In Praise of Messy Lives (22 page)

The bookshelves offer bright assistance:
Amazing Minds: The Science of Nurturing Your Child’s Developing Mind with Games, Activities, and More; Raising Your Spirited Child: A Guide for Parents Whose Child Is More Intense, Sensitive, Perceptive, Persistent, Energetic; Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry)
. These books, and the myriad others like them, hold out the promise of a healthy, civilized venture, where every obstacle, every bedtime, every tantrum, is something to be mastered like an exam at school.

Can we, for a moment, flash back to the benign neglect of the late 1970s and ’80s? To children helping themselves to three slices of cake, or ingesting secondhand smoke, or carrying cocktails to adults who were ever so slightly slurring their words. To those evenings when they were not noticed; they were loved, just not monitored. And, as I remember it, those warm summer nights of not being focused on were liberating. In the long sticky hours of
boredom, in the lonely, unsupervised, unstructured time, something blooms; it was in those margins that we became ourselves.

And then, of course, it sometimes turns out that the perfect environment is not perfect. Take, for example, the fastidiousness a certain segment of modern parents enthusiastically cultivates.
The New York Times
recently ran an article called “Babies Know: A Little Dirt Is Good for You,” which addressed itself sotto voce to parents who insist that everyone who enters their house take off their shoes, who obsessively wash hands, or don’t allow their children on the subway and carry around little bottles of disinfectant. Apparently, there is, from a sensible scientific point of view, such a thing as being too clean; children, it turns out, need to be exposed to a little dirt to develop immunities, and it seems that the smudged, filthy child happily chewing on a stick in the playground is healthier than his immaculate, prodigiously wiped-down counterpart. I like this story because there may be no better metaphor for the conundrum of overprotection, the protection that doesn’t protect.

As their children get a little bit older, and slightly beyond the range of constant obsessive monitoring, homework offers parents another fertile opportunity to be involved, i.e., immersed. I can recall my own mother vaguely calling upstairs “Have you done your homework?” but I cannot recall her rolling up her sleeves to work side by side with me cutting out pictures of rice paddies for a project about Vietnam, or monitoring how many pages of
Wuthering Heights
I had read. One mother told me about how her seven-year-old, at one of New York’s top private schools, received an essay assignment asking how his “life experience” reflected Robert Frost’s line in “The Road Not Taken”: “I took the one less traveled by.” And of course, that would be a
question calling out for the parent writing it herself, since the seven-year-old’s “life experience” had not as of yet thrown up all that many roads.

One of the more troubling aspects of our new ethos of control is that it contains a vision of right-minded child-rearing that is in its own enlightened, super-liberal way as exclusive and conformist as anything in the 1950s. Anyone who does not control their children’s environment according to current fashions and science, who, say, feeds their kid American cheese sandwiches on white bread, or has a party that lasts until two in the morning, is behaving in a wild and reckless manner that somehow challenges the status quo. The less trivial problem is this: the rigorous ideal of the perfect environment doesn’t allow for true difference, for the child raised by a grandparent, or a single mother, or divorced parents; its vision is definitely of two parents taking turns carrying the designer baby sling. Mandatory twenty-four-hour improvement and enrichment, have, in other words, their oppressive side.

A quick perusal of a random calendar for a random Saturday for a random member of this generation’s finest parents will reveal shuttling to gymnastics class and birthday parties and soccer, and Feeling Art and Expressing Yourself Through Theater—entire days vanishing into the scheduled and rigorous happiness and enrichment of the child, entire days passing without the promise or hope or expectation of even one uninterrupted adult conversation. (Those who fall a little short can only aspire to this condition of energetic and industrious parenting.)

