by Ben George
A figure appeared in the distance. It took me a few moments to recognize our dad because he was wearing a dark suit (we had never seen him in a suit) and because, as an anxious child, I had immediately assumed he would be going to jail for a long time. If and when he did return he would be dressed in prison stripes. I remember my dad smiling as he came closer and I’m pretty sure we ran to hug him. Ours was not a family prone to such Kodak moments, but this was a special occasion.
I think about this episode a lot now that I have my own child, and with considerable amazement. Partly it’s the physical risk my father was taking. This was just a few years after the bloody riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, so the notion that you could get hurt—either by the police or in jail—was quite real.
Partly it was the psychological impact of his absence. He had three kids at home, none of whom was old enough to understand fully what he was doing. In other words, he had a ready-made excuse for not protesting the war in such a dramatic fashion. He could have found a safer way of taking action—registering voters, passing out leaflets.
And then there’s the sheer logistics of the thing. My wife Erin and I, with our lone daughter, Josie (one year old), rarely get our shit together enough to make it out to something as low-key as a literary reading. And yet my folks—young doctors with professional ambitions, little money, and three rambunctious boys—were willing to see my father hauled off to the hoosegow to protest the war.
Most of all, when I think about this episode now, it makes me see how dramatically the culture of parenting has changed in a single generation. How many of today’s parents—and I include myself in the tally—would take the same action to oppose the unconscionable war of our era?
Consider, for instance, how the current crop of parenting magazines would judge my father’s action.
Actually, that’s a bit of a MacGuffin. Because as anyone who reads parenting magazines knows, they don’t discuss politics. They don’t discuss anything that extends beyond the duties of parenting and the products thereof.
But I imagine that if these magazines did discuss my father’s decision to protest the Vietnam War, the discussion would show a certain measure of disapproval, because, after all, he was leaving his little boys in the lurch, choosing to place his moral duties as a citizen above his paternal duties.
And herein lies the false dichotomy: the notion that you can separate these two duties. Because my father wasn’t just leaving us in the lurch. He was also acting on our behalf, trying to effect a change that might, eventually, diminish the chance that his sons would be drafted to fight in a foolish war. Without quite meaning to, he was also setting an example for us. He was saying: “Boys, this is what it means to follow your principles.”
It bears mentioning that my father’s arrest was not the largest sacrifice he made. During this era he taught at Stanford Medical School. He was a popular instructor with impeccable credentials. But he also worked at organizing student groups that opposed the war. He has long suspected that his antiwar activities played a role in the school’s decision not to renew his teaching contract.
I want to be careful not to idealize the way my father and mother raised us. They would be the first ones to admit that they spread themselves too thin as parents. A pointed example: in the summer of 1971, they were convinced to buy into and live on a commune a few hours north of San Francisco. The idea was to research and write a book about the back-to-the-land movement.
My memories of that summer are surreal and episodic, as befits a suburban four-year-old plunked into the middle of a rural picaresque. A cow stepped on my toe. The milk on my Corn Flakes had chunks of cream in it. Most memorably, a man nicknamed Big John joined Mike and me in our evening bath, fully clothed. We would learn, years later, that he was crackling on acid at the time.
The Land—as the commune came to be called—was a failed experiment within the smaller community of our family, as well. Mike and I felt out of place. The other kids ran around naked, which totally freaked us out. We worried about getting enough to eat. Our older brother Dave, sent back east to stay with my grandparents for the summer, felt exiled.
And our parents wound up having to pick up the slack for folks like Big John. My mother, for instance, made a point of rising early each morning to grab eggs from the chicken coop—before the other adults could. She was worried about Mike and me getting enough to eat.
So I’m not arguing that today’s parents should drop everything and head for the hills, in pursuit of some solar-powered utopia. My concern is that parenthood—as defined by our generation—is becoming the opposite experience: a sort of comfy bunker of apolitical consumerism.
I see this among my own friends, in the endless discussions about our babies, and our babies’ products, and our babies’ anticipated needs for day care and schooling. It’s like some default setting we slip in to the moment we encounter another parent. The world outside the Babysphere recedes.
And what a relief to see it go! Based on the news reports, that world is in awful shape: awash in violence, poverty, political corruption, senseless suffering, and looming environmental disasters. Focusing on our babies—sweet-smelling and innocent—has become a form of rescue that feels attainable. We may not be able to save the world, but we can save them.
This dream is unattainable, of course. You can’t baby-proof the world, and the effort to do so causes children more harm than good, I suspect. They need to know that the world is going to deal them some blows, which they will survive. More to the point, children aren’t vessels of goodness. They contain the same destructive impulses that the rest of us do. An essential part of parenting resides in recognizing and curbing these impulses, not indulging them.*
What I’m talking about, more broadly, is the drift toward what is often called “child-centered” parenting. I recently spent a long weekend with a couple who personifies this approach. Their three-year-old—let’s call him Max—controlled everything in that house: the scheduling, the spending, the mood and ideation. Everything was about Max, his needs and wants and progress. Max himself was an awfully cute little guy, with curly hair and pouty lips and an expression that conveyed an essential shtunkdom.*
He was also a tyrant. His version of “playing” with his four-month-old little brother consisted of pounding on the baby’s car seat and yelling into his face. (Erin took one look at this behavior and said, “If he comes anywhere near Josie acting like that, he’s going to get smacked.”)
