All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (12 page)

One can argue that point, obviously. Phillips does, with himself, on the page. But he ultimately seems to conclude that there’s some truth in it. He quotes the analyst Donald Winnicott: “I was sane, and through analysis and self-analysis I achieved some measure of insanity.” And the route to that insanity, for Winnicott, was through the marshes of his childhood feelings. “Children, for Winnicott, are mad in the best sense of the word,” Phillips writes. “For Winnicott, the question was not, ‘What can we do to enable children to be sane?’ but ‘What we can do, if anything, to enable adults to sustain the sane madness of their young minds?’ ”

The tragedy, in Winnicott’s and Phillips’s view, would be if adults couldn’t sustain this madness. Young children can at least point the way. I think about this as we leave the playground. Sharon is in a fine mood, and so is Cam. Before climbing into the car, she points happily at her toes. “Look at my feet, Cam! They’re gross!”
Dirt!

And the messiness continues, throughout the afternoon. We head off to Sharon’s church, where Cam is a celebrity, clearly, and he’s immediately plied with a leftover slice of someone’s birthday cake. (
Chocolate icing!
Many napkins ensue.) Then it starts to rain, hard, and while Cam eats, the adults stare out the windows. The rain comes down harder, turns to hail; it’s the kind of windy-wet downpour that twists umbrellas into buttercups. Cam wanders quietly over to the screen door and watches, saying nothing. When it’s clear that waiting for the storm to ease up is hopeless, Sharon has an idea:
Run.

And so we do, whooping, shrieking, all the way back to her car. Cam climbs into the backseat, and Sharon straps him in without even bothering to climb inside—she just opens the door, leans in, and lets her rump and legs get soaked in the downpour. Then she takes her seat at the steering wheel. She turns and looks at her grandson. “Pretty crazy, huh, Cam?” He nods. She nods too. “Wow,” she says.

shop class as childhood

Acting like a kid isn’t just about losing one’s inhibitions or speaking in gibberish. Children learn about the world through doing, touching, experiencing; adults, on the other hand, tend to take in the world through their heads—reading books, watching television, swiping at touch screens. They’re estranged from the world of everyday objects. Yet interacting with that world is fundamental to who we are.

This is the argument that Matthew B. Crawford makes at elegant length in his 2009 best-seller,
Shop Class as Soulcraft.
He notes that today’s office workers often feel that, “despite the proliferation of contrived metrics they must meet, their job lacks objective standards of the sort provided by, for example, a carpenter’s level.” The information economy has made such a fetish of “knowledge work” that people no longer experience the joys afforded by knowing how to do things with their hands.

This topic was a minor theme at ECFE. “I didn’t find my career particularly fulfilling,” Kevin, a stay-at-home dad, told his all-male class one day. “It was just something I did. I liked it fine, but I didn’t come home and say, ‘Wow, I’m really glad I helped this big corporation process their data more efficiently!’ ”

Young children, on the other hand, offer adults the chance to engage in life’s more tactile pleasures and tangible, real-world pursuits. They provide an opportunity for agency, for being able to do something and actually
see
its effect. With young children, you “make a snow slide, and it’s just awesome,” as one father recalled during his class. You build Lego towers, as Clint so genuinely seemed to enjoy doing. Many parents described baking cookies. One mother talked about learning to bake for the first time—there’s something irresistible about
thwapp-thwapping
a mound of glistening dough with a child. Overall, children make people more inclined to cook: according to a Harris Interactive poll from 2010, the overwhelming majority of Americans who cook say they do so for their families, not themselves. And what more elemental craft, with a more tangible outcome, could a human pursue?

These lost pleasures of “manual competence” are of great interest to Crawford. In his book, he argues that “the
experience
of making things and fixing things” is essential to our well-being, to our
flourishing
(to use his word), and that something happens “when such experiences recede from our common life.” He quotes the philosopher Albert Borgmann, who makes the distinction between “things” and “devices.” Things are objects we master; devices are objects that do the work for us. “The stereo as a device contrasts with the instrument as a thing,” Borgmann writes. “A thing requires practice while a device invites consumption.”

