Bringing Up Parents

I don't quite know what to make of yesterday's New York Times article: "When a Parent's 'I Love You' Means 'Do as I Say." Link here.

For quite some time now psychologists have been debating whether parents should love their children conditionally or unconditionally. Should they love their children when they do the right thing? Should they withhold love and affection when the children get it wrong? And should they love a child more when he gets a good score on a spelling test and less when he gets a bad score?

I am not going to summarize the answers because the terms of the problem are unclear and need redefinition.

First, most children have two parents of two different genders. Mothers and fathers are not the same thing. It is not obvious, to me at least, that they need to have exactly the same policy toward love and discipline.

In many, if not most, families the mother expresses love and care-- often, unconditionally-- while the father defines the rules and enforces discipline.

Yet, the article does not draw this most elementary distinction. I suspect that the gender neutral world of advanced psychologically-correct thinking does not acknowledge it. Yet, most children, from an extremely early age, can tell the difference between mother and father. They know that mother will always love them and that they will not always live up to their father's standards.

The article also confuses things because it fails to distinguish between loving your children and feeling proud of them. A parent might very well love a child no matter what, but it does not make a great deal of sense for the same parent to feel parental pride when the child when not accomplished anything worthy of said pride.

If your child drops the ball, you will still love him. You will not, however, feel proud of him for having committed an error.

If you mistake love for pride and try to feel proud of your child no matter what he does you will, in my view, foster feelings of grandiose narcissism.

When your child makes a mistake, you will, as a loving parent, will console him, tell him that everyone drops the ball sometimes, and offer a few extra hours playing catch in the backyard.

To me that feels like parental love. No one would really want to shun a child for making an error. But no one should want to feel pride in a child when the child has not earned it.

I would add that good parenting does not involve telling the child that you are proud of him for trying, no matter the outcome.

It is better to try than not to try, but parental pride should be reserved for success.

Without considering the difference between love and pride, and without considering that mothers and fathers do not have the same role, the discussion becomes confused and misleading.

The Humble Leader

In comments inspired by David Brooks' most recent column, John Baldoni offers an analysis of how humility can work in a leader's favor. Link here.

For my own take on the Brooks column, see yesterday's post.

Baldoni wants current and prospective leaders to know that arrogance and bluster are often the contrary to effective leadership. Your greatness as a leader is seen in the way your team functions, not in your ability to prance around barking orders.

All things considered, it is better to be a humble leader than a humbled leader. If you are not the first you are far more likely to be the second.

The Decline and Fall of America

While I've been identifying the green shoots that might signal a return to civic virtue, other members of our heteroclite culture have been hard at work promoting incivility, in the form of grotesque egomaniacal public outbursts.

In an excellent column this morning David Brooks looks back nostalgically at the American reaction to victory in World War II. Link here.

There he finds a victorious nation refusing to gloat. Having won the war, America was awash in modesty and humility. From political leaders to celebrities everyone struck the same moral tone: the war was over; it was time to get back to work.

To Brooks it sounded like victory.

At some point in the decades that followed, we lost the modesty and humility that characterized the "greatest generation." Intellectuals and artists in the 50s began the critique, but the decisive moment of cultural transformation came during the 60s with the advent of the counterculture.

The culture of modesty and humility was attacked and ultimately defeated because it was deemed to be mentally unhealthy.

As Brooks put it: "Self-effacement became identified with conformity and self-repression. A different ethos came to the fore, which the sociologists call 'expressive individualism.'"

Brooks does not quite say it, but his terminology suggests that he understands well that the new ethos was produced, propagated, and proselytized in the name of mental health. I have been calling it the therapy culture. Surely, it represented the triumph of a therapeutically-correct way of life.

Generously, Brooks says that this is: "just the culture in which we live." I fear it is not quite that easy. Especially as a conclusion to a column that clearly associates the lost (and hopefully, now resurgent) culture of the World War II generation with success.

The new culture may not be the death of civilization, but it does mean something. In Brooks' words: "It's funny how the nation's mood was at its must humble when its actual achievements were at their most extraordinary."

Actually, it is not really all that funny. The cultural ethos that glorifies self-promotion and self-expression is not a culture of achievement.

It is a culture of self-congratulation designed to cover up failure. It's a culture that says: let's declare victory and go home. As though the utterance of a few magical words could create reality.

It may not be the death of civilization-- largely because civilization does not stop at the nation's borders-- but if we are going to solve our problems and re-emerge as a great and prosperous nation, we must also work at cultivating the green shoots of civic virtue.

In this context, and not wanting to be anything less than optimistic, we might see the recent breaches of public decorum as the death knell of the therapy culture.

