Parent as Deity

 My sister was telling me the other night about a theory of childcare she recently came across. It holds that the ideal parent should act toward their child in much the same way as an ideal God would act toward humanity. In other words, you should love your child unconditionally, but your will should also be ironclad. You should exist above and beyond your creation; you should not long for its approval; and its pleadings and negotiations should have no power to divert you from your purpose—so long as your purpose is fundamentally just and beneficent. Which, of course, it will be; because you are God. 

Admittedly, Freud would say that the reason for this family resemblance between the parent and God is not accidental—since the latter is merely a projection onto the cosmos of our primal recollection of childhood dependence, which some of us then carry with us into adulthood. And so too, it is no coincidence that our individual conceptions of God will often mirror our experiences of our own parents—or our cultural expectations of parenting in general. If we had angry and capricious parents in our lives, we will probably conceive of God in much the same style—and the contrary is also true. 

My sister of course knows all this; but her point was that it's interesting to conceive of parenting this way nonetheless. And the more I thought about it, the more I came to agree: the Biblical story tells us a great deal about the parent-child relationship—and more specifically, about why it is so often fraught with misunderstanding on both sides. 

Take the Biblical notion of sin and disobedience. This came to mind because my sister was talking about how her son, my nephew, is going through a phase at the moment where he always wants to play as the "bad guy" in every game. This caused me no concern—the bad guys are usually the coolest characters, after all. I ask you: who would pass up being Darth Vader or Boba Fett in order to play as Luke? But it worries my sister. She fears that in her attempts to impose rules and boundaries as a parent, she ends up casting her child in the role of the family villain, and that he has internalized this role. 

And it is indeed all too easy for a parent to start to talk about their child as if they were the "bad guy" in every disciplinary situation. From the parent's perspective, after all, the child often seems to be a creature of willful disobedience and ingratitude. We, the adults, provide for all of their needs. We give them food and shelter, gratis. All we ask of them in return is that they follow a few simple rules. Yet, for our troubles we get no thanks; and the handful of minor rules—which to us seem so easy to comply with—are generally the very ones that the children want to break. Indeed, they often seem to want to break them merely because we set them. If my sister says, "Put on your PJs," my nephew will inexplicably refuse.

In each of our families, therefore, we reenact the myth of the Fall. (A metaphor—the parent as God the Farmer in the Garden of Eden—that Stephen Dobyns explores in one of the poems in his fine collection, Cemetery Nights). 

The parents think: here we provided them a perfectly lovely Garden of Eden to play in. They didn't have to work for a living, earning their bread by the sweat of their brow. Everything needful was provided to them free of charge. We just had one simple rule: don't eat of this one tree. You can take a fruit from literally any other tree in the Garden! Just not this one. And of course, that's precisely the one they choose. Is that not the experience of every parent? A child is told they can pick any book except one as a bedtime story—which do you think they will then want the most? 

But the divine metaphor also helps us gain a better understanding of the child's view of the relationship. As my sister and I thought about it, we realized that the child's perspective also makes a lot of sense. From their vantage point, they actually don't have anything to be grateful for. After all, they didn't ask to be here in the first place. Created ex nihilo, they found themselves in a Garden that they did not request in advance. It's all they've ever known. And within this Garden that was not of their choosing, they find they are suddenly subject to a bunch of arbitrary laws that they didn't select for themselves either. 

This has been a longstanding grievance of human beings against the Biblical deity as well. It seems titanically unfair, after all, that we should be burdened with a conviction of sin and disobedience when there was no voluntary contract to start with. We did not have a say in being created; we just found ourselves here. We are "stranger[s], and afraid/ In a world [we] never made," to borrow a line from A.E. Housman. And yet we find, Housman writes, that we are nevertheless subject to inexplicable "laws of God" and "laws of man" that were not of our choosing or devising. Why should we be grateful to God for putting us in such a position? 

So it is with parents. They were the ones who wanted to have kids in the first place. Likewise, it was the parents' decision to feed and clothe the child. There was no prior request on the kids' part for them to do so. Why should thanks be in order? 