Now, it’s true that the closets of young children today are larded with devices—devices that ding, devices that ping, devices that beep, that shine, that play music, that play videos, that respond to a simple touch. But early childhood is also one of the few times when we as a culture still emphasize the supremacy of—and mastery over—
things.
We buy our kids hammers to bang and necklaces to bead; we give them finger paints to smear and plastic instruments to play; we sit on the floor and lay acres of railroad track, build towers of Tinker Toys, make flowers out of pipe cleaners. When a child is born, there’s always a relative who goes off and buys that child a tool set, thinking he or she ought to know how to use it. In preschool all children learn music, all children do arts and crafts, all children use blocks, play catch, dance. Parents are often surprised to discover that their children are just as interested in using screwdrivers to open the battery compartments of their various devices as they are in the devices themselves. They still view devices as
things.
You can take them apart and put them back together. Children still have their hands on the world.

Perhaps the explanation for this is a simple one, anchored in a basic developmental reality: early childhood is when we first gain control of our bodies and develop our motor skills. But in some ways, that’s the point. Toddlers and preschoolers acquire knowledge in ways that are
inseparable
from their physical experiences. This is the time when it’s easiest to see what we human beings may truly be—“
inherently
instrumental, or pragmatically oriented, all the way down,” as Crawford suggests. By spending time with young children—building forts and baking cakes, whacking baseballs and making sand castles—we’re afforded, in some respects, the opportunity to be our most human. This is who we are. Creatures who use tools, creatures who create, creatures who build.

philosophy

When her eight-month-old was asleep and her two older kids were watching TV in the next room, I asked Jessie what she loved most about parenting. I thought her answer would be her dance parties. And she mentioned them. “But on a bigger scale,” she said, “I love watching my kids learn how to figure things out on their own. It’s how an explorer must feel.”

It’s a little clichéd to say that small children are always changing. What’s so pleasurable about Gopnik’s
The Philosophical Baby
is that she describes these changes neuroscientifically, and at times even quantifies them. Part of what’s so startling about the minds of babies and young children, for instance, turns out to be a simple function of volume and frequency: their brains are so plastic that their intellectual inventory turns over every few months, making their learning curve a true spectacle to behold. “Imagine,” Gopnik suggests, “that your most basic beliefs would be entirely transformed between 2009 and 2010, and then again by 2012.”

Children remind us just how much of our implicit knowledge, which hums inaudibly in the background all day long, is stuff we once had to
learn.
They climb into the bathtub partially clothed, put half-eaten bananas in the refrigerator, use toys in ways the manufacturer never intended. (
So you want to mix those paints rather than make pictures with them? Lay stickers on top of one another rather than lay them out side by side? Use dominos as blocks, cars as flying machines, tutus as bridal veils?
Knock yourself out!
) No one has yet told them otherwise. To children, the whole universe is a controlled experiment.

And that’s just the practical stuff. One woman at ECFE told me her daughter asked whether she’d always be a girl—not because she wished to be a boy, but because she didn’t know whether gender is a fixed trait or a mutable one. A man told his all-dad ECFE class that his son, earlier that day, turned to him after staring out the window and said, “Maybe when we’re squirrels, we’ll be up in that tree.” (He didn’t know whether our roles—this time in the entire animal kingdom—are fixed or mutable.) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of
Flow,
shared a similar moment from his young parenting life when he told me about the time he took one of his sons to the beach: “He saw some bathers, swimmers, coming out from the water, and he sort of froze, saying, ‘Look, Water People!’ It was so . . .” Csikszentmihalyi didn’t complete the sentence. But the word he was searching for, I think, was “logical,” because he continued: “I thought,
Yes, I could see how, if you’ve never seen them, they seem like extraterrestrials.
” Of course! Swimmers: Some otherworldly species that makes its home in the sea.

