Fear No Influence

 Some time ago, I sent my parents a link to an article from the New York Times about childrearing styles. "Omg," I said in the subject line—or something to that effect—"this is so our family." 

The article described an emerging generational divide between Millennial parents and their own boomer or Gen X parents. Millennial parents are drawn to approaches like "gentle parenting," which emphasize acknowledging children's emotions and talking them through a tantrum in a way that shows empathy with their experience. "You're angry," the gentle parent says to the bawling child. "You're frustrated. We have to go, but you don't want to go." 

The Gen X and Boomer grandparents, meanwhile, are often standing off to the side, waiting for this to be over. It's not so much that they disapprove of gentle parenting. It's just that—it takes so long! If they had their way, the child would already be bundled into the backseat of the car by now, whether they wanted to go or not. They might cry for a time, but eventually, they would get over it, and probably fall asleep on the ride. 

This is not to say that the Gen X-ers or Boomers were harsh or unfeeling, when they had kids of their own. Much to the contrary, they were often deprecated in their day by older generations for being too lax. They were seen as mollycoddled Spock babies, who were mollycoddling their children in turn, because they didn't do things like enforce corporal punishment. 

As I once remarked to my sister and brother-in-law: the big innovation of our parents' generation was: "what if we don't hit them?" The big innovation of our generation appears to be: "What if we not only don't hit them, but also try talking to them?"

There seems to be an overall trajectory of progress here, therefore. I'm willing to accept, then, that gentle parenting is probably an improvement over what has gone before. But still, I sympathize with the grandparents. After all, there are a certain number of things—not only in childhood but also in adult life—that simply have to be suffered through, whether one wants to do them or not. And so, maybe sometimes just saying "we're going home now" and loading the kid in the car is enough. 

More fundamentally, I take issue with some of the intellectual premises of the gentle parenting model, even if I do not reject its approach. After all, the basic idea behind gentle parenting seems to be that many of our adult complexes and hangups descend from traumatic experiences in our childhood. And while that may sound overly dramatic, it's important to understand that trauma is here given a wide meaning: encompassing many day-to-day experiences that involve a loss of autonomy. 

When you force your kids to do something, then—when you bundle them into the backseat against their will—you are in some sense traumatizing them—if only a little bit at a time. So says the gentle parenting system, at any rate. And to be sure, most Millennial parents will concede to their Gen X or Boomer critics, some amount of trauma is therefore probably unavoidable. After all, you have to send your kids to school and the doctor's office, etc. And they won't always want to go.

That said, the Millennial parents retort, surely one can try to minimize the amount of trauma children endure. One can try to talk them through their objections, and encourage them to do things of their own volition, rather than immediately compromising their autonomy and decision-making ability as a first resort. And this, I certainly agree with. Watching my sister raise her kids, I've seen the approach work in practice: the results are wonderful. 

The part I continue to doubt, though, is the belief that our adult personalities are a product of our childhood traumas. I can certainly make the case that they are. I can trace my own many neuroses and insecurities to various potentially precipitating incidents in childhood. The problem with the trauma theory, therefore, is not that these hypothetical causal chains are intrinsically implausible. It is that, in constructing them, we are governed entirely by hindsight bias. 

A more useful test of the trauma theory, then, would be a longitudinal study that somehow measured the effects of the same triggering incidents on children across a statistically significant sample size, and then followed up with them in adulthood to see if they had the same neuroses in common. 

One does not know how one could even construct such a study, let alone make it ethical; yet, I have my own hunch as to what it would find, if it could somehow be run. I suspect it would show that people adapted to the same childhood incidents in very different ways. 

Anecdotally, after all, I know tons of people who had far more rough and traumatizing upbringings than I did, but who turned out to be far more normal. I am reminded, as always when I think of this, of a poem by Gottfried Benn. (I've quoted it on this topic before). He remarks that he knows people whose childhoods were spent in crowded squalor, with four siblings and their parents to a room, yet who grew up to be as "beautiful and self-possessed as duchesses." 

Benn's point is that our childhoods affect us in ways we cannot accurately predict. When trying to figure out why certain people turn out the way they do, therefore, he simply throws up his hands in surrender. "I don't know it to this day," he says, "and now must go myself." (Hofmann translation throughout.)

Doubtless, it would be putting the point too strongly to say that our traumatizing childhood experiences have no impact on the persons we become in adulthood. Benn's poem should not be read to imply so overweening a claim (it would go against the poem's whole thrust of intellectual humility). It is more to say that the influence that these events does exert is so roundabout and complicated, and governed by so many other intervening factors, that it defies our human ability to slot it into pigeon-holes. 

The problem with the "trauma as explanation" theory, then (as I've called it before), is not so much that it is wrong to attribute a causal connection between our childhood experiences and our adult personalities—but rather that the causal link that it draws is too simple and direct. It fails to take account of the power of those "individual vagaries" of human beings that, as Nabokov once put it, "damn[s] all clowns and clods" (by which he chiefly meant the Freudian school of psychoanalysis). 

If we are going to be gentle parents, then—and I think we should—it ought to be for its own sake—because it is simply better, intrinsically, to treat people as people and to try, as much as possible, to respect their wishes and autonomy, regardless of their age. We should not do it, that is to say, because we are over-cautious about "traumatizing" them, or convinced that our actions today will really yield predictable outcomes in their eventual adult personalities. 

I say this not based on any clinical studies, I admit, but on the basis of anecdotal experience. It just seems to me that people are too complicated to have their fates and personalities determined by a single set of events in early childhood. I remember something my dad always said about child-rearing: namely, that one spends a lot of time worrying about how one's decisions may be affecting one's kids, but in the end, they exert an influence over themselves that is wholly independent of all one's efforts. 

"Kids are going to be who they're going to be," my dad says. "There's very little you can do one way or the other to change it. They just start growing up, and they're already their own person." Parents, then—in his view—should approach their task with humility. They are overseeing the care and nurture of a being that will take its own course regardless of their actions. They should therefore focus on providing it safety and unconditional love; so long as these two are met, there is little else that makes a difference. 

Reading Emerson's collection of lectures, Representative Men, one finds essentially the same insight, from all the way back in the nineteenth century: 

"Nature wishes every thing to remain itself;" he writes, in the introductory lecture: "Each is self-defended. Nothing is more marked than the power by which individuals are guarded from individuals, in a world where [....] children seem so much at the mercy of their foolish parents[.] We rightly speak of the guardian angels of children. How superior in their security from infusions of evil persons, from vulgarity and second thought! They shed their own abundant beauty on the objects they behold. Therefore, they are not at the mercy of such poor educators as we adults. If we huff and chide them, they soon come not to mind it, and get a self-reliance; and if we indulge them to folly, they learn the limitation elsewhere."

Therefore, Emerson concludes, "We need not fear excessive influence." What we do or do not do with respect to our children makes little ultimate difference to the people they become, because they are shielded by nature from our influence—just as my dad concluded from his years of parenting. We are generally so worried about how we might influence kids that we scarcely heed—nor do we wish to heed—the humbling truth: we may not influence them at all. 

And so, I agree with Emerson: we need fear no influence. We need have no "anxiety of influence," to borrow Harold Bloom's phrase—at least not where childrearing is concerned. Let it be emblazoned, then, over the doorframe of every Millennial parent's home—let us chant it to ourselves as an ever-relevant counsel: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of trauma, I shall fear no influence. For every person, even one's own child, will ultimately create themselves.