Often when I pick up a book because it looks interesting - judging by its cover - without knowing anything about it, it turns out to be forgettable. But sometimes it lives up to its cover. That's the way I feel about Allison Gropnik's The Gardener and the Carpenter.
Gropnik is a professor of psychology (and wife to one of the Pixar cofounders and a mother of 3), and she has done a lot of research into human and animal behavior, and the science of behavior fascinates her, and she has the talent to weave the science into an interesting book. Her name wasn't unknown to me, although I didn't immediately recognized it; I've enjoyed reading Gropnik's columns in the Wall Street Journal. A memorable one was her essay on children as scientists - they observe, explore, mimic, test theories and look for connections as they encounter the world around them.
Gropnik's book is partly an exploration of human behavior focusing on how children learn, and partly, the part that drew my attention to closer reading, about changing our understanding of our role as a parent to one that is focused on the relationship rather than focused on an end goal. And the final chapter addresses the question of why have children at all, if we are not in the business of producing a certain type of adult, in other words, if parenting doesn't have a pay-off.
Gropnik's argument is that parents should be more like gardeners who nurture and tend their gardens, than like carpenters, who craft their wood into an object with an end in mind. She points out that "parenting" as a verb is a relatively new concept. For instance, we don't "child" or "lover" our parents or spouses. The relationship between parent and child (or between spouses or friends) is not an action, but a state of being in relationship. Rather than trying to form their children into something or someone, parents should try to be available to their children, to provide them stability, safety, and opportunities to explore, to observe, and to learn (hence, the connection to The Nature Principle, near where this book was shelved). She rejects the idea that parents have ultimate control over what kind of people their kids become by saying that nurture is only one part of human development. She points out that despite the rise of parenting how-to books, there are no guaranteed methods for producing successful, productive, happy adults. Trying to follow a prescription or blueprints for parenting will only make us more neurotic and anxious, instead of more relaxed and confident in our identity as parents, so that we can actually relax and enjoy parenting.
This metaphor alone, without all the scientific data, isn't a new idea, but I need to be reminded to take a step back when I'm worrying about the kids' development. On the one hand, I want to give them opportunities to try new things and to develop the discipline of practicing in order to improve at a skill. But here's a statistical analysis of a parenting conundrum: I keep attempting to sign kids up for piano lessons because I believe music lessons provide a skill that brings joy eventually, help form habits of discipline, and form neural pathways that affect all kinds of other activities. My thought was I would have each kid take two years of music lessons. However, 5 of the 6 the kids who have had lessons never want to practice, and 4 of the 6 show no real musical aptitude. Only one kid now loves to sit down with his guitar or banjo or ukulele and strum some songs. Occasionally, one other kid will sit at the piano or pick up his clarinet and play a song then wander away again. The sixth child only had about six months total of lessons here and there. Am I gardening or carpentering when I want the kids to take 2 years of music lessons? I'm glad I gave them the opportunity to learn music, but I want to support them in following their own interests, not mine.
Another comparison Gropnik makes is to dieting. We now have more nutrition books, more recommendations for losing weight, more types of food, and more access to healthy foods, but we are in many cases less healthy, and in more cases more neurotic about what we eat. Approaching diet as a science project takes away the joy of eating. Similarly, replacing the relationship between parent and child with a prescription for how to parent takes away the joy of parenting.
Gropnik's book is not an appeal to return to the past, but she does use appeals to examples of parents in primitive cultures or in the distant past as a way of demonstrating both how children learn and human beings bond, and how we don't need a prescription for raising children. She encourages parents to rely on our intuition and traditions, on the example of our grandparents, who let children explore their environment and have the freedom of unstructured play, but also taught small children to do chores and practice cooking.
