Slow Parenting

"Let the Kid Be." That was the headline topping Lisa Belkin's essay in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. Perhaps, the piece suggested, we've at last moved beyond "Get-them-into-Harvard-or-bust parenting," perhaps beyond, even, the bad mother confessionals that Ayelet Waldman and a host of bloggers have lately been promoting. Indeed, writes Belkin, a "second wave has taken hold—writers are moving past merely venting and trying to gather the like-minded into a new movement" that some call "slow parenting" and some "free-range parenting" and, if one were to bottom line it, might be defined simply as giving children room to be themselves, as opposed to the resume-building, fear-rattled citizens of a dog-eat-dog world.

Just five years ago, when I published Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World, there was, I will be frank, little public interest in the argument that I made within those pages—that it was time to let our children be, that it was our job as parents to open doors, not prescribe pathways, that stories and storytelling were the gifts that we parents must pass on. "I want to raise my son to pursue wisdom over winning," I wrote. "I want him to channel his passions and talents and personal politics into rivers of his choosing. I’d like to take the chance that I feel it is my right to take on contentment over credentials, imagination over conquest, the idiosyncratic point of view over the standard-issue one. I’d like to live in a world where that’s okay."

Perhaps we've entered that era now. Perhaps, with new books such as The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (Tom Hodgkinson) leading the charge, certain freedoms will be granted—less Suzuki, for example, more afternoons spent wandering along the banks of the mud-rimmed creek. At least until, as Belkin points out, the next parenting movement edges onto the horizon.

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When we Cannot be There to Cure

While warming last night's dinner for this afternoon's lunch, I began paging through the current New Yorker, stopping at a Joan Acocella story called "The Child Trap: The rise of overparenting." Among the books cited in the story is A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting, by Hara Estroff Marano, an editor at large at Psychology Today, who once asked me to write a magazine story by the same title. I ultimately declined, for while I have often worried about children being asked to do too much too soon under too much pressure, I couldn't abide by the theory that we are out here raising wimps. I know too many young people who are anything but, and I believe in the future of this country.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/11/17/081117crbo_books_acocella

I've frequently been asked about the overparenting phenomenon because I once wrote a book about the importance of giving children room to dream and to breathe. I wrote of raising my own son in this idiosyncratic household of artists. Of forging a community of young readers and writers with whom he might dream out loud. I wrote, in SEEING PAST Z: NURTURING THE IMAGINATION IN A FAST-FORWARD WORLD, of the sometimes loneliness of choosing the road mostly untaken. I worried about whether I was making the right choices, whether our son's college application—his very future—would suffer because he did not have a comparably long resume of private lessons, quantified triumphs, proof of far-above-par life ambition. Because his mother had not pushed to give him one.

Reading Acocella's review essay just now made me think again on these issues, to reassess just what might have been gained or loss. It brought to mind a conversation we'd had with our son a few days ago, when he called at night to, as he says, give us an update. "This story has a good ending," he began, as he often does, a habit he got into years ago when he realized he had a slightly anxious woman for a mother.

"Well, the thing is, I woke up at 3 AM with a really bad earache. I mean, it just was really bad," he said.

"Okay."

"So I tried to go back to sleep and I couldn't, and finally it was 6 AM, and I took a shower. But I still felt really bad, I mean, there was just so much pain, so I went off to Health Services and when I got there, I realized they were closed."

Oh Lord, I thought. Oh no. Because this is a kid who can have a fever of 104 and say simply that he's going upstairs to take a rest. A kid who refused to admit that it hurt even the tiniest bit after he got all four wisdom teeth pulled.

"So, you know, I didn't really have any options except to check myself into the emergency room," he continued.

"The emergency room? Of the hospital?" My husband and I said, choral like. Because we're talking dawn here, and an off-the-campus institution.

"Yeah. But it was okay. It's not that far from campus; I remembered seeing it one day. You know, it's a process getting checked into an emergency room. But they took care of everything, so now I'm pretty much fine, or will be."

This is a simple story, no heroics; I'm not deluded. No one has saved the world or out-thought Paulson on the economy. But when our son told us his tale, hours later, when his pain had passed, an entire wash of emotions ran over me. Relief, most of all, that he'd done the right thing and was well. Realization, absolutely, that he's on his own now, he's a man. There comes a time, and that time has come for me, when we cannot be there to cure. We can only be there to listen afterward, and to be grateful for the children with whom we've been entrusted.

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