It may be a good omen that no one is rushing to defend Kanye West or Joe Wilson on the grounds that they were right to express their feelings.

Love in a Time of Feminism

Prof. Martha Nussbaum is seeing a culture shift. Compared with students in the 60s and 70s today's college students are more risk-averse, more cautious, and more practical about their future plans. Link here.

In her words: "... they certainly do seem to be more cautious and calculating-- about career choice, political engagement, and aspiration generally. They make prudent life plans, and are unembarrassed by all their prudence. It would not surprise me if attitudes toward romantic love have become more cautious and calculating, and perhaps also similarly ironic and detached."

The culture shift is not difficult to understand. In the 60s and 70s the country was solvent. Now the country is bordering on insolvency.

Students have become more prudent because they are dealing with new realities. Those of us who grew up in a different America should feel proud of these young people. We should not, as Nussbaum suggests, instruct them to feel embarrassed for having learned the virtue of prudence.

Nussbaum wrote these lines in a review of Cristina Nehring's book: "A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance in the Twenty-First Century." My own comments on the book can be found here.

While Nussbaum does not hold Nehring's book in very high regard, she does agree with her that romantic love is an extraordinary, soul-shaping experience, and that it entails considerable risks for those who enter its hallowed corridors.

Nussbaum and Nehring place great value on the experience of falling madly in love. They differ on the nature of the experience. For Nussbaum true love is a more philosophical, more Platonic emotional intimacy, something that is best left to artists and intellectuals. For Nehring true love is more melodramatic, a wild excursion to the dark side, promising, thrills, chills, and spills.

Beyond the fact that they are talking about two different kinds of love, Nussbaum and Nehring are divided on the role feminism has played in women's search for love.

Nehring says that feminism has made women so practical-minded that they have lost touch with their appetite for romance. A woman who assumes career responsibilities will be less free to give all for love. Modern women, then, do not go for the grand passion, but settle for less-than-ideal amorous arrangements.

If feminism is responsible for this state of affairs, then that is to its credit.

Besides, in our everyday lives we rarely see the grand literary passions that Nehring worships. That kind of love is the stuff of fiction and dreams. At best, it is the domain of adolescent girls. But it is certainly not something to build an adult life on.

Nussbaum especially objects to Nehring's blaming the lack of romance on feminism. For her, feminism has mostly offered legal protections to women. Without these legal protections, a love based on mutual respect would be impossible, she believes.

To me this feels like an intramural dispute in a church I do not belong to. But it raises a number of basic issues about relationships and the larger culture.

As I reflect on these issues, I keep thinking of a term that Nussbaum never mentions in her long review: marriage.

Romantic love and marriage are not necessarily the same thing. Platonic love and marriage are also not necessarily the same thing.

Once the question rises beyond emotional and sexual affinity into the realm of making a life together, the free-wheeling, often careless, adolescent passion yields to a more sober, temperate, adult love.

If adult women are not indulging the extremes of romantic love, then perhaps the reason is that they have grown up.

Whatever kind of love we are talking about, the most important question is whether a woman's choice of a mate should be based entirely on love or whether it should make love one among other considerations.

Marriage is a social institution. Romantic love is not. Nor is philosophical love. Making an individual part of your life is not the same as seeking out passionate intensity.

In fact, the more inappropriate your lover would be as a spouse, the more intense your passion.

This question is central to Nussbaum's review. My take is as follows: it often happens that choosing inappropriate lover causes you to alienate friends and family. Then, seeing yourself as having made a grand sacrifice for love, you will harbor the expectation that your lover will compensate your loss by offering constant and undivided attention. Since no single human being can be the the entirety of your social network, the passion will necessarily end badly.

For me, however the most provocative concept in the debate is... risk. Nehring and Nussbaum seem to agree that young women today are more risk-averse, thus, less apt to let themselves be carried away on wings of ecstatic rapture.

But, there are risks and there are risks. There are emotional risks in falling in love, but there are also risks involved in the opposite of true love: casual sexual encounters.

Admittedly, modern medical science has mitigated these risks, but it has not eliminated them.

Yet, I cannot agree with Nussbaum when she says, following Nehring, that women: "did not have much of an opportunity to take risks for love until feminism came along."

The practice of adultery in pre-feminist cultures contradicts this assertion. Think of the medieval practice of courtly love. And think of what was at risk for a married woman when she took a teenaged lover.

Certainly, these passions were more intense as the risk was greater. But they were also more intense because were purportedly unconsummated.

Finally, Nussbaum asserts that true love, based on mutual respect, cannot exist without the agency of the law. Until women gained the legal protections that feminism fought for in recent years they were not, in her view, free to engage in love relationships.

