Parenting in the US: The War for Independence
In part 1, we talked about parenting as care-giving or values instillation. I went through some of the major challenges to this in current US society through financial constraints, time constraints, and un-restrained industrialization. Today, I will focus on the biggie: the core American value that has a dark side when it comes to families.
Independence
We fought a major war for independence in the late 18th C, fought it again 30 years later, and then fought it again 50 years later. Plus all sorts of battles in between. These have been the only wars fought largely on US soil. Really, this struggle continues: parts of our national community remain disenfranchised, and as long as we value independence, we will continue to fight. Much of this is positive. And yet, we pay a heavy price for putting independence first and foremost. Really multiple costs, but I’ll focus solely on the cost to families here.
American “traditional” culture holds that the task of childhood is to individuate, or separate, from parents. It’s a feature of Erikson’s stages of development, bound as an assumption of the identity-role confusion stage. We have laws about achieving independence: for all at 18, or if earlier, through “emancipation.” The message: there is me; there is you; and I must draw lines to distinguish. A huge bulk of American literature, film, music, and other arts focuses on ‘coming-of-age’ stories. For instance, notice how we now take the Romeo and Juliet story to be about Romeo and Juliet. We focus on them and their struggle to assert themselves. This element is arguably secondary in Shakespeare’s work. Shakespeare mostly focuses on the fractured community, and its destructive struggle to repair.
Independence and Identity
The American family, as set by the cultures that have been taken as the norm for the US, is built around independence. Throughout childhood, we give infants and toddlers leeway to explore, push school-age children to dive into interests and skills, and all towards the idea of “finding” who you are. We take identity as an ultimate truth. This is, in fact, magical thinking, of a ‘teleological’ sort. Teleological means we take the end result as evidence that there was a right end result to get to. In fact, identity is socially constructed, and continues to be constructed throughout life. This is shown poignantly in many end-of-life writings, such as W;t or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. We breathe the independence narrative in so pervasively that it can sometimes be as hard to notice as is the air all around us.
Independence: Negative Consequences
Artists have been acutely aware of the costs of independence culture for individuals. Avenue Q, for example, satirically skewers this often impossible quest for an individual “purpose.”
For families, placing independence above all inevitably succumbs to Newton’s Third Law: there is an equal and opposite reaction. Natural exploration does not know appointment deadlines. In the process of finding your identity, your body may find itself in an unsafe space you are not developmentally equipped to handle. Free exploration may not get along so well with others. In these example situations, parents find themselves stuck in a catch. Stick with independence, and leave your child in a potentially dangerous situation they are unequipped for. Or, swoop in and impose a culture shock on a child whose right to free-expression has now been infringed.
In adolescence, things get worse.
Stay tuned for part 3…