My Lonely City

I asked my cousins, one night they spent with us, if they’d like one more bedtime story before they went to sleep. Of course they said yes, and the older girl asked me to read aloud a chapter from a book she’s been reading. It’s one of the Scary Monsters Don’t Do This or That series – I had one when I was young called Vampires Don’t Wear Polka Dots, which was actually pretty good. This one was Ghosts Don’t Eat Potato Chips.

Break for literary nerdiness: I recently re-read Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, which is in many ways a satire on the Gothic novel. In it, the main character, who has read rather a lot of Gothic novels, is led, or rather pleased, to imagine that her friends’ father has murdered or imprisoned his wife who died of a sickness some years before. This conjecture, and her other romantic flights of fancy, not only lead her to behave imprudently, though with no lasting ill effect, but they also prevent her from perceiving the true character of those with whom she deals before that character is brought up forcefully before her attention. This same conflict – between the imagined and the real, the fanciful and the present – informs the Ghosts Don’t Eat Potato Chips book and series. The main characters are staying at a – rather verbally abusive, it seemed in the chapter I read – relative’s house, and think the ghost of her long-dead husband is living in the attic. Of course it will turn out to be someone fairly innocuous, and everyone will laugh about how silly the kids were for being so carried away. And then life will go on, until the next book. No point, just some fun comparisons.

I just read a book that I actually had bought for someone else, but never had the opportunity to give it to them. It’s called ScreamFree Parenting and it’s by Hal somebody. (I wonder, when he gives advice, how often he hears “I can’t do that, Hal” and chuckles – or wishes to scream.) My husband and I spent a few days last week caring for my cousin’s children. It was an … intense experience. Enjoyable, but also frustrating. Hm. Anyway, it made me think of this parenting book, so I dug it out of the armoire where I keep the gift things, unwrap it, and read it over the weekend.

So the premise of this book is that, first, we must focus on ourselves – rather than wholly on our children – and approach parenting as though it were as central a part of our own emotional, psychological, and spiritual development as it is for the children for whom we care. We are not, he continues, responsible for our children, responsible for making them into the kind of people they ought to be; rather, we are responsible _to_ them to give them the resources they need to choose for themselves to become “self-directed, responsible adults”.

When we feel responsible for our children, we respond by emotionally reacting (or overreacting) to their behavior – behavior for which _we_ feel ashamed. When we do this, we are actually pressuring them to change their behavior in order to calm us down. This response is counter-productive because it puts our emotional state, even health, in their power – and their responsibility, which is an overwhelming thing for a child to bear. It also, even more sadly, fails to teach them to make – and be responsible for – their own choices.

The book recommends giving kids their own space – both physical and emotional – while at the same time teaching them their “place” or their relationship to and among others in the family and beyond through healthy structure and consistent, reasonable consequences for the behaviors they choose. I liked the book a lot, despite its tendency to overuse the word “responsible”. I liked most of all, however, the idea that no one is responsible (again, that word …) for meeting your emotional needs but yourself. This is different advice from Harley’s His Needs, Her Needs which argues that in order to have a strong and faithful marriage, each partner’s primary emotional needs must be met by the other partner – or they will be met by someone else. I think both sets of advice are good. Where’s the balance?