Beyond the fact that this assertion demeans countless generations of women, it does not feel true on its face. The notion of marrying for love dates to seventeenth century England, and does not seem to have been a consequence of feminist legal reforms.

For my part I would guess the first marriages based on love date to the time of the Protestant Reformation. When Martin Luther and his monkish followers broke with the Catholic Church over the issue of a celibate clergy they created a new form of marriage, one that was not arranged, that did not involve titles and possessions, but that was based on love.

Defrocked monks, priests, and nuns marrying each other... at the risk of consigning their souls to eternal perdition... that was probably the way the Western world introduced love into marriage... and also granted women a fuller measure of social respect.

On the Road to Happiness

When last I posted on this blog I was reporting on studies connecting weight gain with dining rituals. What you eat does matter, but whom you eat with also matters. The studies were important for emphasizing this latter, often overlooked, aspect of the problem.

I have been blogging about similar studies for quite some time now, mostly because I want to chronicle an important culture shift. The therapy culture is losing influence and is being replaced by a more balanced view of human behavior.

In many cases scientific research is challenging the dogmas of the therapy culture, revealing that they are not based on science, but on ideology.

The new scientific studies have simply acknowledged the indubitable fact that human being always live in society, and thus, that their health and well-being must have something to do with the company they keep.

Where the therapy culture saw us as individual mental units controlling and channeling impulses, the new culture sees us as social beings who function at their best when interacting with others.

It may be too early to label it a full-fledged movement, but the new culture took several leaps forward in today's New York Times Magazine. Clive Thompson's article is: "Is Happiness Catching?" Link here.

As Thompson reports, recent research has shown that: "staying healthy is not just a matter of genes and diet." Being friends with healthy people contributes importantly to our own health.

Good health habits, he writes: "...pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses."

The metaphor is strange, and was probably chosen to get our attention. Hopefully, no one will get the impression that we all need vaccines against good health habits.

Thompson is reporting that if all our friends stop smoking and start eating better we are likely to do the same. Why would we do so? We want to conform to the group's norms.

And yet, the therapy culture has always cast aspersions on conformism. It has preached that conformity is a bad thing because it prevents us from expressing our inviolate individuality.

Now, recent research has shown that it is better to get along with others than to express your true emotions creatively.

Speaking of two test subjects Thompson said: "By keeping in close, regular contact with other healthy friends for decades, Eileen and Joseph had quite possibly kept themselves alive and thriving."

It's not just about healthy habits. Anyone who keeps in touch with friends for decades usually has very good social skills. They may not be involved in operatic relationships, but they are masters of producing and sustaining harmony.

This implies good character, a willingness to put your concern for the feelings of others ahead of your own will to express your own.

Surprisingly, the studies suggest that it is more important to have many superficial relationships than to have a very few close and intense ones.

Thompson said: "...one of the more curious findings in their research [is]: If you want to be happy, what's most important is to have lots of friends." He adds: "the happiest people were those who had the most connections, even if the relationships weren't necessarily deep ones." And he concludes: "happiness doesn't come from having deep heart-to-heart talks."

Take a moment to measure the import of this thought. I venture that no therapist has ever suggested that the path to happiness lay in having a myriad of superficial acquaintances. Therapy has always gone for the gusto, for the deep and intense relationship, for the one true love relationship where you could pour out your heart and soul and not be judged ill for it.

This meant that therapy was using the relationship between therapist and patient as the model for the way humans ought to connect. Explicitly or implicitly, it was telling us that the bad communication habits that we would inevitably learn from therapy should form the basis for future relationships.

In other words, therapy was pretending to offer a useful social skill.

Therapists did not bother to tell us that if we talked to our friends the way we talked to our therapist then we would have far fewer friends.

The net result is: after all those years of therapy and the therapy culture, we still have difficulty knowing how to get along with each other. So, Freud had it wrong, and Rodney King had it right.

It's not about becoming a secular saint by sacrificing happiness for psychodrama, but about learning how to just get along, with large numbers of people on a superficial level.

Curb Your Appetite

The title of the Time magazine article is almost great: "The Social Side of Obesity: You Are Who You Eat With." Link here.

I qualify it as "almost" great because I would have preferred that they emphasize health, not obesity.

Putting that aside, author Shahreen Abedin does very well to place eating disorders within a social context.

Where classical therapy has defined the problem in terms of the relationship between mind and appetite, more recent research has started with the fact that we are hard-wired to eat with others. This research shows that whom we eat with greatly influences how we eat, what we eat, and how much we eat.

So, therapy got it wrong. Worse yet, by failing to place eating withing a social context it doomed individuals to an unending struggle with appetite.

When therapy teaches people to see themselves as unique, autonomous, independent individuals, each of whom it trying to control the appetites that risk taking over their lives, it is consigning them to inevitable failure.

