Parenting and l’morte d’Author, part I
Cheryl thought it first, apparently. Violet’s gotten into this habit of sleeping one day and being awake the next. It seems like a pretty nice life, to be honest.
I’ve been reading a lot of online parenting articles and blogs lately–well, a lot for me, at least–and it really seems like there are two competing, self-reinforcing, and (it seems to me) incredibly counterproductive tones. Articles are either:
- full of panic, uncertainty, regret, self-flagellation and questioning as to whether they can parent at all, let alone well
- defensively authoritative, occasionally accusatory, forthright mandates on how to raise your children
These are both broad generalizations, so I run the risk of just having conjured this out of thin air–this objection and criticism of my hypothesis is totally valid. If I’m wrong, please convince me that that’s the case. The fact is that these occur to a greater or lesser degree, from the most shrill to the most tender, but I think there is something fundamental at the root of it.
Evidence of this phenomenon:
Can a Lack of Sleep Set Back Your Child's Cognitive Abilities? -- New York Magazine
Bossy McBossypants (I love Catherine Newman's writing, by the way.)
Are Kids Getting Too Much Praise?
Will your Preschooler Need a Tutor? (Seriously.)
It drives me nuts. Before I go on, I should probably establish something. While I think hyperanxious parenting is wrong-headed, neither do I subscribe to the idea that parenting just comes naturally and parents should just chill out and do what occurs to them. Lots of people are stupid or inexperienced or even downright malicious.
Somewhere, though, around the Vietnam era, I think, we lost our collective sense of authority. My guess is that we actually realized how incredibly terrible authority can be in and of itself, when it is incorrect. I am considering the possibility that there was a systematic loss of faith in authority on a social scale.
This is really hard stuff to talk about and think about, by design, almost. It’s complicated and abstract and I think, ultimately, amounts to what feels like and what we may as well consider a fundamental spiritual shift. Religion was way into authority and when the world was religious in a big and serious way, which is to say, when the people who wrote things that got read by others, when the idea-makers were religious, authority was truly a big and serious deal. Feudal lords told their serfs what to do. Parents told their children what to do. Authority stemmed from on high, followed the chain of command all the way down into the right hand of the father and the switch there held was held to be, truly, an instrument of God.
Science takes authority out of the hands of individuals and puts it in the hands of Nature–from the point of view of scientists. It is great and fantastic for this reason. It makes progress more rapid because ideas are pitted against each other and they fight and may win or lose, but ultimately (by which I actually mean “in the limit”) there is no individual who is an authority. It is here where we learned to defer to the wisdom of numbers, and authority over any individual child became more diffuse.
There are, suddenly, if not “right” and “wrong” ways to handle your kids, there are better and worse ways. Malnutrition exists and can be prevented. Your kids should be vaccinated and a hug every now and again decreases the likelihood that they’ll go shoot somebody later–maybe not to zero, but still, we as a society would appreciate it if occasionally, in addition to spanking your kid, you let them know you love them.
One of the difficult aspects of science stems from the fact that human society is necessarily atomistic. While authority in the divine sense may not exist, expertise certainly does. If you want to have your appendix removed or know the difference between a charm and a strange quark or solve a third-order differential equation, you can’t just ask anybody. Well, the beauty of it is that you actually can, and, given enough time, a lot of people will be able to develop the expertise to tell you the answer or provide the service. Which is to say that simply because you do not have expertise does not mean you can’t get it.
Still. It’s pretty costly to get it. You have to observe the same stuff for a long time in order to really get it as well as somebody else gets it. Some people may never get it. And there’s a big fat undecidable proposition required for the whole endeavor: positivism. It’s undecidable because it can never be clear whether anything is true or causal or whether it just looks that way.
The two of these combined, philosophically, I think. Suddenly in the middle of the century, like say post-WWII, there’s a new “priesthood” — very deeply involved in the actual war, like the killing of a lot of people — made of scientists. While these scientists may not claim to be authorities over things they know nothing about, they do claim to have models that describe the world well, which translates poorly into English as knowing the “truth.” There’s a big hole when you try to claim that it’s the “Truth,” which is that one of the founding assumptions is the assumption that the “Truth” is knowable: positivism.
It turns out, for real, that it doesn’t “matter” whether the truth is knowable, if all you want to do is make a really good guess at what will be the consequences when you perform/observe a certain action.
