Bringing Children Up, or Bringing Them Down

I trust that I count among the very few who is not an aficionado of the writing of essayist David Sedaris. I prefer Tom Wolfe.

And yet, yesterday Bari Weiss’s The Free Press brought forth an interesting essay by Sedaris. Since I make a habit of reading what Weiss publishes, I happily waded into the Sedaris reflections on bringing up children. Apparently, we are no longer very good at it, so, we need all the help we can get.

One might say that we are no longer bringing up children. We are bringing them down.

Sedaris begins his essay with a day in the life of a member of Gen Z. It is too easy to expose the ridiculous pretension of this over-therapied generation, but we can indulge ourselves by offering one example.

A friend recently called on one of her assistants to deliver a statistic during a business meeting and was later charged with “casual violence.” Apparently Deborah needed to give advance warning that she was going to ask a question, one that might possibly put her employee—someone who was well paid to know stuff and be able to spew it forth—on the spot.

Now, Sedaris explains that this generation was mis-raised. Or better, brought down. They have been coddled and swaddled to the point where they cannot breathe-- and then they blame the climate for oxygen deficiency.

Who are these hothouse flowers, all so easily and consistently wounded? People whose parents never hit them, that’s who. People who don’t know what real pain is, but still want to throw the word around. 

Sorry to correct this, but it was less about the pain and more about the grotesque level of indulgence and permissiveness.

When I was a child, a slap across the face was too minor to qualify as “casual violence.” It was simply what you got for talking back or holding everyone up. It never hurt all that much; what stung was the swiftness of it, the surprise. Who knew my mother could move so fast, like someone belted in the martial arts. I don’t feel like it traumatized me to be knocked around a little. Blood was rarely drawn. No limbs were broken. Could my parents have made their point without resorting to violence? 

He continues, mentioning this near-worship of youth corresponds with a declining birth rate. People have fewer children. Ergo, they are more prone to spoil the children they have.

One might say, with some reason, that Sedaris has mistaken correlation for causation, but his observation still merits consideration:

One of the worst things that’s happened to us as a country is that people are having fewer children—1.8 as opposed to five 50 years ago. Sure, it’s good for the environment—fewer people means less demand for resources. The problem is that single children receive a freakish amount of love and attention. Most graduate at least twelve times before leaving high school. Their every move is recorded and celebrated, and it gives them an outsize sense of their own importance. 

Now, bad parenting insinuates itself into the school system. Children who did not learn to respect authority at home do not respect it in school. Worse yet, parents who glorify their often singular offspring refuse to accept that said offspring might be imperfect.

If our schools are a mess it’s in large part due to these parents who think their kids are special, who get mad if you contradict their brilliance, if you give them a bad grade or, God forbid, try to take their phones away.

I find one notion amusing, even if it does not make a lot of sense. Saying that children have no natural predators does give us a picture of children who follow their whims, their bliss and the call of their gut. Said children have been taught not to answer to any external authority:

Children now are like animals who have no natural predators left. Had I arrived at my elementary school with a bleeding head wound, explaining that my father had just thrown me out of his moving car because I was teasing my sister, the teacher would have handed me a Band-Aid, saying, “Well, I hope you learned a lesson from it.” Now, even a scratch on the back of your hand could get your parents locked up for abuse. And children know this! 

Neuroscience tells us that children do not develop the brain function that makes them moral beings until late adolescence. Giving morally underdeveloped children the power to do what they please is a very bad idea. See what happened during China’s Cultural Revolution.

Naturally, Sedaris does not want to sound like a crank, like someone who can only find fault. At the least, he feels obliged to offer a better, shining example of good parenting. To find it he had to go to Yokohama, Japan.

I know that that is far away, but certainly he was not going to find it in the West:

I wondered, thinking of a couple I saw on the subway in Yokohama once. Their eighteen-month-old son was with them, and when the boy wanted to look out the window, his mother removed his shoes, and took a towel out of her bag that he could stand on. Just before we reached their station, the woman pulled out a small spray bottle along with a paper napkin and cleaned the kid’s handprints off the glass. So actually, maybe that’s the solution. You have a child or two, and then send them off to be raised in Japan until they’re eighteen or so, and have learned proper manners. When they return and you tell them how absolutely awesome and special they are, they’ll look at you and blink, not understanding, and thus not believing, a word of it.

Fancy that, learning good manners. It’s the basis of being well brought up. Children who have no manners have been brought down, even before they are launched.

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