Lessons in fatherhood from the childless Henry David Thoreau
My father left when I was 4 and my brother was 8. He went on a work trip to New York and never came back to live with my family. Because he drank too much and was less than kind when he did, I never consciously missed him in my early years. But when I entered college, I started to gravitate to male professors. When they introduced me to writers and thinkers, I was drawn to the fathers of philosophy in no small part because they promised to sort out a very confusing world — mine, the world my father left behind.
Many of the towering figures from the history of philosophy were not fathers. The whole life-of-the-mind thing militates against getting one’s hands dirty with diapers and baby food. But somehow, I’ve become both a philosophy professor and a father. Becca, who is 10, is my biological child. Henry, who is 5, is not. I spent most of my life looking to philosophers for guidance, so it is only natural that I wondered if they could help as I learn to be a parent.
As I’ve become a stepfather, I have turned repeatedly to one figure from 19th-century American Transcendentalism for advice. It isn’t Ralph Waldo Emerson, father of four children. No. Emerson wasn’t a particularly amazing father. He was cool and detached — from almost everything — and often too absorbed in his work. Instead, I have found myself reading the writings of the man who took care of Emerson’s kids while the Sage of Concord was away: the childless Henry David Thoreau. In his 44 years of life, Thoreau proved that you can be a stellar parent even if you are not related to your kids.
When Emerson toured Europe in 1847, Thoreau moved into his mentor’s house to help raise the Emerson children, tutoring them but also leading them as the “Captain of the Huckleberry Party,” a near-daily berry-picking expedition. In November, Thoreau wrote to Emerson about his son Edward, who was 6. “I respect him not a little,” Thoreau wrote, explaining that he happily played “Mr. Rough and Tumble” with the boy. Edward asked his new manny, “Mr. Thoreau, can you be my father?” In an important respect, Thoreau already was, or something akin to it.
In 1917, in a slim tome titled “Henry Thoreau, Remembered by a Young Friend,” Edward Emerson recalled Thoreau as an elder brother, writing: “I CAN remember Mr. Thoreau as early as I can remember anybody, excepting my parents, my sisters, and my nurse. He had the run of our house, and on two occasions was man of the house during my father’s long absences. He was to us children the best kind of an older brother. He soon became the guide and companion of our early expeditions afield, and, later, the advisor of our first camping trips. I watched with him one of the last days of his life, when I was about seventeen years old.”
I believe that Thoreau’s was a father’s, not a brother’s, love, though. His was the kind of bond that causes one to go to pieces when a youngster passes away too soon. Thoreau did so at the news, in 1842, that 5-year-old Waldo Emerson had succumbed to scarlet fever.
Regardless of the exact relationship that Thoreau had with the children in his life, it is his particular take on raising kids that interests me most. Over the years, I’ve come to think of his approach as slow-growth or hardwood parenting. Thoreau wrote in his journal on Nov. 6, 1860, “I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected. Such trees continue to expand with nearly equal rapidity to extreme old age.”
Thoreau was a soft touch when it came to the Emerson children, at least in part because this sort of gentleness might encourage them to be resilient and durable. He taught them to take their time being young and wild — encouraging them to roll on the grass like snakes, to pet fish in still pools, and to scavenge for bushels of berries. There would be time enough to grow old and stodgy.
I think my father never liked parenting for the very simple and problematic reason that my brother and I were kids — rather than the adults we would become. I remember, quite vividly, the rare occasions when my father would visit and show my brother and me signs of love and affection. We’d have to win a soccer game, or ace a test, or lose some weight, or read “an adult book,” or learn a new skill. In other words, we would have to show him that we were growing up quickly, that we would soon grow out of being kids. There was no time to be, in Thoreau’s words, “solidified and perfected,” and my brother and I have risked growing into fathers who expect similarly precocious growth in our own children.
“Children, who play life,” Thoreau reminds us, “discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.” Raising children has less to do with their success and failure than with encouraging them to play, to take risks, and learn how to flourish with others. This type of parenting is extremely hard, far harder than micromanaging the lives of little ones. It has come as a real surprise to learn this lesson from Thoreau, a man who was never a father but acted wholly the part.