There are some dangers in idealizing the past, and while grandparents are an excellent example of people who take joy in children, I wouldn't be surprised if my grandmothers were somewhat anxious as parents. Gropnik frequently uses her grandson as an example of how children learn and uses examples of how she plays with him as examples of how play helps children problem solve and observe in order to learn. Perhaps because she is a grandparent and not the parent, she is free to be involved in a loving relationship because she is free of the pressure of "parenting." Grandparents have a special relationship with children predicated on love and enjoyment of each other's company. My behavior was certainly affected and moderated by my desire to please and not to disappoint my grandparents, particularly my grandfather, who frequently expressed his pride in us and his affection. Perhaps her argument should be "try to be more like a grandparent to your child."
I have to admit that I skimmed a good chunk of this book, even though I enjoyed the writing and the ideas. With my reading turning more nonfiction lately, I read differently. I do a lot more skimming. Does this count as reading a book? Often with nonfiction first chapter has most of the information of the book condensed into 15 pages, and the last chapter contains the philosophical reflection on this information and its effect on our choices. The chapters that were pertinent to how I might parent with practical applications were at the very end of the book. The first quarter, maybe third, of the book goes into more scientific detail than I care to read deeply about. Two lengthy chapters are primarily dedicated to evolutionary explanations for a long childhood and for parental and romantic love, and in several instances, Gropnik uses animal behavior as examples of parental behavior. Animal behavior is interesting, but it doesn't motivate to change my own behavior or particularly clarify my understanding of human behavior, and frankly, neither does evolutionary theory. For one thing it is largely conjectural - I'm sure it's based on fragments of bone and artifacts of tools and homes, but how much do we really know about our predecessors' feelings? Can we recreate a life from fragments? And how does evolutionary theory account for grandparents? Gropnik recounts the idea that having older adults around in the community allowed the younger adults forage for food while someone minded the cave babies, but it's hard to accept that natural selection is the cause of this development in human society, and not some Intelligence.
Another reason I skipped most of the section on evolutionary theory as an explanation or guide of human behavior today is that we are so far removed from that environment - shouldn't our behaviors and approaches to love and childrearing have evolved and adapted to our current environment? I'm know that discussing our elemental nature in regards to human behavior throughout time is an interesting mind project, but I don't feel compelled to read about caveman behavior in order to be convinced about a way to rear children today. So I skimmed, which seems to happen frequently when I read nonfiction - I don't want to read all of the science parts, just the practical and philosophical parts.
One of those sections was about how children learn, which is more interesting to me as a parent of a toddler who is helping to run a preschool co-op. One of my favorite subsections is called "In Praise of Mess," which proclaims the glorious fact that messes are signs of children learning, that children thrive in an environment where they feel free to make messes. Also: stories are important. Check. Despite the disclaimer that this is not a parenting how-to book, the preponderance of information proving that children learn by different kinds of imitation is a strong reminder to watch my own behavior and tone of voice.
Also interesting was the section on essentialism - how children infer that certain things have an essential likeness and way of being that makes them similar or different than other things. For instance, concepts of "boy" and "girl" are understood by very young children as essential categories.
Gropnik also praises apprenticeship learning and giving adolescents opportunities to engage in meaningful work as a part of education. And while she is critical of medicating children who are mildly ADHD so that they can fit into a traditional school environment instead of adapting an environment to fit their style of learning, she is not dismissive of new technologies and uses a parable about a "device" that changes the world (the book) to suggest that new technologies are always developing and not only changing the way we communicate and socialize, but also the way our brains work. For instance, the ways we see and remember have changed over time as an adaptation to being a reading people. Reassuringly, she points out that the ancient arts - drama, music, poetry - have not disappeared, but have continued to flourish as technologies have changed.
Home schoolers might find reason to rejoice in some of Gropnik's research - she gives multiple examples of how school learning is not the most effective (partly because a "goal" - all A's and a college admission - for school assessment does not always accurately measure how a young person will manage as an adult). Young children learn best by discovery, by practice, and by being shown examples (imitation), rather than by being told something and then being tested over it. Being a good test taker is not the end goal of education, and yet that is what schools seem to emphasize with assessment based learning, all reasons home schoolers rely on when questioned about their choices. Gropnik points out that learning to read and to do math are not ends unto themselves, but means of further learning, which is one of the most convincing secular reasons for choosing an alternative way of teaching. But she doesn't really address home schooling as such, even though she has praise for apprenticeships and project based learning and mentorship relationships.
