Riffing off my review of Eberstadt’s book, Tim Burke wrote an excellent essay last week on modernity, change, and our children.
(I hope I’m not doing violence to his thought by boiling it down, but here goes.)
Burke writes that much of the despair about children’s experiences today is just really part of our own adult confusion about modernity and fear of change. Eberstadt and other conservatives are responding to our desire to hold on to the past. To make the future like the past is an impossibility, he writies. It takes “extraordinary resources and will to deliberately change the forward drift of social change.”
Most of the time, we should just accept that what we were is not what we are or will be. That humans are resilient, and children most of all. Our children will be ok in day care, or at home, just as we were ok with the range of things done for us and to us when we were children…
So much of this angst, from Eberstadt or many other commentators, is about the most confusing and difficult fact of human life: our children will not be us. Modern middle-class Americans are more confused than most about this fact. We hope our children will be better than us. We hope that they will be us. We fear that they will be worse than us. But we are not prepared to relax and deal with the truth: that most of the time they will be nothing more or less than different. That children are both alienation from as well as connection to the present, and that this is neither good nor bad. It simply is.
I’m not sure why but Burke’s essay depressed me terribly. Maybe it’s because I’m going to turn forty next year. It could be because I recently discovered that I don’t understand Sponge Bob whom my kids adore. It could be because there’s a fatalism about his post, which undermines liberals, as well as conservatives.
I agree with Burke that there is no way to turn back the clock. Conservative efforts to force women back to the home, to cut out daycare, to push abstinence-only sex education, and to stamp out rap music seem misguided to me. As Tim said, a return to the fabled days of old would cost too much to engineer and would interfere with other progress that has been made.
However, I do think that the present is far from perfect. I do think that conservative criticism of the present can be useful to liberals. They do sometimes get things right. There may be some real problems with our kid’s education and upbringing. The lack of free time exercising and the excessive use of Ritalin is not something to shrug our shoulders over.
As a liberal, I think that we can make our lives better, not by turning back the clock and not by acquiescing to the whims of fate, but by thinking up something totally different for the future.
Apt. 11d 
Oh, I think the present is also far from perfect. But when I advocate significant reforms or transformations of the present, I just want to be clear about the precise things I’m trying to deal with, and I’d rather do that in terms of foundational moral or ethical arguments than badly constituted social-scientistic ones. I would also like to be clear that at least some of the things that we want to see happen around family life we want for ourselves (which delivers benefits to our children through us) rather than because we think our children need to be something other than what they are.
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Yes, that’s the way I read you too, Timothy, and I approve (more work for philosophers, after all — what you are advocating is what I spend my professional life doing). But I also shared Laura’s reaction to something in the essay — some sort of fatalistic, or relativistic, tenor to it.
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Call it optimistic fatalism, I guess. I think that children in specific and humans in general are resilient, and that the things which justify us clanging the alarm bells of social policy are far fewer than social critics on the right or left would have us believe. I’m really finding that there’s a reading of Edmund Burke that I think is increasingly appealing to me, and not for the name; that reading aligns with some of the thinking I’ve done recently about complexity, networks and the idea of “emergence”. Basically, I’ve developed a strong skepticism about whether it is possible in many cases to produce programmatically desirable outcomes in social policy that coincide with the intentions of the policy-maker. Much of the time I suspect that energy and resources thrown at complex social issues produce *some* change, but rarely the change which is anticipated or desired. Equally not the opposite, a change which is feared or hated. Often instead just…something different.
Now this presumes that we go into making policy with clear intentions and clear agreement on the moral or ethical foundation of our intentions, which neither Eberstadt nor most of the critics of current family, domesticity or childhood arrangements strike me as having. But even when we’re clear on our collective intent and clear on the moral conception of our actions, I think that there is a constrained set of social problems which are simple enough to respond predictably and productively to policy instruments.
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This line of thinking might be very good for philosophers, like Harry. Not so good for the social scientists.
Yeah, of course, social policy does not yield the expected results. I’m sure that forcing women back into the home would have little effect on childhood obesity. Angry mothers might let their kids watch more TV making them even fatter. Angry mother would turn to booze and pills to find relief. Eberhardt’s solution clearly won’t work and would lead to whole host of other problems.
But that doesn’t mean that we should give up on the project. Being fat isn’t good for kids. (Neither is poverty, abuse, malnutrition) I think we can all agree on that. It’s a worthwhile project to figure out how to change that in the smartest possible way. Probably one solution alone won’t help. It’s the layering of reforms that can make a difference.
The voting rights act of 1964 + troops + a president committed to the issue sure made a difference in A-A voting in the South.
I’m not sure why it is so wrong to make social policies solely based on the interests of kids. That have no benefit for adults. Individually, my husband and I have many decisions, both large and small, that have no benefit for us, but large ones for the kids. In fact, in some cases, those decisions have had a detrimental effect on our happiness. ex. We took the kids to a Wiggles concert.
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I stay home in part because I want to make a difference in how my kids grow intellectually and emotionally. I want to impart my own (liberal) values to them. Maybe I could do that if they were in daycare and I worked, but I’m not sure there are enough hours in the day . . . .
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Many things are not good for kids. I don’t think it’s just an abstract theoretical question to ask how we know which of the things which are not good for kids (or people) require a solution, and of those, which might actually respond to a solution.
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Is there a statement more tautological (or is it oxymoronic?) than “Tim Burke wrote an excellent essay”?
Is there a statement more horrifying than “we took the kids to a Wiggles concert”?
For what it’s worth, I didn’t find Tim’s essay depressing. What I’ve found depressing – or, perhaps more accurately, oppressive – over the last two years of child-raising is the notion of perfectibility that I see in too many books and essays. The idea that if you do X, then your child will turn out perfectly… with the none too implicit threat that if you don’t, you have failed. What Tim’s perspective suggests is that if you approach the parenting job with love, good sense, and patience, kids will probably do all right, even if you don’t follow the seven steps to childly perfection.
Of course, I’m the guy who couldn’t finish watching Finding Nemo because I over-identified with the over-protective father, so another possibility here is that I’m just a big old hypocrite….!
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Abu — yes, Tim’s essays are alway good, aren’t they? Congratulations to both of you, BTW. I saw lots of nominations for your blogs for a Kaufax award.
And yes, those perfect parenting books are just awful. I stopped reading them ages ago. I’m no poster child for perfect parenting. Didn’t breast feed for a year. I read the New Yorker instead of playing educational games with the kids. They watch TV. I’m sure my kids will be quite fine without 100% of my full attention.
In the recent post, I was just questioning the opposite message that we get. That ignoring them will have no effect. In fact, it will make them stronger and more independent.
It’s all about balance and common sense. Unfortunately, there only seems to be the extreme messages out there right now.
As a society, it might be too difficult to find a solution. As, Tim points out, creating good policies in these matters may be impossible. It’s just up to us, as individuals, to do the right thing.
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