I attribute the most recent part of this to literary critics. Post-structuralism pulled off a hell of a feat of equivocation by hijacking the fact that light travels at the same subjective speed but that time passes at different subjective rates depending on your frame of reference. They used that intuition to stake a claim that the fact that the Universe behaves in a way described by the General Theory of Relativity implies, in some fuzzy way, that the Universe is, generally, relative.
Maybe it seems like none of this stuff is relevant to your parenting or my parenting. I contend that that is not the case. When Barthes declared “The Death of the Author,” how could that not have had an effect on parenting?
It had a heck of an effect on individuals’ senses of identity.
It had a heck of an effect on characters in our stories.
Authority was revealed as a hoax, and with the Vietnam War, it was revealed as a dangerous, irresponsible, and morally bankrupt hoax. American culture was well-suited to accept this belief, I think, being composed primarily of the progeny and products of incorrigible contrarians. So a dash of French philosophy, some depressed post-war writers like Hemingway, Faulkner, and later Saul Bellow, and even later, Don Delillo…
Out of time. It’s Halloween! More on this later.
This is just fantastic. Totally unrelated, but fantastic.
This post is fabulous. Oh, different cultures. If you’re feeling awkward explaining condoms to your kids (ok, maybe college age kids), just send them this link for an incredibly entertaining experience. This must be new; if it isn’t, it should have been part of Slate’s YouTube Sex Ed special (featuring the brilliant (and fetching) Supreme Court scholar, interested parent, and Slate.com contributor Emily Bazelon).
uif dvufoftt jt sjejdvmpvt (the cuteness is ridiculous)
I kid you not, child of mine. You are verging on the region of negative marginal benefit with respect to your cuteness.
I say this because this past week was incredibly unproductive. …which is not to say that things aren’t going well. They’re going fantastically. Still, at some point, I will eventually have to stop staring at you and accomplish something.
(Violet’s started cooing. For minutes and minutes and minutes at a time. Literally cooing, like as in “…gurgle gurgle coo… ga coooo…heh coooooo…”
It is unbelievably cute. Heart-rendingly so.)
So from this, I imagine you get the basic idea: such literally incredible cuteness, in that I wouldn’t have believed it, cannot believe it, that the parents actually cannot stop paying attention to the child long enough to hunt/gather and hence begin to wither away, taking along with them all sources of sustenance for the ever-more-ravenous child. It’s a cuteness death spiral, kid, and I’d advise you to be more annoying more often if you want to make it to adolescence, let alone to college. If increasing hunger makes you less cute, it may be our only chance.
We had a good weekend, though, kid. Red got to meet you and you, her. It was the first time it really felt like fall. Mom’s wearing her traditional seven layers of clothing to counteract the effect of our shoddily-constructed and poorly insulated (aka affordable) house. We went to a corn maze with quite a posse, all dressed up in flannel, and somewhere around midday, the sun reminded us that this is At-effing-lanta and so we ended up in short-sleeves with sunglasses. The next day your Mom and I and you and Red went for a walk in the woods with the dog. It was beautiful. We took lots of pictures. More of those later, I suppose.
Oh, and one time when you pooped, it was a lot, so I said that if pooping were a competitive sport, you would’ve won the “Pooper Bowl.” It was just as funny then as it is now. I love being a dad.
I’m reading Cryptonomicon and it’s a pretty spectacularly great book. I’m reading parts of it aloud to you, mostly when you’re upset, which is totally okay, despite the fact that the language is a little objectionable (if you object to certain language), I am not repeating my parents’ parenting failures by reading you Stephen King novels. It’s just a nice little — well, not little — book about codes and code-breaking and information and WWII and, tangentially, heroin-addiction and neuroses and social fluency and holocausts.
There’s an idea that has just been presented, about three kinds of people. Roughly, those who think talking is the opposite of doing something, those who think talking counts as doing something, and those who talk with the hopes that they’ll figure something out about the way things are or how things work or, as Bobby Shaftoe puts it, “what the fuck is going on.” Shaftoe notes that these kind of people usually try to engage other people, and hope they’ll join in.
It’s fun. It’s one of the wonderful parts — maybe the most wonderful part — of being a grad student. It runs in your family and extended family and I think you’ll enjoy it, too. If not, your upbringing is probably going to be pretty frustrating.
There are lots of examples – what will be the effect of new downtown dormitories for Georgia State University on the average rent in the area? More on everything later, though, eh?