Anyway, at some point Max wanted to go to the park, so we packed up and headed to the park. Just outside the park, we passed by a man sitting on the sidewalk with a battered cardboard sign that read: “Homeless Vet. Please Help.” He had a giant Starbucks cup for change.
As homeless vets go, this guy looked to be in OK shape. I put him in his late thirties, Hispanic, and pretty well groomed. It was as if he’d gussied himself up for his visit to the prosperous suburbs. All of which made our brief encounter that much sadder and awkward.
Actually, “encounter” is overstating the matter. It was more like a very self-conscious non-encounter. The guy didn’t say anything to us as we passed by. He didn’t even look up. Nor did we say anything to him, or offer him money. Only Max stared at the guy (as kids will), trying to figure out why an adult man was sitting on the sidewalk and why he had a blanket thrown over his shoulders (it was a pretty warm day) and what his sign said.
His parents said nothing and Erin and I said nothing and Max, despite his curiosity, said nothing, either. When I asked his mother later if we should have somehow acknowledged the homeless dude, she said, “He’s got a whole life to figure out how the real world works. Why spoil his childhood?” I could see her point. I feel the same impulse to shield my daughter from ugliness. How does one explain class inequalities or addiction or war trauma to a little kid, anyway?
At the same time, I could see Max absorbing a lesson. When a strange man is sitting on the sidewalk, and your parents ignore the man, y
ou should do the same thing.
To be fair: these friends of mine aren’t heartless people. They’re good lefties who give to charity and believe that regressive tax cuts are bullshit and moaned over the Bush Idiocracy as much as the rest of us. But it seemed to me, as I thought about how this little scene had played out, that they were inadvertently serving the agenda of the Bush Idiocracy, which is predicated on denial.
The essential appeal of conservatism* in this country—aside from its naked pandering to the primal negative emotions of fear and grievance—resides in the notion that Americans need not face any of our common crises of state, need not even cop to their existence.
Their political house of cards is built on denial. Denial of global warming. Denial of the looming fossil-fuel shortage. Denial of our massive foreign debt. Denial of our shameful economic disparities. And on and on.
The whole goal is to keep the electorate fat and happy, to assure us that—despite all evidence to the contrary—our superabundant lives are sustainable, we can have it all, the economy will keep growing forever.*
What I saw with Max was basically the origins of this mind-set. His parents (and I) were trying to protect him. But, within that process, we were denying both the true state of the world and also our own moral responsibility for others. We were, in that sense, hiding behind his innocence.
Which is precisely what Madison Avenue wants us to do. They want us to approach parenthood with the bunker mentality, so they can sell us the decor. They do so by cannily exploiting those new-parent hopes and anxieties, trying to convince us that we can safeguard our children through the retail cure. Thus the cavalcade of new products intended to keep your baby safe.
And believe me, we’ve seen them all, because dozens of catalogs began mysteriously appearing in our mailbox the moment we brought Josie home from the hospital. Erin recently found this item in one of them: a helmet to be worn by children just learning to crawl.
It’s not just a matter of keeping your child safe, though. Today, you also have to make sure that he or she is not “falling behind” in the great developmental race to be the next Baby Einstein.
This is the hidden cost of parenting in the information age: it has a tendency to make parenting seem like a competitive undertaking. Every time we take Josie to the pediatrician, we get a report on her “percentiles,” meaning how she ranks in terms of her weight and height. When we visit with other babies, I find myself comparing Josie to them, hoping she’s developing more quickly than her peers.
Wanting the best for your child is perfectly natural, particularly for newbie parents. What I’m getting at is the underlying mind-set, a mind-set that is parochial to the point of solipsism. In other words: why should I care about the Family of Man when I’ve got my own kid to worry about?
I fear that education is the arena where this tension will come to a head.* My history here is again a product of my parents’ values. For most of our childhood, we lived in the lower-income part of an affluent town, Palo Alto. Our parents sent us to the public elementary school closest to our house. I’m not sure they would have had the money for a private school, but they probably could have sent us to a public school in a “better” neighborhood. The point is that they believed in the public school system, which meant you made do with the school closest to your home.
It wasn’t the worst thing in the world for us to be exposed to kids from poorer backgrounds, even if that meant withstanding a little bullying.† Heck, that was part of our broader education in How the World Really Operates. And though it’s true that I gave away a lot of lunch money, I did love my grade school. I even cried on the day I graduated.
But I sometimes try to imagine what I would do in my parents’ place. If I knew she was being bullied, would I allow Josie to attend our local elementary school? More to the point: would Erin? I’m pretty sure the answer is no. In fact, Erin already has announced that she’s not sending Josie to a school that doesn’t challenge her intellectually.
