Unconditional Parenting, Children's Rights and the Parental Prerogative

(This is a continuation, more or less, of last week's post The Problem with Evil.)

Let's say you were out shopping one day and you saw a man and a woman walking toward their car. The woman said to the man that she'd like to stop for ice cream on the way home. The man grabs her by the wrist, hauls her towards their waiting car, and hisses at her that he's had enough of her constant demands and they're just going to go home RIGHT NOW and she'll be lucky if she gets ice cream ever again.

Now imagine that the woman is a little girl, three years old, and the man in question is her father.

Does his behaviour become more acceptable?

Why?

I just finished reading Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn, a book that argues that parents need to move from "punishment and rewards to love and reason." I'll be honest: the book drove me kind of nuts. It conflated the mildest of consequences with emotional abuse--believe me, it's not the times I missed a bedtime story or didn't get a treat at the store that made me question my parents' love for me or my worth as a person, it's the times they told me they hated me and wanted to get rid of me, and putting the two in the same category can be counted on to be fairly enraging to anyone who has actually experienced the latter. Furthermore, I question his evidence: while he quotes studies right, left and centre I don't have much trust in his honesty in doing so, if only because in one section he claims that all relevant research consistently shows only negative effects from competition for children: and, as anyone who has followed the scientific debate on this questions even peripherally over the last few years already knows, this is a highly contentious position and there is a substantial amount of research marshalled for the opposition (including a recent study on the benefits of organized sports for school readiness, as Ann blogged about recently). I'd like to do a full review of the book at some point in the near future, hopefully after I start school and have access to a glorious fully-stocked university library again, so that I can dig up the studies he references for myself to see what they say. In the meantime: there's this book, see, called Unconditional Parenting? And I read it, and it drove me kind of nuts.

But there was a lot of good in it, too. At the same time that I was enormously frustrated with the author's seeming extremism, I couldn't help but see how relevant and applicable it was to my own upbringing (which, as described above, was not precisely ideal in several aspects). The most interesting--precisely because it's missing from so many parenting manuals--is his baseline assumption that kids are actually people.

You might think this is a given, but I'd argue that we live in a society that claims to believe that children are real people, but rarely acts like it. Consider: It is not legal to pay someone less to do a given job based on their race, sex, dis/ability or sexual orientation, but it IS legal to pay someone less to do a given job if they are under sixteen. You can't restrict someone's access to public space dependent on race, income, gender or dis/ability, but you CAN restrict someone's access to public space if they are a child. Children can't own property and can't vote. I'm not saying there aren't good reasons for some of those restrictions, but it seems pretty clear that on the whole, we regard children as something like persons-in-waiting.

The clearest example to me that we don't really think of kids as people is that behaviour that is considered completely unacceptable if directed towards an adult is considered defensible if is directed against a helpless, dependent child; that, moreover, we consider it more important to preserve the parent's prerogative to do whatever they like with their children than to interfere on the child's behalf unless the parent is clearly engaging in the worst excesses of physical, sexual or emotional abuse.

If we actually thought that children were people with full human rights, then it would be self-evident that kids are entitled to respectful treatment and good parenting. Not that their parents are entitled to treat them like shit so long as they're trying their hardest and haven't done anything illegal yet so far as anyone can prove.

Think back to that example I posted at the top: would we care if the man said, "But I love my girlfriend, and I'm doing my best. I only pop off and hit her a few times a year but I never hit her hard, and I know I lose my temper and call her names sometimes, but she just pushes my buttons and I can't help it!" Would you buy it? No. His behaviour would be clearly inappropriate; we couldn't force his girlfriend to leave him, but we'd all be pretty united in our belief that he's a shitty, abusive boyfriend. We wouldn't care that he loves her and he's trying his best but he's really tired and his job is stressful.

Yet when it comes to children, these are exactly the justifications that we accept.

I am not a perfect mother. I have sometimes said things to Frances in anger that I regret. But I fully realize that on some level losing my temper is a choice, that I am responsible for it, that Frances deserves better, and that it is my job to change my behaviours, not her job not to trigger them. Even when she is being whiny or clingy or obstinate or slow (it does happen, even with Frances).

I also fully realized that if we lived in a society where people need to have permission to get pregnant, Frances wouldn't be here. Genetically and in terms of my own history, on paper, I am a bad risk for motherhood. Yet I like to think I'm doing pretty well. So I'm not saying that we need to license people for being parents--any more than we license them for being boyfriends, aunts, siblings, or any other type of relationship.

What I am saying is that parents do need to have more restrictions on how they can treat their children, that avoiding the very worst forms of abuse is not an acceptable guideline, that children are entitled to respectful treatment from everyone in their lives (which is a very different thing from legal treatment), and that parental prerogative and children's rights are mutually contradictory--we can't have both. That in a society that truly believes children are people who are entitled to the full spectrum of human rights, parental prerogative would not exist. That yes, there are good ways of raising kids, and there are bad ways of raising kids, and as a society we are entitled to draw and enforce those distinctions.

Just don't ask me how. I haven't figure that part out yet.

I'd like to be very clear in stating that I'm not arguing that society should legislate ideal or optimal parenting--any more than we should legislate ideal or optimal nutrition. Actually nutrition is not a bad analogy: we all know what we "should" be eating, we all know we're not eating it, but we also have a pretty good idea of where the line between "acceptably non-optimal" or "good enough" and "neglectful" is. That a baby is being acceptably cared for if he or she is being fed formula but is not being acceptably cared for if he or she is being fed pork rinds or orange juice. What I'm arguing here is that it's possible to draw a similar line for parenting styles that is somewhere above "doesn't beat, rape, starve or turn children into actors in child porn films."

Listen, we're the parents, right? We're the grown-ups. It's not our kids jobs to suffer in ways large or small so that we can avoid asking ourselves hard questions like "Am I a good enough mother?" or looking bad in front of other people or feeling uncomfortable when they question our parenting styles.

We're the adults. This is our burden to carry, not our children's. And I believe that when we abdicate our responsibility to figure out what acceptable parenting is and do something about it, we have collectively decided that it's more important for parents to feel good about themselves than it is for our kids to be well-cared for.

Posted by Andrea at August 21, 2008 9:58 AM under Mothers and Anti-Mothers

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