If it's just you and your appetite, alone in front of the refrigerator, the chances are very, very good that you are going to lose. People who binge, binge alone. Admittedly, some groups get together to engage in binge-eating-- or more commonly, binge-drinking-- but the average binge eater binges alone.

Thus, one way to help a person overcome the tendency to binge-eat is to encourage him to eat with others, in a group. Meals are rituals and rituals satisfy the need to feel like part of a group. Thus, no one will have to satisfy that need by overeating.

If the individual is left to struggle with his appetite by himself, he might well find some unsavory ways to do so. For example, we know well that depression suppresses appetite. Thus, some people will have a vested interest in maintaining a low level of depression because it helps with their weight control.

But when a depressed person feels the depression lifting and old appetites returning he might feel anxious that he will start overeating. Thus he might work out a way to restore the depression.

But we should also note-- to complicate things-- that you do not have to have a strong appetite to eat a lot. Some people use food to medicate depressive or anxious states. They feel desperate and mistake desperation for appetite.

And some people select certain foods because of their biochemical properties. Eating too much dulls their anguish at being alone.

The cure is not to learn how to control appetite, but to choose to eat with others.

According to the Time magazine report, the best and healthiest way to control appetite does not involve counting calories, measuring portion size, or strengthening your ego's control over your impulses. All you have to do is to arrange to share a meal.

But not just with any others.

Here the research has made some important distinctions. You will eat more with a friend or family member than with a stranger. The need to make a good impression on another person, thus to forge a new connection, induces better behavior. As you know, you are going to be connected to your parents, children, and siblings no matter how much you eat.

Also, when you are at a normal weight and you are eating with someone who is overweight you will likely eat more than you usually would. Apparently, your appetite will yield to your concern that the other person not feel badly about overeating.

If, however, you are overweight and are eating with a skinny person, you will be likely to eat less. This suggests that appetite also yields to an urge to conform.

If we introduce gender into the equation, some interesting things happen. When a woman is eating with a man, say, on a date, she will eat less than she would if she were eating with a girlfriend. Research has also shown that the more men there are at a table, the less a woman will eat.

The same does not seem to apply to men. Researchers believe that a man's caloric intake is unaffected by the presence of a woman.

This feels counterintuitive, but that does not necessarily make it true. If a man is trying to impress a date, he would, in my view, be less likely to pig out. He would also be more likely to eat more when he is surrounded with his friends in that classical male bonding ritual of watching a football game.

Coaching an Executive's Spouse

Everybody considers the role of the executive's spouse (especially, wife) to be antiquated, outdated, offensive, and unworthy of serious concern. Especially when said wife does not have a career of her own.

At a time when women are most often judged according to whether they have their own careers, the stay-at-home wife barely appears on the culture's radar screen. Women who choose that path are not considered to be role models for young women.

The role of executive spouse goes well beyond full-time mother and homemaker. And it goes well beyond paying lip service to being supportive.

Being an executive spouse is a job in itself. Such an individual works to help her husband advance his career. She socializes, entertains, and networks. She can often be his most important adviser. And she can be an important corporate asset or liability.

The two most prominent recent executive spouses are Laura Bush and Michelle Obama.

When senior executives are being interviewed for important positions, hiring committees often invite their wives along for dinner or even a meeting.

They want to see what kind of executive decision the man has made in choosing a wife. And they want to see whether his wife is cooperative, understanding and tolerant of the demands of his job.

Chief executives do not have as much time as they would like for home and family. Those whose wives who can function well under those circumstances will be more focused on their jobs.

If a wife's concerns are a constant distraction, the executive will be less likely to perform well on his job.

I began thinking more seriously about these issues when I read Jamie Stengle's illuminating article for the Associated Press. Link here.

Stengle interviewed Colette Young, wife of a corporate CEO, who had founded a business coaching the wives of executives.

The issues range from etiquette to office politics to how to deal with an overworked executive husband. In her view the executive wife is a also a CEO. She manages her home and family, while also contributing to her husband's work.

Happily the Associated Press has also provided us with an excellent interactive quiz that all wives can use to evaluate their own reactions to everyday stressful situations. Link here.

The quiz is important beyond the fact that it allows wives to judge where they fit-- and where they want to fit-- on the good, better, best continuum. Its greater value is in offering an important cognitive exercise. For each stressful situation the quiz offers five different possible reactions.

If you are facing a stressful situation, I would highly recommend that you take a deep breath and sit down and try to imagine five different ways you might respond to the situation. Give each one some thought.

Master this exercise and you will respond more effectively to stress. It will allow you to make an intelligent choice, and reasoned decisions are always better than popping off with the first thing that passes through your mind.