One sometimes sees these exhausted, devoted, slightly drab parents, piling out of the car, and thinks, Is all of this high-level watching and steering and analyzing really making anyone happier?
One wonders if family life is somehow overweighted in the children’s direction—which is not to say that we should love them less, or less centrally, but that the concept of adulthood has somehow transmogrified into parenthood. What one wonders, more specifically, is whether this intense, admirable focus is good for the child. Is there something reassuring in parental selfishness, in the idea that your parents have busy, mysterious lives of their own, in which they sometimes do things that are not entirely dedicated to your entertainment or improvement?

I also can’t help but wonder if all of the effort poured into creating the perfect child, like the haute bourgeois attention to stylish food, is a way of deflecting and rechanneling adult disappointment. Are these parents, so virtuously exhausted, so child-drained at the end of one of these busy days, compensating for something they have given up? Something missing in their marriage? Some romantic disappointment? Some compromise of career or adventure? One can’t help but wonder, in other words, what Tolstoy or Flaubert would make of our current parenting style.

The effort to control is prolonged, too, later and later into the child’s life. Colleges in the United States have begun to give parents explicit instructions about when it is time to leave after dropping students off at school, because otherwise they won’t. Even at college, even with seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, these parents are lingering, involved, invested, tinkering; they want to stay, in other words, and control more.

Built into this model of the perfectible child is, of course, an inevitable failure. You can’t control everything; the universe offers up rogue moments that will make your child unhappy or sick or brokenhearted. The one true terrifying fact of bringing an innocent
baby into the fallen world is that no matter how much rubber flooring you ship to the villa in the south of France, you can’t protect her from being hurt.

This may sound more bombastic than I mean to be. All I am suggesting is that it might be time to stand back, pour a drink, and let the children torment, or bore, or injure each other a little. It might be time to dabble in the laissez-faire; to let the imagination run to art instead of art projects; to let the imperfect universe and its imperfect children be themselves.

When T. S. Eliot wrote about the cruelest month “mixing memory and desire,” he might also have had in mind that this is the season of school admissions in New York City. So as the sooty piles of snow melt into gray puddles, parents obsess over the letters they will and won’t receive from the school that will or won’t confer on their radiant progeny the blessing of its approval. It seems to be a challenge in this season for even the more sensible parents among us, even those who really do have better things to do, not to fall prey to the prevailing fantasy that if your child is rejected from one of these desirable and enlightened places, he or she will be destined for a life of drug addiction, grand theft auto, or general exile and smoldering mediocrity.

My eighteen-month-old recently had his first school interview. Apparently he sailed through it, though how is somewhat mysterious to me. Especially since he calls all fruits “apples,” and sentences such as “Mommy. Moon. Get it” are not necessarily indicative of a huge understanding of the workings of the universe. However, no one is too young for the system, and a small
obstacle like language cannot be permitted to get in the way of the judging and selecting and general Darwinian sorting to which it is never too soon to accustom yourself in this city. I have been asked to write recommendations for other one-and-a-half-year-olds for this same lovely school, and have thought of writing, but did not actually write, “He knows a lot about trucks.”

You might think it would be enough to be unnaturally occupied with your own children’s admissions saga, but you would be wrong: it is also important, in certain circles, to be unnaturally occupied with other people’s admissions sagas. Recently at a dinner party a few blocks from my house, someone said that the wife of a well-known man was lying about where their twin boys got into school. The mother of these twins claimed that they had “chosen” a less prestigious school over another, more prestigious school, but someone else “knew for a fact” from a connection in the admissions department of the more prestigious school that they had not got in. This mother, the story went, who had given up working to raise her twins, experienced the school rejection as such a crushing failure that she lied about it. And the person who did the energetic digging and unearthing? I am not sure what her motivation was. Does someone at this dinner party stop to think, “Who have we become?” I think in the corner was a disaffected English father, muttering about the class system, but I wasn’t there.

And the admissions process is, for many, only the beginning. There is on the part of certain parents, in certain schools, a slightly unholy fascination with the school. They socialize constantly with the other parents, there are opportunities several times every week to have coffee or drinks with them, there are
mixers and potluck dinners and listservs; there is perhaps the tiniest bit of cosmic confusion over who exactly is attending the school: the children who just go there, or the parents who revel and revere and bask in it.

