Parenthood Is Common Sense, Not Quantum Physics
The nationwide attention to the “nanny trial” in Cambridge, Mass., in which a young au pair was found guilty of shaking to death an infant in her care, struck deep chords in the American psyche.
The media feeding frenzy may have been the result of two threads running through our culture: the “expertizing” of parenthood and its corollary, the idea that parents have complete control over how their children turn out.
Renowned baby doctor Benjamin Spock once said that parents ought to trust their own common sense to do the right thing. We no longer believe that. Parenting today seems more complex than quantum physics and much more anxiety- producing.
Callers on talk shows repeatedly asked if it wasn’t very irresponsible of the mother in this case to let a 19-year-old “child” care for an infant. Few noted that throughout history, most 19-year-olds were mothers several times over. This working mother, who made what seemed like reasonable provisions for child care, has been attacked as if she were some kind of monster. She cut back her work schedule to three days, came home often to breast feed and worked only five minutes from home. It seems logical to assume that a young au pair would be perfectly capable of caring for an infant.
Yet this local tragedy became a national story in which all working mothers were attacked as neglectful. Parental anxiety ran rampant: Several women were quoted on television saying that they felt they could never leave their babies again. Even New York Times pundit William Safire weighed in, saying the case showed that children were better off with even “strange” relatives than with relative strangers.
The fact is that parents probably have to worry more about being struck by lightning than by a sitter killing their child. Statistics show that a family member is more likely to harm a child. Worry about Uncle Fred or Cousin Flo’s boyfriend, not the nanny. The idea that a relative with a few quirks is better for a child than a kind and caring sitter is bizarre.
Too often, we see parenthood as complex and fraught with danger. It isn’t. We now know that a child’s brain develops more in the first three years than we had suspected, but this knowledge should not panic us as it has. Normal, nondysfunctional parents who interact with their children always have provided plenty of stimulation for infants. You do not have to put Beethoven on his crib’s musical mobile or worry that if you don’t shove exactly the right size block at her at precisely the right moment, she’ll never get into college. A less-than-brilliant babysitter will not harm a child’s development if the parents give the child stimulation. Nor will being in day care harm the mother-child bond. British psychologist Penelope Leach made many parents anxious when she said that mother’s working harms the child’s attachment to her so women shouldn’t go to work until their children were at least 8.
The data contradict this. Last year, a major federal study of infant day care (10 sites and 1,200 children) reported that day care did not harm the mother-child bond; the babies were securely attached to their mothers. When psychologist Lois Hoffman examined 50 years of studies, she found no significant differences on any measure of child development between the children of working mothers and at-home mothers.
Once upon a time, we expected mothers to love, bathe and feed their children. Then along came Sigmund Freud and suddenly, mothers were totally responsible for the psychological health of their children--forever. But many other social forces impinge on the development of human beings.
Family historian Stephanie Coontz keeps the report of one study tacked to her wall to remind her that we can’t always predict what complex forces will affect children. In that study, researchers tracked subjects from infancy to adulthood, predicting which ones were likely to be successful. They were wrong in two-thirds of the cases. They consistently overestimated both the damage of early family stress and the positive effects of having a smooth, nonchallenging childhood and adolescence. “They had failed to anticipate that depth, complexity, problem-solving abilities and maturity might derive from painful experiences rather than easy successes,” Coontz notes. In fact, the boys and girls who were the cheerful, good-looking, popular kids in high school, the ones whom all the other kids envied and most parents wanted their kids to be like, often were those who didn’t grow psychologically in later life.
New data about how children grow and thrive can help parents if we keep in mind that superhuman efforts are not necessary for happy children and that working parents can be good parents. We can’t create a risk-free life; sometimes decisions we thought were good ones turn out the wrong way. Accidents happen, fate intervenes. But good parents will, most often, do the right thing.
