Parenting the perfect child into existence
The assumptions of purity baked into parenting & educating respectfully
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I remember reading a gentle parenting book when my child was around two years old. It was full of advice on which words to avoid, and which words to use, how to feed your child, how to put them to sleep.
I don’t mean to paint all gentle parenting books with the same brush, but the vibe was very much how do I get my child to do the things, but in a way that won’t harm them.
There wasn’t much on whether the things actually needed to get done. There was no real conversation about power and coercion, or about how imbalances of power are, fundamentally, the source of human conflict and inequality.
At the time, all I knew is I wanted to do things differently, and this seemed differently enough!
So off I went, avoiding “well done!” and instead saying “You made it down the slide!”
I don’t want to diminish this sort of thing. I know that changing the way we use words helps people shift from patterns of conditional love to ones of unconditional love. It helped me too. It’s just that changing the words, or the way in which we demand things, is not really a fundamental shift - it’s mostly an aesthetic one.
And helpful and unhelpful, superficial and deep, can co-exist. I think that the fixation many of us have on finding a method and executing it perfectly, is part of why we then get a backlash against parenting ‘gently’: people don’t understand what it means because all it looks like is just changing the way we say and do things, rather than questioning the very foundation we are parenting from.
I have come to recognise the increasing pivot to ‘more respectful’ ways to control children as perhaps a tiny step in the right direction, but more insidiously a search for an elusive idea of purity.
We assume that because we are going through the aesthetic motions of parenting in a more gentle or respectful way, then our children will consequently be young humans without trauma, and become adults who are in often very vague ways, better.
The purity I mention is located in the way we parent, in the perfectionism we bring to our chosen method: we follow scripts, we do things like co-sleep and baby-led wean, we use natural consequences rather than the naughty corner or time-outs, and we follow whatever genre of parenting to the letter, at times in the face of what our actual child might be telling us they need.
We load our choices with moral connotations because we need to feel like we’re performing parenting right, and that by performing it right we’ll also get the desired results.
To be clear, I don’t blame us. We are all doing our best under very challenging circumstances. I blame the Parenting-Industrial complex, and anyone who peddles the aesthetics of gentle parenting; and of course I blame a patriarchal, colonial capitalist culture that has trapped us in isolated, nuclear families, stripped many of us of a sense of belonging, and that devalues carework while also expecting us to invest endless amounts of time, effort and resources into doing carework just right.
To quote a recent post by
about attachment theory, which pre-dated and forms the basis of most Western parenting methods, “Attachment Theory perpetuates the fantasy of emotional purity—the idea that secure attachment is a pristine state achievable through the right conditions, free from the 'contaminations' of trauma, systemic violence, or historical oppression. Herein lies white supremacy’s obsession with purity, order, and the erasure of historical entanglements.”It is not a coincidence that most parenting philosophies and styles out there are Western inventions, often taken and repackaged from ancestral or Indigenous knowledge, and sold to us as disembodied, culturally empty ‘methods’.
I know this because I fell for many of them. I did all of those things. I had the aesthetics of gentle parenting down. I’ve written more about my experience here, but essentially there is a way to excel as a respectful parent, while actually not truly seeing and respecting your child.
It’s akin to following a recipe from a cookbook exactly to the letter, while having no intuitive sense of ways it needs to be modified to suit the people it is going to be nourishing, the place you are in, the ingredients you have access to. I cook intuitively - I have an innate sense of what sort of food goes well with other food, and I will modify recipes based on this sense. I didn’t really have this when it came to parenting, and the books became recipes I needed to follow to the letter.
Purity shows up also in the outcomes we come to expect when we follow methods in ways we deem are exactly right. Because following a recipe precisely should guarantee you a predictable outcome, right?
And when we invest in a method, and at some point decide it didn’t ‘work’, we decide the method was somehow flawed. Our child did not turn out better, so gentle parenting must be somehow wrong
.
Back when L was around 3 years old, he threw a (soft) ball directly at a friend’s baby’s head. It was intentional. I remember my friend, who was a new mother holding her precious first baby, being utterly horrified. I’ll never forget how she turned to me and said, “Why did he do that, if he’s always been parented respectfully?”
