The parent trap
Throughout history parents have always done their best to raise their children to become healthy, well-adjusted adults. Yet, as UC Berkeley developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik points out in her timely, research-driven new book “The Gardener and the Carpenter,” it’s only very recently that we’ve tackled parenting (a verb that only became popular in the 1970s, Gopnik points out) with the same kind of outcome-oriented determination applied to academic and workplace success.
The problem, according to Gopnik, who earlier explored very young children’s minds in “The Philosophical Baby” and “The Scientist in the Crib,” is that the more we’ve come to see parenting as a job, an anxiety-provoking one aiming to engineer a child’s successful future, the more angst-ridden and less joyful parents have become.
For Gopnik, a psychology and philosophy professor, the important distinction between parenting and being a parent is captured in her title’s metaphor. Whereas a carpenter works toward a specific, static outcome, a gardener, like the ideal parent, is more open to the unpredictable whims of nature over which one has, ultimately, far less control.
In an age of Kumon preschool enrichment and hypercompetitive college admissions, Gopnik’s central message is radical in its simplicity: “Love doesn’t have goals or benchmarks or blueprints, but it does have a purpose,” she writes, “not to change the people we love, but to give them what they need to thrive.” Gopnik spoke recently by phone; her answers have been edited for length.
Q: You call parenting a “bad invention.” What’s so wrong with it?
A:
Well, first of all, it isn’t a verb. We don’t wife our husbands and we don’t child our parents. We don’t measure the quality of our other relationships by how well the other person turns out, for instance whether my husband is a better person after 10 years than he was when I first met him. To support the people we care about is intrinsic, it is not instrumental. It’s not something we do because we’re hoping to get some other outcome.
Q: You write that “from an empirical perspective, parenting is a mug’s game.” In other words, the choices parents agonize over — whether or not to sleeptrain, how much to push homework, etc. — don’t have any discernible correlation to adult traits. Does that surprise you?
A:
It’s striking when you look at the research, and also frustrating because it can lead some people to then say that parents don’t matter, and that’s not true at all. The irony is that we pay attention to all these things that don’t matter, and not to what does matter, such as parents having enough resources to provide an environment where their children have both security and freedom.
Q: Do you hope your book is a welcome tonic to parents who feel pulled by conflicting advice?
A:
Yes, I certainly hope that’s one of its effects. However, as I’ve been talking to people about the book, I keep getting this reaction of, “Yes, I completely agree with you, it’s been my intuition there isn’t any formula (to being a parent). Now, just one last question: Would you tell me what the formula is?” (Laughs.)
Q: Do you think living and teaching in Berkeley influenced your choice of subject matter?
A:
The Bay Area has always been a hotbed for people wanting to be reflective and not just do what everyone has done before. That’s a good thing because it means they’re open to new possibilities, but it can also mean you can’t do anything intuitively. I’ve spoken with Michael Pollan about this, and I think there’s a good analogy between what happened to caregiving and our obsessiveness with food. As Michael has pointed out, the more obsessively we focus on what a particular food is going to do for us, the less healthy we’ve become. Simple pleasures become complicated.
In the same way, instead of just saying, “I love my baby and I pick him up because he’s adorable and it’s so nice to cuddle with him,” we practice attachment parenting. We let our children play outside and have age-appropriate freedoms and are labeled freerange parents.
Caring for children has always been one of the deepest and most satisfying things that a human being does, and yet it is hard to keep a healthy attitude toward it in our competitive, outcome-oriented society.
Q: You and your brothers (Adam and Blake Gopnik) are all successful writers and thinkers. So, were your parents, to use your metaphor, carpenters or gardeners?
A:
Someone writing about me in the London Times asked why didn’t I write about the Gopnik method? Well, because the Gopnik method was basically to just include us in everything. I don’t remember our parents ever doing something because it was going to make the children smarter. It was more like, “We’re going to the opening of the Guggenheim (Museum), so of course our 2- and 3-year-old will come along,” which is one of my first memories. Our parents felt, “If we’re doing it, then our children will do it, too.”
Jessica Zack is a freelance writer who frequently covers art and film for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com