Parental Mystic Wisdom Shield
I know a lot of really good parents. None of them are helicopter parents, and most of them might, when appropriate, practice Free Range Kids some of the time. Rather than tell parents how to be parents-- a topic of little interest to me-- I want to talk about how to be a kid. I wish I had taken more risks. I read Hacker News a lot, and have been realizing more and more, how many web entrepreneurs and people who accomplish a difference are risk-takers. From what I gather, most people who learn to take risks, learned by experimenting during their teen and college years. I've been taking more and more risks as the past decade has gone on, and my life has been immeasurably enriched.
This week, a teen went to Rainbow Gathering. Her mom launched a campaign to cross-post her picture all over the blogosphere to enlist help catching her in or near Rainbow Gathering to bring her back home. She is now home safe. Should she have left in the first place? No. Of course not. But another phenomenon occurred in this story, which was dangerous to even talk about, which I find interesting. It is the phenomenon of the Sheild of Mystical Parent Wisdom.
Scenario 1: Mom has some reason to think Teen doesn't intend to come back, and is therefore in danger of living on the street and going into exploitation and prostitution. Scenario 2: It's a domestic squabble over an unapproved road trip. She's not lost. You know exactly where she's going.
We don't know. What really fascinates me is how many respondents obviously don't care which scenario it is. Commenter after commenter after commenter, it is automatically scenario 1. Looking at it as a statistical sample, this uniformity might just reflect the kind of person this blogger surrounds herself with. But the outpouring is what interests me. Perhaps they watch too much sensationalistic TV news, and believe suburban Illinois is dangerous, and weed causes rape? Perhaps they think her home town contains no pregnancy, or many innovative diseases?
You and I are being urged to pick up the torches, so in the spirit of simple fact-checking, I want to do some due diligence. Are Teen's traveling companions tatooed with "THUGG LIFE"? Will Teen have sex and drugs at Rainbow? Are they the same sex and drugs she would have had in her home town by sneaking around? We don't know.
But I dare not do that due diligence. The one person who posted to say "This is normal behavior for teens, who end up fine, and it's going to be OK" was met with-- and I am not making this up-- "Seriously, WTF is WRONG with you?" "Die in a fire." Even-- get this! "You are obviously not a mother", as if motherhood validates anything. There was an astonishing amount of all caps. They went to great lengths to support and encourage the idea, that a parent should completely break down as a human being into a quivering mass of frothy wrongness. I would revise that to say they may, and it's forgivable, but you can also tell them when it's happening.
A bunch of it has already been deleted, and pretty soon I'll bet the whole blog post and comments will be.
Teens have an untrustworthy reputation, with good reason. It is an age of weird brain chemicals. However, it is funny how often parents are trusted to be rational when they're actually insane. There are good teens and bad teens, and there are good parents and bad parents. Both phases of life are accompanied by scientifically verified neurological chemicals that can set the emotions buzzing. Some (and I need to add here, most of those I expect to be reading this) handle it well. Others don't.
In the blog post about his song "You Ruined Everything In The Nicest Way", Jonathan Coulton put it this way:
I was having a conversation with a friend who had recently become a parent, and she reminded me of something I had forgotten about since my daughter was born. She was describing this what-have-I-done feeling – I just got everything perfect in my life, and then I went and messed it all up by having a baby. I don’t feel that way anymore, but the thought certainly crossed my mind a few times at the beginning. Eventually you just fall in love and forget about everything else, but it’s not a very comfortable transition. I compare the process to becoming a vampire, your old self dies in a sad and painful way, but then you come out the other side with immortality, super strength and a taste for human blood. At least that’s how it was for me. At any rate, it’s complicated.
Seriously, weird shit happens to your brain to change who you are as a person. I'm still hunting up the studies that I read about it, and will add them to this post later. (Here is one.) But understand this, OK? This is not "maturity", it's just different. "Movement in a direction" is not the same as "progress". We grow out of being teens. Imagine a science-fictional world in which humans grow out of being parents. If we did, we'd look at that brain state as just a phase, not the holy mount of Olives.
Nearly everyone agrees there are plenty of idiots in the world-- until the idiot in question is a parent, in which case they suddenly gain access to Mystic Wisdom, even when they are out of their mind. A parent would never dramatize an unapproved road trip into "running away" to raise an internet mob!
I am not allowed to disagree with a parent, because what do I know? That is secret knowledge that contravenes all the rules I thought I knew about how one human being should act toward another human being. Want to hit your child? Demean them? Teach them lies? None of my business, apparently. All of a sudden, instead of standing up for my friend against a bully who's bigger than him, or carrying on a discussion about the epidemiology of religion, I'm "offering parenting advice"? No. I have pet projects too, so I understand your one-track mind. But if you don't realize I'm talking about something else, than you need to switch tracks or you will become incapable of carrying on any other conversation.