Many of our friends have gone the private-school route, for the same reason. They believe in supporting the public school system—until their kid needs a more challenging math curriculum.
I realize that when the time comes for Josie to head off to school, I’ll want to make sure she’s happy and learning. But parents of my generation have a tendency to worry too much about every little aspect of their child’s emotional and intellectual development. One of the main reasons for this overprotectiveness is that families have become so atomized.
In our race to get ahead, we’ve grown further and further removed from the natural support system of an extended family (and older relatives who might chill us out by knocking some common sense into our heads).
Erin and I, for instance, don’t have a grandparent, or an uncle, or even a cousin, living within a hundred miles. We see Erin’s folks maybe once a month, mine three times a year, at most. We’re more or less on our own as parents. All of which leaves us vulnerable to the anxieties described above.
And how do we, as loyal Americans, respond to these anxieties? We pull out our credit cards. Objects that would have seemed odd even ten years ago—the Rainforest Jumperoo leaps to mind*—are now standard domestic props. I won’t even get started on the eight-hundred-dollar strollers, though I must mention that our neighbors across the street recently brought home a battery-operated mini-Escalade for their five-year-old.
It’s easy enough to mock these excesses, but it’s much harder to fight the larger tide of materialism. After all, as Erin often argues—as the sharps on Madison Avenue know she will argue—“it’s for the baby.” Ah, guilt-free shopping! Is it any wonder the registers sing so loud at Babies “R” Us?
But as every parent knows, these products aren’t just for the baby. They are for the parents, to make us feel like competent caretakers, to reassure us, and, perhaps most of all, to make our lives more convenient.
That’s the other crucial dynamic in play here. Having a baby is not, as these things go, a convenient experience. It runs against our national inclinations. To cite a rather unfortunate personal example: my wife and I bought our daughter that miserable Rainforest Jumperoo not because she needed it, but because plopping her in it was more convenient for us.
An even better example: diapers. For years the makers of Pampers and Huggies have relied on our native American sloth to pimp us their landfill cloggers. Erin and I nearly fell into this trap. We wanted the ease of disposables, particularly in those exhausting early months. To her credit, Erin found a cloth brand that she dug.*
But our lust for convenience really goes beyond the products. It’s a mind-set, a national religion at this point. And it’s what makes so many socially concerned parents retreat from their best impulses, and head into the bunker.
A final example, and then I promise that my little sermonette will be over.
A few months ago, Erin and I heard about an antiwar rally happening in our town. It was one of those days where we were both pooped by mid-afternoon. But we got to talking about the idiocy of the war and about the way in which future generations would be paying the fiddler’s bill, and that got us fired up enough to overcome the inconvenience of dragging our asses up and out of the house.
So we schlepped Josie to the center of our little New England town. The gathering was nothing dramatic, just seventy or so concerned citizens holding up signs at a busy intersection.
And I suppose there’s an argument to be made that Josie could have been harmed by all the car exhaust, or frightened by the noise—if, in fact, Josie were frightened by anything. But the reaction that people had was fascinating. They didn’t just smile at Josie. They smiled at us, and nodded. One woman, a veteran of such rallies, said, “It’s so good to see families out here, not just us old peaceniks.”
In the end, I was glad we brought Josie, because her presence there was a powerful reminder that the effects of war aren’t limited to those who can fight, or protest. Despite the cynical effort to outsource th
e fighting of our wars to this country’s underclass, the war itself will take a toll on all of us—and on Josie more than on her elders. She’s the one, after all, who will be paying for Bush’s demented imperial adventure.
As we walked back from the rally, I got to thinking about how close we had come to bagging it altogether. It had felt so tempting, so convenient, to stay home. But in the end, our lust for convenience is a sucker’s game. And it’s worse than that. It’s an affliction we will pass on to our babies, at precisely the wrong historical moment.
Because let’s face facts: as Americans, we’ve been able to coast on our own superpower status for the last half century. But the scientists and economists and historians can be ignored for only so long. My wife and I may be able to escape the worst of global warming and the end of cheap oil and our massive national debt. Our daughter will not.
And so it is incumbent upon us—more than on any previous generation—to face these challenges. Not to allow Wall Street and Washington to lull us into a false sense of security, even if, as parents, security feels so precious to us.
Becoming a parent is essentially about expanding emotionally, feeling more than we did before. It should awaken our empathy—not in some fleeting, phony-ass Oprah way, but as rational moral actors. We owe our babies more than a safe, well-appointed bunker.
I’m not suggesting that we should shirk our emotional duties to our babies—the central duty being to love them unreasonably—only that our ultimate duty to them is to face the world as it truly exists, to recognize the trouble we’re in as a species, and to take action against that trouble on their behalf.
There are a thousand different ways to do this. Lead a more sustainable lifestyle, obviously. (Consume less. Drive less. Start a garden. Abstain from Pampers.) Become politically involved, rather than surrendering to apathy. Even, as in the case of my father, be willing to put your own liberty on the line for your beliefs.