For now, I’ll keep demonstrating how to make particular noises and practicing the alphabet and numbers with you. If it gets annoying, coo twice to let me know. If you don’t understand what I’m saying, coo three times. If you’re afraid we’re being overheard, we’ll have to work out a simple code. Instead of “coo” say “ba,” instead of “ba,” say “ga,” and instead of “ga,” say “coo.” That should fool ‘em.
kid, i am tired…
and your mother, fuhgeddaboutit. Some nights, the bear eats you.
Not much you can do about it.
I’m salvaging a never-posted post from before the summer:
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You’re kicking around in there now and I’m going to DC in less than a month. It’s going to be a long summer away from you and your mom, but it’s all good news–it means I’ll get to be back for the rest of everything, and that we’ll get to live wherever we want someday, I hope.
There’s been a lot of sad stuff going on in the broader world. In the news today, there’s the Virginia Tech shooting, continuing bad news from Iraq, problems in the Department of Justice, the French seem to be drifting creepily rightward. Nonetheless, life is good, on the whole, and especially for us, so let us mourn for others and rejoice and be grateful for ourselves, shall we?
I’m not sure what all I’ve told you so far–it’s hard to remember, exactly, and I’m too lazy to go back and read. You should have faith in people. Kurt Vonnegut died last week, and I keep coming back to that in my head. You’ll probably read all his books, I’m guessing, considering the fact that we have them around. His essays are really my favorite parts. He put little faith in people in the aggregate and a lot of faith in people individually. Probably wise, although, I think he gives us as a whole too little credit.
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Sorry, wandered off there to format data, which is probably good.
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I was thinking about my dad yesterday–his hands used to seem so …fatherly, I guess.
The Mets have the best record in baseball 14 games into the season. I just found pretty robust results that indicate that a 1% increase in the number of skilled immigrants to an area leads to a 2.5% increase in population in that area,
while a similar increase in the number of family preference immigrants leads to a 1.7% increase, both at 5 years out. At zero years out, they both are correlated with a 1.9% increase in population.
It’s exciting. Life is exciting. I hope you feel the same way.
People are kind, generally, and life is exciting. There’s so much to learn. You get to hear Cat Stevens for the first time, and that’s amazing. The same thing with The Promise Ring. You’re going to know the words to Dismemberment Plan songs without trying, the same way I did with James Taylor. You’re going to get to form an opinion about political parties and abstract expressionism. You’re going to go to your first baseball game and learn how to draw and memorize all the lines to your favorite movie.
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That’s all I wrote then, incidentally. It was a sad year, in a lot of ways. Not for us–these are high times in the Treacy-Lenda/Delaney family. Still, the roaring 90s are gone and the 00s, into which you were born, will probably be remembered as a pretty rough decade.
Grammie and Grampie — my Grammie and Grampie, my maternal grandparents, your paternal (patrimaternal? matripaternal?) great-grandparents got to meet you this weekend. We don’t see eye-to-eye on political matters, but we always have fun when we hang out. I think it’s a matter of consumer sovereignty. Grampie seems to maintain the seemingly inconsistent beliefs that people are capable of making good decisions, yet persist in regularly making bad ones. I generally think the reason they make bad decisions is that they’re just intrinsically bad at making decisions. There’s probably more to it than that, but it’s striking sometimes how so subtle a difference plays itself out in political, moral, and ethical views.
It should be a good week. We have rain! Probably not enough to make a dent in what’s apparently a drought of biblical proportions. Nonetheless, I’ll remember this week as The Week we Got Rain. Let’s hope it lasts.
Your mom and I have already started shifting things to accommodate your presence. We’re eating more consciously, sleeping less, paying less attention to the pets, sitting around a lot more, paying more attention to laundry. I splurged for organic milk yesterday. There’s no debt just yet–mortgage and car loan aside–but I have a feeling my grad student stipend won’t cover everything for the next few years. Frugal or not, it’s hard to compromise on stuff for you, kid. Hopefully, lifetime income means we won’t have to.
I heard today that the War in Iraq has cost more than any other war except WWII. That’s a heck of a cost to incur with no perceivable benefit. I wish everyone still hated war. That doesn’t feel like a political view. It feels like hating famine or plague. Who the hell wouldn’t hate war?
It’s been a rough decade: hurricanes, droughts, drugs in baseball, 9/11, the War in Iraq, Virginia Tech, the Bush presidency and Guantanamo Bay, xenophobia, boy bands, rising income inequality. Scientology. The War on Drugs rolls on. There are reasons to hope: the first woman president, maybe, and gay marriage isn’t proving to be a very big deal after all.
