Our Parenting Culture Needs a Mission
How the end of the cold war and the explosion of entertainment helped to eliminate standards and produce a parenting culture obsessed with safety and comfort. An excerpt from Setting the Bar.
Hello Bar-Setters! The following is an excerpt from chapter 8 of Setting the Bar:
Today’s parents are children of the 80’s and 90’s when, for the first time in collective memory, there was no grand national mission. Each previous generation experienced a monumental test: World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the space race, Korea, and Vietnam. But following the Soviet Union’s implosion, children grew up without a unifying national challenge.
All of a sudden, the Cold War was ending and we celebrated how amazing we were just because we’re American. To what did we attribute this inherent awesomeness? Consumerism. Those pinko commies couldn’t keep up with our prosperity. We became kings of the world because we buy more stuff and create more stuff to buy. Add to this the Watergate scandal and post-Vietnam era disenchantment and we had all the ingredients for public distrust and boundless self-interest.
With no great cause and few shared missions, our nation lost that essential sense of being a part of something bigger than ourselves. We came to believe that we were insulated from the sort of disruptive challenges that have defined all of human history—to expect that our lives should persist without any major problems. And without that collective sense of an impending trial that our children should be capable of weathering, adulthood could be delayed indefinitely.
Over the past few generations, we have watched a culture of bulldozer parents reduce expectations of personal responsibility and remove the challenge from every rite of passage. This has created increasing ambiguity around the question of when children become adults and what adulthood even means. Our 18-year-olds are increasingly less capable of self-governance. Even more, they are less interested in going out into the world and becoming independent adults. This is to the liking of many parents.
The Parents Who Prefer Their Kids Seated and Entertained
Last year my wife’s high-school class read an article about the ways technology intentionally creates addiction. In the post-reading discussion, students began asking about how Neely and I handle technology with our own kids (who were two and three at the time). They couldn’t believe that our kids never played on tablets or phones and they accused us of being too controlling after hearing that we planned to limit our kids to a flip-phone until high school. Neely then explained our desire to give the kids symmetrical increases in freedom and responsibility. We want them biking all over town in elementary school and driving, dating, and becoming free and self-sufficient in high-school.
Suddenly, the class was hailing our philosophy as they recounted how stifling their own childhoods had been. Over and over, students reported a bizarre phenomenon where their parents actively encouraged them to spend more time on their screens for the explicit purpose of keeping them at home. I don’t want you biking to the park, why don’t you guys just play some live video games instead. Parents preferred their kids seated and entertained to active and seeking independence.
An Absence of Vision and Responsibility
The dominant parenting culture seems to have lost any sense of duty to make children capable of standing on their own or any sense that this power is an essential part of living a good life. Absent of any other purpose, parents try to hold on to the sense of purpose they’ve found through their children’s dependency on them. Safetyism becomes justification for perpetuating an unhealthy codependency.
We’ve somehow become convinced that the freedoms we enjoyed as kids were a product of a simpler time when the world wasn’t so dangerous. I disagree. The difference is that we are now saturated with information, from the outrage-oriented media, to the Neighborhood app, to neurotic parents who virtue-signal their safetyist norms all over social media. These forces give credence to all of our most childish parenting impulses—to make our children the center of the world—to never let them grow up and never let them face hardship.
Today, there is tremendous pressure to give outcomes to our children, while neglecting the original purpose behind those outcomes. Rites of passage have become automatic upon the passage of time. If you don’t quit high-school, you will graduate. At age 18, we call you an adult even while your parents continue to pay your bills and fight your battles. When are you an actual adult? How will you feel a sense of self-worth, confidence, and freedom?
If we don’t demand a standard of competency and unsterilized life experience from our children they won’t have the tools to thrive in our dynamic world. Even more, we must give them these experiences so they are capable of understanding that there are worthwhile values that aren’t compatible with the infinite expansion of safety and convenience. As Matthew Crawford writes in Why We Drive:
“Safety is obviously very important. But it is also a principle that, absent countervailing considerations, admits no limits to its expanding dominion. It tends to swallow everything before it.... one must venture beyond the mental universe of risk reduction…. That universe takes its bearing from the least competent among us. This is an egalitarian principle that is entirely fitting in many settings, a touchstone of humane society that we rightly take pride in…. But if left unchallenged, the pursuit of risk reduction tends to create a society based on an unrealistically low view of human capacities. Infantilization slips in, under cover of democratic ideals. I will insist on the contrary, that democracy remains viable only if we are willing to extend to one another a presumption of individual competence. This is what social trust is built on. Together they are the minimal endowments for a free, responsible, fully awake people.
A society without the expectation that citizens meet certain standards of competency is no society at all. The dream of progress is to remove any need for competency and any risk of harm. It’s time we challenge that dehumanizing ideal.
Thank you for reading and sharing this excerpt of Setting the Bar.
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Carry the fire!
Shane