Well, since I am on about faith, love, devotion, and all that, I'll point you to this reply to a fairly miserable Slate column (is there another kind?) on "single parents," which is of course a euphemism for sluts who got knocked up, or bitches who couldn't keep their mans, or whatever. What's really quite remarkable to me is just how little discussion of the welfare of children in families discusses, you know, children. This, I suspect, is largely due to our reluctance to confer either autonomy or agency on children, to treat them as unrealized human beings and palimpsests on which to write and erase the errors and triumphs of surrounding adulthood.
It seems plain to me that the common arguments for the nearly universal preferability of "two-parent" households, and married heterosexual households above all others, all rest upon a fundamental belief that the greatest benefit we can offer children is to lie to them. This belief in turn rests on a conviction, never articulated, that kids are something other than people, that the value of candor, forthrightness, and basic honest must be distilled lest these creatures that so resemble our larger selves be irrevocably damaged by the truth of human experience. I for one find it entirely baffling, and depressingly common.
12 comments:
As someone with a strict "don't lie to your 3-year-old" policy, let me just say that I understand lazy, wicked child-rearing practices. In trying to explain Easter to the kid, I picked up a Bible and unintentionally scared the shit out of him with tales of dead men rising, towns getting set on fire, people drowning, etc. "An old white man with a beard loves you" is pretty easy and I can understand why someone would write that large, even as I deplore it.
Funny kids aren't people unless they are a mass of unborn cells then they enjoy full rights...until they are born, then it is up to the parents to do as they wish.
It has been my experience that my kids have greatly enjoyed the unmasking of parental deceit regarding Christmas and Easter and tooth fairies and all that - as long as the presents keep rolling in of course. Once threatened with the loss of the upside they are happy to play the game of deceit themselves.
The challenge of being a parent (single, married, gay, straight, whatever) isn't in lying to kids to protect them from life, it's in determining how much of the truth they can handle at their age. Whatever age that may be. Too much truth without a frame of reference they can understand leads them not to understand whatever your talking about.
My eight year old asked me where babies come from the other day, so I told him truthfully. I didn't get into the full-on mechanics, but I didn't lie to or mislead him. Then I asked him questions to make sure he understands.
Prof.
I have 3 children and don't lie to them. The 7 year old just verbally pinned me to the door of the car about the Easter Bunny and my attempts to avoid saying "No I don't believe in the Easter Bunny." She verbalized her subsequent mental process ending with "So that means you hide the eggs?" I was literally saved from Little Miss Detective by the school bell at that point.
I had no problem answering her "do you believe in God" question with "no" and going on about the fallacy of non-evidence-based belief but somehow admitting disbelief in a mystic bunny that hides eggs and chocolate was drastically more difficult.
Then again...there are eggs and chocolate every year.
Kirk Tousaw
My parents never pretended Santa was real; our presents always had labels saying who they were from. same with the Easter Bunny.
To me the whole charade seems very strange.
Anyway.
What's really quite remarkable to me is just how little discussion of the welfare of children in families discusses, you know, children.
One of the few things I remember from being a child was how much that pissed me off.
I was randomly reading a very uninformative article in the paper a while back, about how a middle school play about the problems kids face in middle school had been canceled for... some reason. Seriously, that was as specific as the article got.
Anyway, some school official was quoted as saying he worried that the play might portray school life as harsher then it really was.
Well, if my experience is any indication, you could portray the school as a latter-day Auschwitz and I bet some kids would still think you were sugar-coating things.
Is it that damn hard to listen to kids and not talk down to them?
As for the Slate article, this jumped out at me:
There is a scene in the teen pregnancy movie Juno in which the title character, a 16-year-old who has decided not to abort her unplanned baby but to give it up for adoption, is having an ultrasound. The technician, thinking she has on the examining table another knocked-up teenager planning to raise her child, makes disparaging remarks about children born into those circumstances. We are supposed to loathe this character and cheer when Juno's stepmother puts her in her place. But I found myself sympathetic to the technician. Why is it verboten to express the truth that growing up with a lonely, overwhelmed mother and a missing father is a recipe for childhood pain?
Why shouldn't a medical professional tell a teenage girl that she's a failure who will inevitably botch up parenthood and raise a miserable little maladjusted shit?
I'd... I'd hope the answer to that question would be self-evident, especially to an advice columnist.
I can't speak for the legions of moral scolds out there, but I'd call multi-parent families the preferred alternative too, at least as far as the statement goes. In that situation, you've got (1) distribution of the responsibility, (2) a model of normal adult interaction for the kiddies to emulate, or in the more common case, (3) better odds that at least one of the people in charge of those formative years isn't a raging abusive motherfucker*. Of course those things have precisely zero to do with the guardians' sexuality or legal relationship, and by my reasoning, families with even more adults are even better for the chilllldddrren. (And aren't they?) Moreover, a single good parent-type is far more valuable than any number of useless ones.
Oddly, I don't think Emily Yoffe accounts for Grandma helping out, nor any of the many of those other distinctions obscured by that truism. She also has a problem confusing correlation with causation (single parents are poor), at least as far as I skimmed in her article.
K
*technically and/or figuratively
Lying to kids about what? The fact that they have two parents, a mother and a father?
YOU are the liar.
ZING!
Msr. IOZ:
Thank you for linking to the rebuttal, and NOT the nasty "Slate"piece.
The commenters - almost all of them Women (from what I can tell)of the first order - are priceless.
Here's a sampling: "Thank you for this. The best response I came up with to Yoffe's article was, 'Fuck you!'"
"Fuck you, Emily Yoffe. Bend over and kiss my Sicilian ass."
"Fuck you on a pogo stick, Emily Yoffe!!!!"
Wow.
I don't care if it is sexist to say it, I want to kiss every last one of them full on their single-mother mouths!
(Just don't tell Mrs. Truthful please.)
Free the Children!
TT
p.s. Followed the label on this post to an entry from last year.
There it was - the obvious answer to Prof. Yoffe's dilemma:
Build more and better prisons!
(It's a given that we need to build more and better Democrats.)
My my, hey hey.
TT
Why shouldn't a medical professional tell a teenage girl that she's a failure who will inevitably botch up parenthood and raise a miserable little maladjusted shit?
That's very stirring and noble and all, but, you know, if you want to start laying wagers on the odds of single teen mothers raising non-fucked up kids, I'll be happy to bet against you every time.
Sure - it can be done. But that's hardly the rule in these situations.
Anonymous:: "That's very stirring and noble and all, but, you know, if you want to start laying wagers on the odds of single teen mothers raising non-fucked up kids, I'll be happy to bet against you every time.
Sure - it can be done. But that's hardly the rule in these situations."
Um... none of which explains why it's a good idea to harangue teenage mothers about what awful failures they are.
Call me a sentimental fool, but I tend to think adults in positions of power shouldn't bully teenagers.
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