MOST ADULTS CONSIDER PHILOSOPHY
a luxury. But philosophy, it turns out, is what children do naturally, and when they do, they take us back to that remote and almost unimaginably luxurious time when we ourselves still asked loads of questions that had no point. In fact, according to Gareth B. Matthews, author of
The Philosophy of Childhood
,
asking pointless questions is the true specialty of children, especially between the ages of three and seven, because the instinct hasn’t yet been drummed out of them: “Once children become well settled into school,” he ruefully observes, “they learn that only ‘useful’ questioning is expected of them.” (Which recalls Edmund Burke’s alleged observation about studying law: “It sharpens the mind by narrowing it.”)

René Descartes once said that a person has to start over in order to do philosophy properly. “That is hard for adults,” writes Matthews, who taught philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for more than three decades. “It is unnecessary for children.” Children have nothing to unlearn. Matthews gives a perfect example—the concept of time—and quotes St. Augustine: “What, then, is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. But if I want to explain it to a questioner, I am baffled.”

Parents, like St. Augustine, are often baffled when their children ask questions about something so basic as time. But they are often delighted by them too. There’s something decadent, and at the same time intellectually pleasing, about entertaining such fundamental questions. “A couple nights ago,” said an ECFE father, “Graham and I were snuggling, and he goes, ‘Dad? What’s water?’ ” Graham was two and a half. He knew what water was, obviously. But his question was: “Yeah, but what
is
water?” There was an audible ripple of enthusiasm around the table.
What is water? Yes!
“And I’m like”—his dad clapped his hands, theatrically warming to the subject—“ ‘Well, there’s hydrogen, there’s oxygen.’ . . . It was awesome.”

After class, this dad told me that Graham’s follow-up question was even wilder: “Can you
break
water?” “Because I’d told him that if you put the hydrogen and oxygen together,” he explained, “it makes water. So he wanted to know if you could break it up.”

I heard a number of similar questions that week. (“Why are people mean?” was one of my favorites. Also:
“
Is there only this place, the place with the sky?”) Matthews’s books are filled with such examples too. He recounts telling a classroom of adults about a classic question asked by a child—“Papa, how can we be sure that everything is not a dream?”—and a mother replying that her three-year-old daughter had just asked the modern-day analogue: “Mama, are we ‘live’ or are we on video?” Even more striking than his examples of existential questions, arguably, are his examples of children stumbling onto questions of ethics. He mentions a child who, after seeing his dying grandfather, asked his mother on the car ride home if the elderly are ever shot when they’re ready to die. His mother, obviously startled, answered no; that would be troublesome for the police. (A strange answer, perhaps, but any parent who’s been in such a situation can identify with the slightly panicked instinct to keep replies concrete and the discussion brief.) The boy, then four, responded, “Maybe they could just do it with medicine.”

“In important part,” writes Matthews, “philosophy is an adult attempt to deal with the genuinely baffling questions of childhood.” Many adults enjoy pondering philosophical questions if given the chance. But they have little excuse to do so in their everyday lives, until they have children. Then they’ve got a chance, at least for a few years, to contemplate—and perhaps reconsider—why the world around them is what it is. He quotes Bertrand Russell, who said of philosophy: “If it cannot
answer
so many questions as we could wish, [it] has at least the power of
asking
questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.” Kids have an uncanny knack for asking those questions. And the questions, as far as Matthews is concerned, are the true revelation, not the answers.

love

When Sharon first laid eyes on Michelle, the baby who would one day grow up to be Cam’s mother, she was just five months old and weighed eight pounds. “Failure to thrive” was the term the agency had used when they put her in Sharon’s care—Michelle’s biological mother, whose intelligence was well below normal, had clearly neglected her, though to what extent couldn’t be fully determined. Sharon received her happily, lovingly, as she had the nine other foster children she had cared for, but Michelle made a deeper impression somehow. Maybe it was because she was so young; maybe it was because she was small and vulnerable and sweet. Whatever the reason, Sharon and her two biological children were smitten—“we loved her to smithereens”—and that love only deepened over time. Five years later, Sharon found herself standing in front of a judge, submitting the last of the paperwork, to make the adoption official.