In a spirit of sincere helpfulness I thought about suggesting to Mom that she go to Rainbow and look for Teen there, but I read further in the comments. Some parents... well... respond like teens. The similarity is uncanny. "You're out of touch... you couldn't possibly understand." They have obtained True Guidance from apparently mystical sources unavailable to others. Like your friend whose boyfriend hits her, it's best to just hand "Crazy Parent and Crazy Teen" a copy of "Difficult Conversations" and leave it at that. Like religion, parenting is this weird off-limits category of discussion. It's so personal.
But this Mom made it everybody's business, and put out the call to everyone. There was much hyperventilation and clutching of one's pearls. I'm not going to tell her how to be a parent-- a topic I have no interest in-- but I do believe that when she gets in your grill, you can tell her to chill. I might be wrong in thinking this was blown out of proportion. What amazes me is what an elephant in the room it is.
Comments
stormgren on Sep. 9, 2010 7:37 PM
Brilliant.
I'm sure you'll be told "YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAAAAAAAAAAAND".
eposia on Sep. 9, 2010 8:33 PM
Thanks for writing this up! I saw that post but of course didn't pass it on. I notice that the pictures she used of her daughter seemed to me to be specifically chosen to help incite that "oh noes! at-risk teeeeen!" reaction in conservative types. But yes, the tyranny of the bio-parents has long irritated me. Womb-incubation does not an automatic pipeline to wisdom make, and as a parent to someone who's bio-mom's idea of good parenting was to let her 6'5" garbage-truck-worker-boyfriend-now-husband beat on her kids when she wasn't doing the same or starving them, and who now can't be bothered to return her kid's phonecalls -- well, the idea of the sanctity of bio-parenthood can go jump in a bog and not re-surface. I'm one parent who will speak up on that if I see it, glad to see you doing it as well (and no, doesn't offend me you have an opinion without having spawned).
infant-phoenix on Sep. 9, 2010 8:43 PM
I completely agree with you. The thing is, it's not that I consider the conversation off-limits, but not very useful. I might take it up on occasion if I feel particularly abused by a given situation, but to me, it's no different than arguing with someone who thinks all Arabs are evil.
You know going in that your words will make no difference in the outlook of that person because they purposefully surround themselves with like-minded others.
In fact, it takes a lot for a person to be capable of even listening to people with different opinions most of the time. We are just like that. It's not that you weren't aware of the society this woman comes from, it's that you are concerned over its degree of influence. How BIG is it, really? I have no idea, and I can only hope it doesn't get too much bigger......
The only way to really fight against this would be to start an opposing movement, popularize the whole "free Range Kid" thing in some way that made it attractive to those all-powerful media folks. Maybe some pediatric research responsibly done could help, but that takes a long time. I, personally, do not have what it takes to start such a movement, so I put this in the category of "problems I can't solve" and try to avoid it if I possibly can.
atropis on Sep. 10, 2010 5:24 AM — "when she gets in your grill, you can tell her to chill."
w0rd.
there are just so many points to agree with here. all of them, really.
drew4096 on Sep. 10, 2010 6:19 AM
Here's some reading material that might interest you.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1q.htm
users on Sep. 10, 2010 1:41 PM
Well said. Just as certainly as I'm a parent (by the generally accepted definition of the term, in which I have created and supervise one or more pre-adults...not necessarily by the less often used definition in which I am doing so *well* or by some standard of conduct) is the certainty that I have no magic wisdom handed down when the fruit of my loins met the fruit of someone else's. I am confident that I make heinous mistakes that will likely put everyone in therapy and cause heartache and uncomfortable family gatherings for years to come.
So I am genuinely offended when someone gives me that nod of inclusion and says "he/she/it is obviously not a parent" in that oh-so-grating way. You have expressed all of my problems with that sentiment...and that sentiment self reinforces the ridiculously stupid concept that "a mother's love" and the fact that "father knows best" are sufficient to guide a parent's actions...and saying that without being a parent you can't know anything about the concepts that go into parenting implies that simply by being a parent you suddenly know that stuff.
That is dangerous thinking.
Well written. I'll stop ranting now, because I'm working my way up into a good froth...and then I have to go beat a child at random.
interactiveleaf on Sep. 10, 2010 6:00 PM
I have more sympathy with BFF and her supporters than you do, because these facts from this particular case stood out to me: The child left more than three weeks before the event was due to take place, didn't have any actual plan for how to get there or how to get back, and was in fact traveling with friends who had THUGG LIFE white power tattoos.
That said, in general, I agree with you.
matt-arnold on Sep. 10, 2010 6:15 PM
Were those facts available before she made her way home safe?
interactiveleaf on Sep. 11, 2010 1:32 AM
Yes, in BFF's journal, mostly from here, but they weren't in the original post; you'd have had to go looking.
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