It is interesting that the parents at these schools will be the first to tell you that other private schools are very materialistic, and that the culture of these other schools is truly off-putting, that they would never dream of sending their Finn or Ava to the other schools because they would imbibe the wrong values, and they will very happily recount stories of moneyed excess about these other schools, but their school, and by implication, of course,
they
are not like that. (I won’t rehash these stories here, but I have recently heard about a fashionable, progressive Brooklyn private school, in which a birthday party of eleven-year-old girls was taken to Victoria’s Secret to buy bras and underwear and then they went back to the Soho Grand Hotel to take pictures of themselves and sleep over. At another Manhattan private girls’ school, one resourceful mother hired, for her daughter’s
Wizard of Oz
–themed seventh birthday party, actual dwarves to serve the food. This is the kind of story that we are talking about, and they are too numerous and florid to fit here.) These parents decrying the materialistic culture of this other school, saying, “It’s disgusting, it really is,” might be sitting in their beach house, over a dinner of grilled shrimp and fresh corn, with the live-in, uniformed baby nurse upstairs with the colicky baby. If you, from the outside, are having trouble seeing how their life—with its long summers at the beach, winters in the Caribbean, the sprawling apartment on the Upper East Side, the helpful doorman, the ubiquitous housekeeper, the $1,000 boots from Barneys—is so different in its values and messages from these other, materialistic parents at the
other school, we will assume that is a problem with your clarity and understanding.

These same parents will also very quickly point out that their school is “diverse.” The reality is that their school, like all the other schools, is a tiny bit diverse. There are a few kids who will trudge a very long way every morning, from another neighborhood, on a scholarship, but the large bulk of the class very much resembles in background the other kids in the class. This is a puzzling word, “diverse,” thrown around all the school promotions, into pamphlets and brochures and websites, because if you were truly committed to sending your children somewhere “diverse,” would you not be selecting a different school, one that doesn’t require almost all of its students to pay tuition that could support several villages in Africa? Or do these parents, to be totally honest, just want a little bit of diversity? If the catalogues were being totally honest about what parents are looking for, would they advertise, say, a soupçon of diversity?

The interesting element of this obsession is that each of these unique and excellent schools seems to be conferring some ineffable quality, not just on its students, but on the parents of these students. In the ten minutes they spend dropping their children off in its hallways, they are seeing some flattering image of themselves reflected back: progressive, enlightened, intellectually engaged.

The most sought-after school in my neighborhood, a famously open-minded and progressive and arty yet very exclusive private school, is conferring a kind of creativity on the parents, so that even if they are bankers or hedge-fund guys, as many of them frankly are, they can tell themselves in the dark of night that they are creative people, because their children attend this
impeccably creative school. And if they are creative people—that is, people who have somehow made enough money to send their children to this school, but work in film or music or advertising—they can congratulate themselves on their creativity, even if they are not, although in a creative profession, exactly creating anything themselves. The secret suspicion that you might be a hack, a glorified hack, making a rather nice living doing something fun but not truly living out your fantasy of creating art the way you honestly thought you would be in college, well, the check you make out to that fancy, creative, open place you are sending your child to is eloquently arguing otherwise. They are putting on operas when they are three years old, after all. They are performing
Hamlet
in the second grade. They are illustrating Wallace Stevens poems by the time they are six. How could anyone accuse you of just being a banker, or a music executive, or an Internet guy with good glasses? I have a friend whose five-year-old attends this school. She and her husband were pleased that when their daughter had an assignment to write down what she wanted to be when she grew up she wrote “artist.” But when they arrived at the class presentation the next day they saw that all twenty-two children had put down “artist”: there were no veterinarians, no circus acrobats, no doctors, no hair cutters. Twenty-two artists in one kindergarten class: the school, you see, does not play around.