Regressive Child Rearing

According to Marcus Aurelius, Heraclitus of Ephesus (5^th century BCE) taught, “We must not act or speak like children of our parents.”

In other words, we must not become who we were raised to be. (No, Marcus did not write the copy for Progressive’s Homeowners Becoming their Parents ad campaign; sorry, Flo!)

Physical and social evolution is always a blend of stability and change. The future preserves something of the present – or it wouldn’t be our future - and the present preserves something of the past, or it wouldn’t be our past.

“April (present) is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory (past) and desire (future), stirring dull roots with spring rain. Winter (past) kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow, feeding a little life with dried tubers. Summer (future) surprised us coming over the Starnbergersee with a shower of rain…” (The Waste Land)

This combination of continuity and change is what affords our World its solidarity, its plasticity, and its novelty. It applies to most physical and social processes; but child rearing, at least as it is practiced in the modern North Atlantic Community, is a notable exception.

(Note: In this article, I’m going to draw from my relationship with my father but the analysis I offer could just as well apply to my mother or to any primary caregiver.)

By the time I was old enough to form a vague notion of where I fit into the scheme of things, my #1 desire was to please, and as far as possible, emulate my caregivers (e.g. my father). To accomplish this, I had two sources of information: my father’s day-to-day behavior and his daily ‘directives and invectives’.

His directives came straight from his father’s playbook. His behavior on the other hand reflected his own lived experience. His message to me was a blend of the two. Let me set the stage, and to keep things simple, let me slightly (but only slightly), modify the dates:

Assume my paternal grandfather was born in 1900, my father in 1925, myself in 1950, my youngest daughter in 1975, and my grandchildren c. 2000. Not far off from actual as it turns out.

My father was well intentioned, if at times a bit clueless. No doubt, he wanted me to have the ‘best possible’ childhood consistent with my becoming the ‘best possible’ adult…which in 1950 he defined primarily in terms of socioeconomic comfort. Still, hardly child abuse!

My father’s parents were survivors of World War I, the Roarin’ 20s, and the Great Depression. Over the years, they developed values well suited to their own lived experience but not necessarily best suited to my father’s personality or to his time in life.

The world in 1925 was very different from the world as it was in 1900 or as it would be in 1950. My grandparents raised my father to succeed in a 1875 – 1925 version of the world, not the 1925 – 1975 version.

Sidebar: It is said that generals prepare to fight the previous war. Likewise, we parent our children to be successful members of the previous generation.

My dad embarked on parenthood, relying on his father’s directives (1900 – 1925) tempered by his own lived experience (1925 – 1950). Bottom line: my father raised me to succeed in the world as it was c. 1925, the midpoint, not as it was in 1950 or as it would be in 1975 (my midpoint), or God forbid, in 2000. Regrettably, my children in turn were raised to succeed in the 1950’s; but happily, it is my grandchildren now who help me adjust to life c. 2025!

Don’t get me wrong, tradition can be a good thing. An anchor to windward can keep you from flying off into space, Icarus-like. But as cultural change accelerates, the din of cognitive dissonance becomes more cacophonous…and more paralyzing.

Most non-human life forms don’t have this problem. Their cultures evolve slowly, if at all. Continuity is more important than creativity. Information passed on, genetically, epigenetically, and culturally, is crucial for survival. Rare eruptions of adaptive novelty are an evolutionary bonus.

For humans, on the other hand, novelty is critical to the survival of the individual, the social order, the culture, and the species. Disruption is our superpower. But we fear it and we suppress it. Each generation must free itself anew, but only partially, from the shackles of the past before it can begin to make its own ‘mark’ on history.

Parenting in our culture means raising children to be a generation behind their times. Best intentions notwithstanding, we are raising our children to succeed in a long gone world… and to fail in this one!

Oddly enough, it is grandparents (full disclosure: I am one, many times over), loosely defined to include any interested adult two generations or more removed, that play an increasingly important role here. By 1950, my grandparents realized that the world had changed. They were not living in 1925 any more and certainly not in 1900. ‘Without admitting guilt’ they recognized past misjudgments and were free to meet their new born grandchildren on their own terms.

Who is not a better grandparent than parent? Ironically, while ‘grandparent types’ may have the wisdom to parent well…they lack the energy. Parents, on the other hand, have more energy but ideologically, they are often stuck in the quicksand known as the past.

What is most remarkable here, and disheartening, is that someone figured this out 2500 years ago. We think we’re so smart, and in some ways we are, yet we have collective ignored millennia old wisdom. Makes you wonder what else we’ve missed, doesn’t it?