‘Giving Tree’ is a lousy model for parent-child relationship

Shel Silverstein’s children’s book “The Giving Tree” is the gift that keeps on giving. Giving something, any way.

Here’s the entire plot: There is a tree and there is a boy. The tree loves the boy ver y much and gives him whatever he needs: juicy apples, shade from the hot sun, branches on which to swing. As he g rows, the boy car ves the initia ls of the g irls he fancies on the bark of the tree. Eventually, of course, he seeks to leave the tree and see the world. Only how will he, having no means by which he can survive without the tree?

So she, the tree, offers to be chopped down so that the boy can make a boat and sail away. Which he does, leaving the tree a branchless, fruitless stump. Many years pass.

In time, though, the boy comes back, stooped with age and weariness. The tree, in her sadness, explains that she has nothing left that she can g ive him. The boy assures her: he needs little now. Just a place to rest.

A stump can be a place of rest, she offers. Come, boy, come and rest.

Which is what the boy does. And the tree — we are told — is happy.

I first read “The Giving Tree” when I was a teenager, fatherless, angry at my mother for her vanity, her self-absorption. (Naturally I saw her with the total objectivity of an adolescent girl.)

So I loved the book. It made me feel sorry for myself. Why

didn’t I have a giving tree for a mother? I would be that kind of mother! One who gave her daughters “The Giving Tree,” one who read it to them in the regular rotation of children’s books before bed.

But one evening, “The Giving Tree” just made my skin crawl.

Maybe, for a new generation of parents, this is a version of evolutionary parenthood. Earlier this month in The New York Times, authors Adam Grant and Allison Sweet Grant talked about “The Giving Tree,” obser ving, “Research suggests that the role models in the stories we read to our children can have a lasting impact.” ( We need research to discover this?)

“Reading Harry Potter,” they obser ve, “has been shown to reduce prejudice among elementary schoolers. And when children as young as four pretend to be strong-willed characters like Batman or Rapunzel, they focus better on boring tasks.”

Again, pretty obvious. So they go on to make the critique that “The Giving Tree” normalizes parental self-sacrifice in an unhealthy and destructive way — but then they give the book a hall pass based on its age: “(It) was written in a different era.

... Half a century ago, parents were less worried about their children becoming self-centered. Today we live in an age of immediate gratification and filtered selfies. In a world where there is cause for concern that children are growing more entitled, we need better role models for generosity.”

That’s their takeaway from this parable of self-immolation?

A more apt one might be that skincrawling realization I had when I read the book to my daughters for the last time: when I saw a boy who really had remained a boy. I saw a one-sided relationship based on toxic self lessness held up as the ideal model for parenthood — the parent rightly fulfilling her role as a decimated stump.

Is Shel Silverstein really positing that the best parenting is a kind of personal crucifixion in which our self hood is poured out to our children’s benefit and at peril to our own?

Because if that ’s the case, what are our children learning ?

Our children don’t remain young. They age. Our ongoing parental responsibility changes from meeting immediate needs to modeling responsibly the gift and challenge of growth.

And neither they, nor we, should be stumped in our final f lowering.

Jo Page is a writer and Lutheran minister. Her email is jopage34@yahoo. com. Her website is at https://www. jograepage.com.