I was thinking about this especially because, during this last stay with my family, it was my turn one of the nights to make dinner. I tried to go above and beyond. I, who am no cook, nonetheless offered a veritable smorgasbord of my usual ready-made options. I had Mac and Cheese au Kraft. I offered not one, but two frozen pizzas, fresh from the oven. I steamed some mixed vegetables in the bag. I even microwaved some faux-"chicken" plant-based nuggets from the grocery store. And what did I get in response? Narry a thank you. And my nephew ate about one bite of the Mac and Cheese and one bite of pizza. 

I was briefly steamed about this—as steamed as the untouched broccoli. But, as my sister and I talked about the parent-as-God problem, it occurred to me that my nephew has no obligation to thank me. He didn't ask for that dinner. He never asked even to have a meal every night at designated times. If he had his way, all food would be consumed in the form of yogurt pouches and chocolate milk sips, staggered over the course of the day, whenever one feels like it. The whole idea of a dinner that we all eat together is one that has been arbitrarily foisted upon him from the adult realm. Why should he be grateful for it? 

Here too, yet again, we are in the realm of the divine relationship. And it illustrates well the fundamental injustice of the Biblical deity. God, after all, was perfectly content on his own. He is famously self-sufficient, being everything. Nevertheless, out of his own idleness—out of sheer perversity—he decided to create humans and endow them with freedom of choice. He also implanted in these humans the will to sin, in addition to the capacity to do so. And then he was outraged that they weren't more grateful for his creation; he cursed them when they proceeded to act on the nature he had created by disobeying him; and they have been burdened ever since with the stigma of crime. 

But, humans might well ask—and many poets and thinkers have done so—how can we justly be punished for rules that we did not make, in a world we did not choose to enter? In relation to God, each of us is, after all, in much the position that A.E. Housman describes, in the line I quoted above: "I, a stranger and afraid/ In a world I never made." 

This describes the child's position vis-a-vis the parent as well. They are a new arrival, coming to a world that was not of their devising. The parent—the Creator—proceeds to impose a set of seemingly arbitrary rules, and gets mad at them for not following them—but by what right, given that the Creator/parent established the preconditions for disobedience in the first place? As the human character in a Stephen Crane poem puts it, in protesting against the supposed justice of God's wrath in response to the Fall: 

Oh, most interesting God
What folly is this?
Behold, thou hast moulded my desires
Even as thou hast moulded the apple.

So it is with children. We—the adults—made them. We made all of them; their desires, their predilections, their potentialities. We did it all knowing (or at least, we should have known, with reasonable foresight) that they would do exactly the kinds of things that are now annoying us. Why should they be grateful? They have no obligation to thank us. And we should not be surprised if they try to circumvent our rules—even if those rules appear by our lights to be eminently reasonable, and all devised in the final analysis for the child's own benefit. 

But so too, we can see why none of us as a child can escape the vague sense of sin. We all end up transgressing the rules, because we came into a world where the rules were already in place—but we did not yet know them.

No wonder, then, that we as children so often identify with the "bad guys" in stories. No wonder we want to play the villain. We feel that we are the villains against our will in this strange world we have entered. As Orwell writes, in a memoir of his school days, he often identified as a child with the figure of Lucifer—because he felt that, like the devil, he had been "defeated and justly defeated." 

So, I would tell my sister not to worry. She may have instilled in my nephew a conviction of sin. That may be part of why he always takes the part of "bad guys" in imaginative play. But that seems perfectly normal to me. Such a conviction is probably impossible to avoid if we are going to exist at all. The fall—the sense of guilt, of first disobedience, of original sin—is part of the human condition. We all experience it growing up in families and societies. We enter the world a "stranger, and afraid." We find that in this unknown and unchosen world we are subjected to what Housman calls "the foreign laws of God and man." Of course, in such a condition, we both resent these laws and find ways to transgress them. 

And thus we find we are condemned for breaking the laws, while at the same time having never really had any alternative but to break them. We are sinners by birth—sinners without having chosen the sin. Which is exactly the condition that the myth of Original Sin describes. And depending on your theological priors, that's either proof the myth is real, or—more credibly, in my view—the universality of this experience in the family, and in the course of child development, is exactly why this picture of the human fate found its way into our culture's mythology in the first place.