L is my second child and I knew enough at that point to know that behaviour is how most children communicate, and not a reflection of their moral compass at age 3. I recognised that to adult eyes, it looked like intentional harm, but in actual fact it was L communicating his emotions the only way he could at the time.
But this event got me thinking about how the purity of gentle and conscious parenting shows up in our high expectations of the sorts of humans this kind of parenting will produce: humans who are pure, who are kind, who are socially conscious, who do not wish to harm or dominate another, ever.
Utopian humans who are first utopian children.
And while we can look at studies around how different parenting produces different outcomes, and I’m not denying that respecting our children matters for many reasons, I just think that believing our parenting will birth children who are all of the good things because they were gentle parented, is a trap.
It’s dangerous because it places unreasonable expectations on our children, and doesn’t take into account all of the millions of other factors that influence the ‘outcomes’ of children and people.
Unschooling and homeschooling have a similar purity problem. Some of us might begin to think that if we keep our child out of the school system they won’t be tarnished by it. And while this may be true, the result of this thinking is that children who have been in school for any period of time are damaged, perhaps even irreversibly so.
The purity of some brands of unschooling manifest as children who have never known a classroom, an ipad, processed food, bread in a package, you name any contentious moral panic-related object or topic - there is probably someone writing about how their child has been shielded from the corrupting effects of it.
All of the adjacent ‘natural’ practices - natural birthing, natural parenting, natural learning - to an extent fall prey to this thinking. It’s in the name, really: the implication is that anything other is in fact unnatural, corrupted, broken, artificial.
Milk that doesn’t come directly from a cow is unnatural, and playing in a cement playground is unnatural, and sitting in a classroom is unnatural - and on and on.
So much of the language we use around parenting and unschooling can feel really problematic. Unschooled children are ‘wild’ or ‘free’ - does this mean that the rest of the children are somehow caged, or domesticated, somehow tarnished by having to spend less time outdoors or being told what to do?
I don’t mean to say that being in a classroom is inherently not harmful - I believe it absolutely can be harmful. I just worry about using binary language that implies that a child who has never been punished is somehow living on a superior plane to one who was put in time-out, and a child who gets to run barefoot in the forest all day is somehow more wild, and therefore closer to their humanness, than one who rides a bus through an urban environment every day.
Life is complex, and some children are loved unconditionally and also occasionally put in time-out. Some children are parented respectfully but still feel judged, or unfree. Some children play on video games, on city streets, and also on beaches - it is all equally valid as play.
The language of purity around parenting and educating does not allow for the complexity of the human experience, and the complexity of being a child in the world as it exists right now, not the world as we believe it used to be (which is rarely historically accurate!).
We cannot keep our children metaphorically clean and pure - children are simply not that to begin with. They too, have complex inner lives and probably know and feel more than we think they do. They too, are imperfect, flawed beings.
It is patronising to believe that children are born innocent and pure (remember when this same point was made about women, to justify patriarchy?)
Children are not outcomes, or beings we can somehow preserve, or vessels for our idealised version of reality, or clean blank canvases we get to paint their future on.
They are not projects and they are not people we do things to.
We cannot build perfect chidlren by parenting and educating ‘the right way.’
Children are active participants that engage with reality and make of it their own creation, one that we have very little control over, ultimately. Believing in a version of pure, natural parenting and educating ultimately backfires because we end up expecting perfection from ourselves as parents, and from our children as products of our parenting.
In the end, this feels much more harmful than a parent who perhaps is not respectful in every way, but who unconditionally loves their child for who they are.
Thank you for reading my friends!
Sending you all lots of love, hope and compassion for our messy flawed selves.
I’ve been reading a challenging book called Hospicing Modernity and, together w the Ayoto article you shared, and this post, it’s really getting me to think about my reliance on frameworks to navigate the world. As a tech worker frameworks were necessary for quickly building understanding and helped me get taken seriously but as a parent it really all falls apart. Parenthood has gotten me to (uncomfortably) face all the parts of life that cannot be neatly intellectualized and must rather be felt. Thank you for this post.
This was so damn good, Fran. Like a conversation with an unschooling therapist.