Parenting shaming: The last acceptable prejudice

This photo makes it appear that a child is helping her parent, but don't be fooled: she probably isn't. Photo / Getty

OPINION

Last week, I came across an article written by a well-credentialed journalist, on a reputable website, featuring legitimate-sounding research from prestigious academic institutions, which shook me to my core. It contained two equally astonishing claims:

1. Toddlers are naturally helpful, and
2. Their parents are to blame for extinguishing their helpful tendencies and turning them into “help-avoidant” teens.

I have never before felt so offended by science, nor more certain that I know more about a subject than someone at some fancy US university. This was victim-shaming, pure and simple.

As the parent of a toddler, your life is taken up by doing the jobs necessary to keep your life and home from falling apart: Washing mostly but also preparing food your kids tell you they hate.

If you’ve got time left over after that, you use it to prevent your children dying in a horrible accident. If you’ve got time left over after that, you sleep: Parenting is hard enough without parents having to shoulder responsibility for the way their kids turn out.

So I was shocked and appalled to find my wife was on the side of the “researchers”.

“That makes sense,” she said when I sneeringly presented their findings to her. “We have f***ed it up.”

As evidence, she introduced the fact that one of our children, who routinely refuses our request to carry knives and forks the five steps from the kitchen to the dining table, frequently gives up their school lunchtimes to do jobs for their teacher.

I felt sad and disappointed that the parenting industrial complex had imposed this sort of self-loathing on my incredibly competent wife, the greatest parent I’ve ever met, for something that was manifestly not her fault.

To me, our child giving up their lunchtimes to help their teacher is evidence of nothing more than the fact kids are naturally helpful to authority figures they don’t know very well, presumably out of some evolved fear response, their helpfulness dissipating in lockstep with their growing familiarity.

Our “naturally helpful” children have for years routinely failed to respond to our requests to get dressed, brush their teeth, clear their plates after dinner, etc, etc, until we have asked them over and over, threatened them with consequences, and eventually become so drained of all emotional resources that we’ve just given up and done it for them.

Here are some things our naturally helpful children have said to me or my wife in recent days:

“You’re stupid and annoying.”

“Why did you do your hair like that? It looks weird.”

“I hate you.”

“I trusted you but I shouldn’t have.”

“I’m going to punch you in the balls.”

How do you even simulate parenting in a lab? Of course, kids are going to behave differently with a stranger in a strange room than they do with their parents in their own homes.

Put a toddler in front of someone with a clipboard and white lab coat and of course, they will be compliant and polite, but introduce their parent into the situation and within an hour, or at most two, all the lab equipment will be destroyed, all living organisms within will be dead. there will be poo on the roof, and if the parent gently asks the child how it happened, they will scream “YOU ALWAYS BLAME ME FOR EVERYTHING! I HATE YOU!”

The irony about trying to study parenting in a lab is that we parents live our whole lives in a lab – one in which our children are the researchers and we’re the subject of their endless experiments into the limits of human endurance.

If we survive, our reward is a lifetime of questioning what we did wrong and should have done better. This is something we’re intrinsically good at. We don’t need help with it, and certainly not from anyone who still has the luxury of time and space to write a doctoral thesis.