So's Your Mother

Like most parents, I've come to my surest and most strongly-held parenting convictions only concerning subjects that no longer affect my children. It sounds at best like a giant waste of energy and at worst like rank hypocrisy, but I put it down to a surfeit of time spent under the influence of Baby Boomers, the people who brought you hula hoop mania and the "Just Say No" campaign. Never before and hopefully never since will humanity see another generation so single-mindedly driven to frantic, inane hedonism and then, later, to the utter extirpation of frantic, inane hedonism for their children.

For those of you without children, and especially for those of us wearing the marketing-expedient Generation X label, I will tell you that right now, nobody knows more about parenting than Baby Boomers. Well, now they do. When they were raising the rest of us, it was a Wonder Bread and American cheese sandwich warmed up by eating it off a hot curling iron, self-babysitting watching scrambled porn while they slept off a needed small fist of valium after a loooong day of working one job at normal business hours. In fairness, being all of them divorced and having skipped most of college to hitchhike the Continental Divide, man, they really had no chance of doing anything close to what their parents had done. And even if they had the means, their parents, with their square commitment to structure, safety and basic material comfort, were anti-archetypes they wanted to avoid, partly out of contrarianism and partly out of a very practical concern that we, their children, would turn out just as lost and unfocused as they now were. It was organic, stream-of-consciousness parenting, filled with switchbacks and U-turns and jerky, jagged tangents improvising on a series of very briefly VITALLY IMPORTANT themes, drawn largely from sitcoms and filial spite. It was jazz parenting, with all the self-important smugness and volume alcohol that implies.

Of course now that they have grandchildren, you can't imagine how loaded with unsolicited ideas they are about how those grandchildren should be brought up. In fairness, Baby Boomers had a tendency to overbreed just a tiny bit out of the recommended range for both their income and personal patience level, so they found themselves quite harried when the kids were in the house. It was only after the nest was emptied that they found a reasonable amount of free time to consume all the self-help books and Oprah Winfrey Shows necessary to render one a Great Unassailable Authority in the realm of child rearing. I do accept the helpful evolutionary social-cycle model of elder wisdom, but I have to say it would be a lot less galling if the person now telling me about the link between juvenile brain development and proper nutrition hadn't also at one time in the very rememberable past been an enthusiastic proponent of Froot Loops for dinner.

Thus painfully aware of the type and severity of the reaction unsolicited parenting advice can engender, I tend to keep myself to myself, as it were, when it comes to those coming up behind me in the parenting ranks. But I'm beginning to understand the difficulty of just shutting the fuck up for those who preceded me because I am now, quite by accident, a Great Unassailable Authority on parenting for people with children younger than my own. The smug condescension, it turns out, is an unavoidable by-product of the act of parenting. The trick is learning how to feel that tickle in the back of your throat to vomit out tips on pacifier-weaning and having the presence of mind to swallow it, and hard.

Every once in a while, the ongoing debate about parenting styles erupts into the public square however,  and I do feel I have enough social cover to address my personal experience and gathered wisdom to no one in particular and without specific judgment. Except maybe for Alicia Silverstone. Boundaries are OK, lady.

First of all, as far as the debate over "attachment parenting" goes: almost fully exposed breasts in the public domain. Already a positive.

Is it cancelled out by having someone who looks like a registered voter attached to it? Yeah, kinda. But still: boobs!

I worry sometimes that my positions can be too nuanced, so let me see if I can firm up some of the shades of gray for you: nobody fucking knows anything. Outside of some fucked-up religious cults or the entire state of Utah, you don't get single-minded parenting data in enough volume to present any reasonable conclusions. Even if properly polled,* there's no way to actually track how or what people are applying in terms of practice with their children. And frankly they can't be trusted to answer in the first place. I can tell you definitively that so much of parenting is situationally reactive that the combination of instinct, parental history and temperament drive almost everything. It's very possible that I'm fucking all of this up on every conceivable plane, but I will tell you sincerely that it feels like I'm doing OK. The only way to know if you've been a good parent is if your children grow up and the number of people they kill is less than two. They don't have to be something great like president or Michael Jordan or Jason Bateman, they just have to not be a serial killer. And you can only know that when they turn out not to be serial killers.

And even if they are a serial killer, you can see their siblings, raised by the same people in largely the same way, somehow are not serial killers. So who fucking knows?

The only thing we can know for sure is if we find two siblings who both turned out to be serial killers and then decide, as a society, to not do whatever is their parents did. It's a lot more likely that we're going to get anywhere with a process of elimination rather than spontaneous ideogenesis. Baby steps, people. Which should be taken in shoes with ample ankle support and on flat, uncarpeted, uncluttered, even surfaces.

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*yes, we'll wait...