Binghamton enjoyed its usual cloud cover for the eclipse yesterday. I could not summon the wherewithal to get us to a place of totality (will I even understand that sentence in five years?) and so we made do with standing in the road watching everything get slightly darker for a few minutes and then going back inside because it was cold anyway.
On a completely different subject, I finished listening to Hunt Gather Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans by Michaeleen Doucleff last week and, as I said to a lot of different people, I have a lot of thoughts. Initially, as the book opened, as it were, I was prepared to absolutely hate it. I have never been able to read parenting books of any kind without shuddering down to my toes. I don’t want to think about myself or my children that much just like I don’t want to read about gardening, I just want to figure it out by throwing seeds around and hoping for the best. I just want to get on with it—whatever “it” is. But Doucleff eventually won me round, with a couple of immense caveats.
I guess the first immense caveat—one that almost sinks the ship—is that I don’t think it is possible for one person to drop into another culture for a few weeks and learn very much that is worth sharing in book form, let alone in a tweet or TikTok. Christians have rightly become allergic to short-term mission “tourism” where an American youth group lands on the shores of Africa, puts a roof on a school, drives by to see the slums, spends a few days at the game park, and then posts pictures of themselves with impoverished looking black children. I believe the term that’s bandied about is something akin to “white savior.”
Groups like this sometimes came through my village, where my parents were laboring to make the Christian scriptures accessible in a language that hadn’t been written down before. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with traveling abroad in order to help other people or learn from them. It is especially worthy to devote your life to various and sundry ways of advancing the gospel. Those things should be done. But the project of Hunt Gather Parent is a little bit like inviting a 21-year-old to write a book about marriage relationships and courting. It might seem like a good idea in the moment, but in the reckoning of the ages, it may prove to be deeply cringe.
Doucleff isn’t trying to do mission work. Her task is to, as respectfully as possible, gain insight from other cultures about how to handle her child. That is a worthy and noble task. I’m just not sure it can be accomplished under the parameters established in the book.
As I said, when I was a child, after one of those groups of Westerners traipsed through the village, taking pictures and trying to learn how to say hello, a friend of ours said, “Their eyes were wide open, but they didn’t see anything.” I’m sure Doucleff saw many things—indeed, she enumerates them—but I’m equally sure she didn’t see the substrata that gives meaning and context to the things she observed. She can’t have, for she attributes the hunter/gather motif to evolutionary biology, and I can guarantee that the cultures themselves don’t do that.
I think what I’m trying to put my finger on is the feeling of exploitation. To travel to a far-flung culture to ameliorate the failures of one’s own parenting methods makes a great story, but it has a whiff of the over-share, the ‘look at my narrative arc! at the expense of that person’s coherent worldview’ about it. While I do believe in cross-cultural borrowing and pollination, I am queasy about skimming something off the surface that probably has a lot of other hidden embedded cultural information under the surface and then offering it to people here who have none of the structural religious and philosophical assumptions that would make the prize a success or doom it to failure.
Which is to say, I think Doucleff is exceptionally good at pointing to the surface problems in American parenting and then going around the world to find surface-level fixes and cures. If you are elevating the emotional temperature of your offspring through a barrage of speech full of affirmation, direction, and feedback, and then you go abroad and see that other people don’t do that, it is very reasonable to come home and stop doing it, and then have a nicer and easier life. But if you go and learn that stories can help control your child’s behavior, without investigating the nature and origin of those stories, and come home and make up a bunch of stories, you betray your ignorance of so so so many things.
I think one reason why I’m a good mother is that I didn’t grow up here. I saw children raised in a more sane place and went with my gut most of the time. I barely talked to my oldest child as she grew. Then I had another child so they could talk to each other instead of me. I talk to my children now, but they are sentient. They read books. They are basically interesting. As a young mother, I required the deep peace of children gainfully occupied doing useful tasks or playing with each other. When the stranger neighborhood kids came over, I let them take my babies to their houses so that I could clean or take a nap. But—and this is the part Doucleff is so careful to mince around without ever saying—I demanded obedience and respect from my children. Or rather, I taught them how to obey, to be respectful, and not to throw tantrums in the grocery store. I didn’t need to go half the trouble of making up stories, of engaging in strange kinds of mind games, of ignoring childish anger and violence because, through the time-honored way around the world that shall not be named, when they were disrespectful or disobedient, I caused them to stop it. Those occasions were rare because they were effective, and they afforded my children the precious gifts of self-mastery and freedom. I folded them into the life of the household. I never told them what to do unless absolutely necessary. I didn’t mess around in their heads, or tinker with their hearts. I let them be their autonomous selves and all the other good stuff Doucleff learned about abroad.
Anyway, I will most likely have more thoughts about this (like…where is the father?? and what about God???) but this post is long enough. Have a nice day!
I received quite a bit of hate mail on my small Christian college campus of Westmont, mainly because of things I said in classrooms, but the largest amount I received was when I took aim at the annual Spring Break short term mission vacation. I must admit, I was a pretty fiery young lad and might temper my critique a bit these days, but I had been transplanted from a situation where my family worked with some of most destitute people in our province, where death was a daily word, to the halcyon climes of Montecito, CA. The student chapels would be filled with testimonials about how much they were “blessed” by the people they went to help, and how much they learned, and so on. I remember my big line was that Westmont had somehow mistaken “magnitude with magnanimity.” Of course, these days I think, well, a bunch of young folks spending their own money or their parents money to at least try to do a good thing, actually getting some sort of perspective, and more likely than if not, supporting missions or non profits throughout their life because of this isn’t really all that bad. I still call them “sanctified vacations,” and I still know there can be big trade off between harm and help from them, but criticism has mellowed.
Several observations:
Being raised within the cultural context of parental discipline, and as I observe young parents struggle to help their children to exercise self-control, I find it hard to believe that the time-proven, nearly universal application of correction to the backside has become the "Deplorable Word." Yet, it has.
Most of us have not the advantage of the cross-cultural upbringing that you enjoyed, Anne. Our only means of stepping outside the cultural milieu in which we find ourselves is the study of history or the study of another contemporary culture. Your critique of Doucleff's attempt to see parenting from outside her culture discourages me. She was trying to offer alternative and proven methods of parenting to those discouraged by the socially acceptable but largely ineffective methods left to parents. Your (and Matt's) book on parenting needs to come to telios. With the limited observations of your children via a couple of podcasts and publicly posted Facebook photos, they seem to be the evidence of a successful parenting approach. How we need sane advice!
As one of those leaders who took groups of mostly young people to build houses in impoverished neighborhoods in Juarez, in our debriefing times after a week in Mexico, I was delighted to hear comments that praised the people and culture, and that indicated some new freedom from xenophobia and Western superiority. While much foolishness remained and was sometimes shared, I celebrated the movement, the growth.
Finally, I so enjoy your thoughtful commentary on the range of books and topics you explore. I look forward to every Substack you write. Yes, something strong and wholesome, something sane and bracing. Have a wonderful day, young woman.