I’m feeling stronger about it all. I don’t just want the world to be better, I want it to be better for you, and better to you. I want people to signal before changing lanes and not to tailgate because I’VE GOT A F**KING BABY IN THE CAR. A ball of potential, a life actually worth living. I want you to have to work for it, but having worked for it, I want you to be able to get it. I have faith that you will, and that ten, twenty years from now, the world will be on the upswing, or at least your part of it will be.
Sexism was offensive before, and now it’s personal. Trust me kid; I’ve just met you and already I know: anything they can do, you can do better.
In which Violet arrives.
Okay, wow. A whole summer, an endless expanse away fro
m home and not one single blog entry. And thus six months just disappear into the void.
You’re six weeks old and you can hold your head up and kick yr legs, but that about covers it. The whole world must seem like some surreal daydream. When you sleep, are you able to move at will and walk, to understand the things we say, or is it all as incomprehensible as it is in waking?
David Foster Wallace (DFW here and in the future) somewhere wrote something about solipsism and infancy, and I guess it must kind of feel that way, like one weird psychedelic experience, where you’re just too wacked out to understand what the hell is going on, or even to move or react very much to anything anyone does. And since the model of other you build in your brain is probably constrained by the model of self, my guess is that it doesn’t even occur to you that the random babbling we’re doing has any more informational content than your own coos and wails.
Maybe it’s like when I try to play guitar, and I kind of can, and then I hear other people play guitar, who really can, and then I can kind of appreciate it as a more refined and intentional version of what I’m trying to do. Am I close? You’ll never tell.
Still, it’s a crazy thing to try to imagine. This morning when you woke up, you were thrashing and fussing and I couldn’t help wondering–was it monsters? A dream in which one of us was ignoring you crying? Or were you trying to eat and failing in your dream? What does internal monologue say, and how? Is that why no one remembers infancy? No words to anchor it? Does that mean that all animals without speech live somewhat like goldfish, with vague sensations and a sense of uncategorizable previous experience?
I hope you have better eyesight than I do. I can’t wait until you ask a lot of annoying questions so I can humor every last one of them. Wondering is worthwhile.
Your birth was a heck of a thing. I was there and it went swimmingly and you were awesome and your mom was a force of nature, resilient and resolute. You should probably pay attention to her — there are few better role models that I’ve ever had the honor to know.
And I’m sure this’ll come up a lot, because it has already, but you are one lucky kid. The neverending flow of visitors and gifts and well-wishes is a testament to the fact that you are well-loved. Considering that all you can even do so far is eat and poop and belch and smile and cry loudly, it’s probably unconditional love.
The house is a mess. Sorry about that. We’ll clean it up before you’re mobile I promise.
There’s an ironic process going on, as well, or maybe an economic process. Your incredible cuteness has made the opportunity cost of doing other than stare at you rise drastically. I find myself having to tear myself away to work on the old Ph.D. Which is not to say that there’s any risk involved, so far. I’ve built up a pretty nice nest egg of econ cred, and my schedule got a lot more flexible now that coursework is almost done. Nonetheless — it’s in your best interests in a big way if I find myself employable come 2.5 years down the line. For which purpose I’ll need to start, and subsequently finish, this dissertation thingie. To which end I’ll need to tear myself away and simply work.
It’s not like 60-hour weeks were in the question to begin with, but with your arrival, they are firmly out of it. Hell, a 40-hour week leaves what, 24*7=140+28=168-40=128-(8*7)=128-56=72 hours to spend at home. If you count getting ready for work and transit time, that takes out another 1.5 hr/day, which brings us down to 65. Okay, that’s still 9+ hours a day in your presence, but still. Not enough, right? Glad you agree with me. Besides, it’s more like 32 hours on the weekend, and that only leaves like 6.6 hrs/day during the week. That’s practically no time at all.
The dissertation will get done. I’ll do my best to teach you how to live a subgame perfect life. It’s not an uncomplicated endeavor. A lot of people have a lot of love, a lot of good intentions, and a lot of different and contradictory advice on how to go about the whole shebang. With certainty, I am wrong about an infinite number of things. Nonetheless, there’s stuff I’ve figured out that you should probably know, and ways to figure out which ways you prefer to live and which advice to take.
In the meantime, I want you to know that life is awesome. It’s a good prior to have. If it doesn’t seem like life is awesome, there’s usually another explanation. “Sometimes people suck” is a popular one. The solution there is to be understanding and forgiving and simply to try to be good.
