Parental Roll of the Dice

The death of Rob and Michele Reiner, apparently at the hand of their son, is a terrible story. And it reminds me of too many other stories of children who have gone off the rails.

Yes, there are children who are raised by parents who simply aren't up to the task ("better off raised by wolves" we would sometimes say). Like any teacher, I can tell you stories that would break your heart, stories of parents who were simply unable to rise to the occasion of parenthood. 

But there are also the wild card children. Their parents did all the responsible things, gave them a good home, took care of them. Maybe they even grew up in a home with siblings who turned out just fine. And yet, somehow, somewhere, something happened, and that child ended up in a mess. 

Maybe it was something chemical or biological. Maybe just a wrong combination of peers and circumstances. Sometimes we really don't have a clue-- not a single damned clue.

Again, any teacher can tell you stories. Heck, as someone who taught in the same small town for almost forty years, I know stories where two generations of perfectly fine parenting somehow led to a sad and challenging outcome for one child. 

We look for simple explanations. If a child turned out to have big problems, then we blame the parents. If there's nothing obviously dysfunctional about the parents, we start to conjecture and whisper darkly-- there must be something bad going on in that home that we just don't know about. If the child turned out to be troubled, it has to be a parental screwup. 

It has to be something those parents did. Please, God, it has to be those parents. Because if it isn't the parents, if it's some wild roll of the dice that isn't completely under of the responsible humans, then we are all vulnerable. It could happen to any one of us. No no no no no no, no. It has to be the parents. It has to be something they did that I am definitely not doing.

This is where I sympathize with the parental rights crowd's distress. "We did everything right. We kept tight control of this child so that they would turn out the right way. And instead we got this!" I get the urge to cast about for someone or something to blame.

Some folks set the bar for a Child Turned Out Bad a lot lower than others. The child doesn't follow our religion, doesn't respect us the way we want them to, doesn't identify with the traditional gender roles. Others have tried their hardest and ended up with children who have actual challenges and dysfunctions, not just disagreements with their family of origin.

I get that some folks experience a powerful impulse to tighten control over your children, to force them to become the people you want them to be. I even understand how that desire can turn into a desire to control every other person who comes in contact with your child. 

I could argue that trying to exert this kind of control over another human being, even a human being for whom you are responsible, is not morally or ethically sound. But I think it's enough to point out that it is an unreliable approach, a parenting approach that is likely to end in failure. 

I like the work of Russell Barkley, a psychologist whose work is largely in the area of ADHD. "You do not get to design your children," he argues. 

So, what we have learned in the last twenty years of research in neuroimaging, behavior genetics, developmental psychology, neuropsychology, can be boiled down to this phrase:

Your child is born with more than 400 psychological traits that will emerge as they mature, and they have nothing to do with you.

So the idea that you are going to engineer personalities and IQs and academic achievement skills and all these other things just isn't true.

Your child is not a blank slate on which you get to write.

Barkley suggests that parents think of themselves not as engineers, but as shepherds.  

You are a shepherd. You don't design the sheep. The engineering view makes you responsible for everything--everything that goes right and everything that goes wrong. This is why parents come to us with such guilt. More guilt than we've ever seen in prior generations. Because parents today believe that it's all about them, and what they do, and if they don't get it right, or if their child has a disability, they've done something wrong when in fact the opposite is true. This has nothing to do with your particular brand of parenting.

So I would rather you would stop thinking of yourself as an engineer, and step back and say "I am a shepherd to a unique individual." Shepherds are powerful people. They pick the pastures in which the sheep will graze and develop and grow. They determine whether they're appropriately nourished. They determine whether they're protected from harm. The environment is important but it doesn't design the sheep. No shepherd is going to turn a sheep into a dog. Ain't gonna happen. And yet that is what we see parents trying to do, all the time.

And sometimes, for reasons that nobody could have predicted or controlled, the sheep run out of the pasture and get in trouble-- maybe a little bit, or maybe a whole lot. 

Three things to remember, I think.

First, beware of guilt and blame. Parents blame themselves. Others blame them. Okay, sometimes the guilt is earned. But if you are manufacturing guilt, particularly based on some hypothetical alternate universe in which the parent said or did a magic something that Fixed Everything-- maybe a little grace is in order.

Second, remember that sometimes a dark chapter is not the end of the book. As long as it's possible to move forward, there is hope. Some people find their way out of the weeds, sometimes with help and sometimes on their own. The real tragedy comes when they do something unredeemable; until that happens (and sometimes even after), there is still hope.

Third, beware any person or system that claims that we can keep young humans safe by taking total control of their lives, their environment, their contacts. The fundamental argument for authoritarianism is always an appeal to fear, a claim that "If I have total control, I can guarantee that the Terrible Thing will never happen to you." That version of safety is an illusion; jailers do not keep us safer than shepherds. 

Sometimes the shepherd just isn't enough, despite all of their best intentions and efforts. Doesn't mean we should stop making out best efforts. But my heart breaks for the parents who did the best they could and still, somehow, lost their child to the dark.