“Raising competent children means trusting them.” (Getty)
It was a week of emotional goodbyes for my 18-year-old daughter as she left home for university. She had a family barbecue, a bonfire night with her besties, a big hug with her dog, and finally a tearful farewell at the airport with her younger sister. I think I was the only one who didn’t cry. After all, the end goal of having children is not, in fact, to be close with them at all times, but to successfully see them launched into the world as vibrant, resilient, and courageous adults. I was certain my daughter would land on her feet.
Raising competent children means trusting them. Trusting them means exposing them to risk. Risk, for a parent, means having faith in the world in which we live and, perhaps more frighteningly, in other people. A mother has to learn to trust her child to be left alone, which means she is going to have to actually leave her child alone. This becomes difficult when other people do not share the same tolerance for risk and trust. Such was the case recently in Virginia, where a mother was convicted of child negligence simply for permitting her five-year-old son to walk to a local pond by himself. It is a sad and ridiculous story that is all too familiar: nothing is more dangerous to social cohesion than a nosy do-gooder with nothing better to do than interfere with the trivialities of her neighbors’ lives.
Yet, without blaming the mother for anything, there are aspects to the Virginian case which reveal the timidity of a low-trust society and the lack of goodwill that it produces. To begin with, the events occurred within a gated community with its own security guard. Williamsburg, Virginia boasts a crime rate much lower than the national average. Why the need for a locked and guarded community if the city is already relatively safe? And why didn’t the nosy neighbor, instead of alerting the security guard, simply make sure the boy got home safely? Was she trying to be meddlesome or genuinely helpful? If helpful, why the lack of personal involvement?
This little vignette of suburban life reveals a number of breakdowns within the social order. There is no tolerance for risk, no trust in one’s neighbors, no Good Samaritan attitude. The gated community’s security guard, the busybody, and the courts that convicted the mother of child endangerment seem to have had good intentions: the care and safety of a child. Instead it seems that the social fabric itself was the problem. How can a parent have faith in the goodwill of the world when the world’s sense of goodness is itself tenuous and hollow?
This is the question I have been asking myself ever since my daughter left for university. Educational institutions, as we know, aren’t ideologically neutral. The experts’ care of children is often at odds with parents’ care for them. This is particularly clear when it comes to specific issues, such as the social gender transition of children at school without parental knowledge. But in fact all the biggest questions we face as a society today — belief in God or in atheism, merit or diversity, asylum policies or immigration laws, communism or capitalism, free speech or censorship — fall under the purview of educational authority. Virtually no area of public or personal life is left unmonitored by the experts. The authorities aren’t necessarily at odds with what parents might teach, but they are harbingers of what often feels like a unified force of acceptable thinking. The entire education system can feel very much like a nosy neighbor whose best intentions for the convictions of your child interfere dangerously with your own. It is not uncommon for a mother to feel her influence over her child cede to the pervasive influence of the system. In the saddest cases, a child interiorizes the authority of public opinion and becomes, not merely alienated from her parents, but contemptuous of them.
One of the most chilling aspects of Orwell’s portrayal of totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four is the elimination of private life. The Party is everywhere, even inside one’s home. Children have no natural bonds, no family loyalty, and no preference for one’s own. Mrs Parsons, Winston’s neighbor, has two young children, and she is afraid of them. “What struck Winston,” Orwell writes, “was the look of helpless fright on the woman’s greyish face” as her children shriek about traitors and thoughtcrimes. “With those children,” Winston thinks, “that woman must lead a life of terror.” We may not live in a state where a child might narc out Mom and Dad to the thoughtcrime police, as they frequently do in Orwell’s dystopia, but the feeling that there are forces hostile to one’s own family sphere operating within the family itself is never, for some, entirely absent. It is one thing to be put out by a meddling neighbor, quite another to tiptoe around one’s own child as though avoiding re-education in Big Brother’s Ministry of Love.
Hannah Arendt writes that totalitarian terror is accomplished when private life is gone — that is, when tyranny makes solitude impossible and loneliness complete. She teases out the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian rule. A tyranny of any kind is undesirable, but under an authoritarian regime, it is still possible to be free in private: “The whole sphere of private life with the capacities for experience, fabrication and thought are left intact.” By contrast, under the “iron band of total terror”, she writes, there remains “no space for such private life and […] the self-coercion of totalitarian logic destroys man’s capacity for experience and thought just as certainly as his capacity for action”. It is the infiltration of The Party into the home that sent shudders both through Orwell and Arendt.
Mr Parsons, Winston’s thoroughly orthodox neighbor, is eventually reported to Big Brother by his seven-year-old daughter for committing a thoughtcrime in his sleep. “‘Thoughtcrime is a dreadful thing, old man,’” he tells Winston when they meet inside a cell at the Ministry of Love. “‘Do you know how it got me? In my sleep! Yes, that’s a fact. There I was, working away, trying to do my bit – never knew I had any bad stuff in my mind at all. And then I started talking in my sleep. Do you know what they heard me saying? […] “Down with Big Brother!” Yes, I said that!’” Parsons is appalled, not to have been betrayed by his child, but to have had unorthodox thoughts that cut against The Party.
Parsons bears an uncomfortable resemblance to nice people, the ones who seem to be correctly informed on all the issues and hold polite values. This is the type of parent who gently nods while explaining to their children that “everyone should do what feels right for them” or “the most important thing is to respect everyone”. Sentiments such as these aren’t incorrect. They are so entirely correct as to be banal — odious, somehow. If one has a bit of a rebellious side — is a little irreverent or impertinent or even just very funny — it feels dangerous to spend time with someone who believes in all the correct things. “Say something fucking wrong!” I want to shout at them. “Say it just to say it, to show that the public world doesn’t hold jurisdiction over your home, your family, and your private world.”
The home should remain a place for private life. It cannot be private unless one resists the intrusion of The Ministry of Nice. The home should be a safe place for dangerous ideas. If one wants a child capable of navigating the pathways of the world, of slipping past the notice of busybodies who are ready to report any whiff of risky thinking, they need a place where social conventions can be discarded, or ridiculed, or accepted. In order for our culture’s sense of goodness to sound, our understanding of the good cannot be synonymous with our sense of the nice. Sentimentalism might make one feel comfortable, but ease does not reflect coherent thought nor offer any guidance for a young person’s fledgling intellectual freedom.
A friend of mine recently joked that Gen Xers are the only people to be told, “You can’t say that”, first by our parents and now by our kids. Show your kids that you can say things inside the home. Normalize wrongspeak. Teach them how to feel free, to try on wrong ideas without the timidity that comes from cultural surveillance of well-intentioned busybodies.