The demise of child-rearing

Public Interest, Fall, 2000 by Lyric Wallwork Winik

And a corresponding message is that parents are also replaceable; other caring adults can do their jobs just as well, if not better. We have books to tell us that peer groups are more important in shaping children than parents; we have instituted day-care certification processes, and there is an entire industry specializing in nanny-placement services. The ultimate test is not who cares for the child but whether his or her developmental needs are being met. Thus parents who are not stimulating (or ensuring the stimulation of) their toddlers' minds are now seen as contributing to their educational and developmental degradation. Thus it is with all earnestness that mothers whose children are being cared for at day-care centers can walk in at six o'clock at night and insist upon knowing what was done to stimulate their infant mentally. (Often, the real answer is not much; employees spend most of the day changing dirty diapers.) And thus, across the scientific universe of child-rearing, parents are but one set o f cogs in the developmental machine.

This, however, begins to raise another set of questions. Between the 300 or so years of child-development theories and another century or so of child-centered scientific research, is it not unreasonable to ask if we have over-thought childhood? Perhaps we have accumulated an excess of information, which instead of leading us closer toward enlightenment has instead carpet-bombed us with contradictions and left us in a state of quasi-paralysis. How can we experientially and nonjudgmentally mold the child as tabula rasa while simultaneously allowing him his instinctual freedom and making the most of his neural connections and intellectual hard-wiring by age three? No amount of self-esteem building is likely to get a parent out of this one. And thus we have, as a society, helped to make child-rearing and childhood that much harder.

But the problem is not simply too much theorizing and too many experts. For it is not only our notions of childhood that are changing but also our notions of parents. Parents may find themselves being devalued, questioned, or rendered replaceable; and conversely, they themselves are sometimes opting to take a very different path. Especially the mothers.

Are you my mommy?

Allegra Goodman is a young woman of letters, a regular in Commentary and the New Yorker, and the author of a well-received short-story collection and an equally well-received novel. Her characters come from the Jewish community; in the case of the novel, Kasterskill Falls, from the Hasidim to be exact. And, like their real-life counterparts, there is a surfeit of children among the characters in this novel. I point this out because that makes Goodman, within her own particular sphere, something of an anomaly, someone who writes about more traditionally organized families and whose central characters are not young, urban singles or the middle-aged caught in the throes of breakdown or adultery.

So it was with some small measure of surprise that upon picking up the anthology Child of Mine: Writers Talk About the First Year of Motherhood, I found her contribution, titled "Student Mother," beginning thus: