Forget about ‘parenting’: think about what being a parent means

Parent should not be a verb. Nor should it be seen as a form of work. That's what cognitive scientist and bestselling author Alison Gopnik will tell an audience of educators in Dublin this morning – as part of the European Early Childhood Education Research Association conference in Dublin City University (DCU).

In her new book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, the Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at the University of California lays out a stark "manifesto against parenting" as a pernicious concept which distorts the meaning of caring for children.

She says the word itself, which only came into general usage in the last decades of the 20th century, is increasingly oriented in the US towards the goal of somehow turning your child into a better or happier or more successful adult than they would otherwise be.

Misunderstanding

As a result, the child becomes a product, to be shaped and crafted to the best of one’s abilities and efforts. This, Gopnik argues, is an entirely wrong-headed approach, based on a terrible misunderstanding of why we have children in the first place.

“What we need to talk about instead is ‘being a parent’, that is, caring for a child,” she says. “To be a parent is to be part of a profound and unique human relationship, to engage in a particular kind of love, not to make a certain sort of thing.”

Hence, the title of her book. Being a parent is not like being a carpenter, who sets out to make a chair to a specific design. Instead, it’s more akin to gardening, creating a space in which a life can thrive and develop, often in unpredictable and unmeasurable ways. All of which could sound a little misty-eyed and sentimental, were it not for the fact that Gopnik’s thesis is firmly rooted in the science of the human brain’s development.

Her earlier book, The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life, investigated how young children cognitively develop by using processes similar to those used by scientists, while also considering the broader philosophical implications of being a carer.

Prosperity

So how did we get to this point? According to Gopnik, as families got smaller and more scattered, increasing prosperity stretched the length of time that young people spent in education. The previous model, with caregiving being carried out across multiple generations of an extended family, and of large families where younger siblings were looked after by older ones, was replaced. Now, people often become parents after years spent pursuing educational qualifications and career goals. They lack the direct experience of caring for children, and search for a language to conceptualise what being a parent actually means.

“In a big, post-industrial world, we treat most human activities as if they were either a kind of production or a kind of consumption,” writes Gopnik in the book. “So that raising children is seen as either very badly paid work or a very expensive kind of luxury.”

Does that mean that raising a “successful” child becomes a desirable status symbol?

“Well, there’s a compelling and very natural desire to have your children do as well as possible,” she says, pointing out the irony that the kind of creativity which is rewarded most in the modern economy is unlikely to be fostered by the carpentering approach.

In Gopnik’s analysis, children need the opportunity to experiment and to learn how to learn themselves. She was looking this week at research into learning in pre-industrial cultures, and was struck by pictures, from a century ago, of very small schoolchildren being encouraged to play with knives and saws.

“No one would think we were better off in an age when children were slicing their fingers off. But as we advance in some ways, we lose in others,” she says.

This is where Gopnik’s thesis overlaps with the current popular obsession with lawnmower parents (who are supposed to smooth every obstacle in the path of their offspring), or helicopter parents, (who hover constantly over their children’s every activity, leaving no space for autonomy or exploration).

Generation Snowflake

All of these have, in turn, been blamed for the emergence of the much-lambasted Generation Snowflake – supposedly over-protected young people who are unable to cope with confrontation or adversity.

Gopnik isn’t too keen on the parallel, pointing out that every generation thinks the one that follows is going to hell in a handbasket. But she does believe an obsession with measurable results and with never-ending assessments is reducing the space in which children can actually experiment.

Ultimately, Gopnik’s thesis is philosophical as much as it is scientific. Why do people become parents? How might they think about what being a parent means in contemporary society? And how can they put their beliefs into practice?

“It is a challenge,” Gopnik agrees. “This has been a vision of people in childcare for a long time. We don’t have to make children learn, we just have to let them learn.”