, but at least it was a different approach. But Mattie and R. weren't interested. They seemed content to wait. 

So, why do Mattie and R. raise their children like this? I think they are operating on the basis of introspection. And I think it is leading them astray.

For example, I'm certain that Mattie was eager to learn her father's native language, because she loved her father and because she just wanted to. So it may be hard for her to imagine that her own son finds it painful drudgery. (That it is presented to him as a "choice" in support of which they have to carry him into the room with the computer terminal is just icing on the cake.) Mattie was probably one of these prim and restrained little girls that never got giddy or rambunctious at the table. (And I could believe that of her husband R., as well, to judge by his self-control as an adult.) And maybe she never had any trouble learning to sleep dry through the night, and therefore assumes blandly that "it's just a matter of time."

But your children are not you.

To be a responsible parent, yes, it helps to remember what it was like to be a kid, but that's not nearly enough. You have to understand imaginatively what it is like to be your kid! And that means understanding someone who isn't you. Remembering what things worked or didn't work for you is absolutely necessary. But it is nowhere close to sufficient.

For other examples, see my posts about my own Father, for example here or (more directly) here.

For still other examples, see any of the posts about how badly Wife's mothering misfired. (Sorry I don't have links right now. Those were a long time ago, and it feels like there were a lot of them. Though it's possible that I didn't write them all down. OK, here's one.)

Back when my own boys were little, I often sighed ruefully that I hoped Fatherhood was going to be graded PASS-FAIL rather than with a letter grade, because there was no way I would ever score higher than a C-minus. But once in a great while, I get the sense that C-minus isn't that bad a grade, all things considered.