When I think of how our older children learned to read without really being taught and how much history, literature, and science they absorbed from our field trips and projects, I keep debating whether I should or shouldn't home school the toddler, especially for the early grades. On the other hand, this child craves social interaction, and while having a consistent caregiver is important to development, as children age, they also develop their interests and benefit from learning from masters about subjects I know little or nothing about. My ideal would be to find a small, Catholic classical school that uses project based learning, especially for its science and math classes, and had a rich arts and music curriculum. Now if only some billionaire would fund it ...
Gropnik never mentions home schooling, although she does use the private school/public school conundrum as an example of how utilitarianism is not the best approach to parenting, or to forming public policy about individual children. The most interesting chapter is the last one, in which Gropnik addresses Mill's utilitarianism, the claim that what is good is what is the greatest good for the greatest number of people, and Kant's deontology, or claim of a universal moral principle, and rejects them in favor of Irving Berlin's value pluralism, the idea that there are multiple goods, some of which are incompatible, but equally valuable, for addressing how to think about the parent-child relationship. For example, public school is good for a great number of people, but for a particular child, it may not be the best choice. Value pluralism seems to apply to many parenting decisions - we are constantly coming up against competing goods. Even the choice to have a child cannot be subject to a universal or utilitarian approach. I particularly liked Gropnik's point that we can't know what our life will be like with a child because we become different people after childbirth. We are enlarged by love to place another person's life above our own. As she writes, "Deciding whether to have children isn't just a matter of deciding what you want. It means deciding who you're going to be."
Unfortunately, many people do approach the decision to have a child from a utilitarian perspective, or decide that becoming a person who puts another person's needs about his or her own, is a limitation or, worse, an enslavement, when in fact, to love another person that much is an enlarging of the heart and a liberation from selfishness. She quotes Virginia Woolf: "'Never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having.'" in response to the idea that because not having children allows you to have more free time and fun, then having children will take away joy but limiting your participation in some solitary or adventurous experiences. But raising children is a valuable experience of its own (that still is compatible with many other valuable experiences0.
Gropnik's praises the experience of having children not from any measurable standard, but because it enriches our life on so many levels, in a great deal because the relationships we form with our children and the people they bring into our lives are also enriching. These relationships form the person we become. But she also recognizes the freedom of the individual to NOT have children.
"Precisely because such decisions are so morally profound and life-transforming, we should respect the freedom of individual people with individual lives to make them. It should be obvious by now that I personally place a very high value, the highest, on caring for children. That is also true for many people in religious traditions, and is often articulated as the justification for opposing contraception or abortion."
After making this statement, she confesses she made the difficult decision to have an abortion after she unexpectedly got pregnant at age forty. This is a surprisingly personal confession in a book that reads as relatively impersonal, although there are several anecdotes of her loving interaction with her grandson and a couple anecdotes of her actions as a mother to three sons. Knowing how much being an older mother to a young child has enriched my life, I feel sorry that she felt compelled to make that decision. Ideally, people would recognize that having one more person in the world to love and to love them would make their life more full. But this argument is only possible to make by witnessing to the joy of being a parent.
And here is where Gropnik's main idea - that as parents, we are in a relationship with our children, not involved in a project to produce a successful adult - is a very humane understanding that also applies to our relationship with our parents. And rather than build institutions that force us to adapt our relationships to our aging parents and to our young children to fit the institutions (large schools, retirement homes), perhaps we should adapt our institutions to fit our relationships. All kinds of policies could be adapted and resources allocated to support these relationships.
Gropnik closes her book with poignant example of the immeasurable value of the parent-child relationship and the importance of play to both. She describes a scene from the old silent movie Nanook of the North in which a struggling Inuit hunter makes a sled and plays with his toddler son in the snow with his son. The joy that both experience outweighs the hours and materials he invested in making the sled. Some experiences are priceless.
Gropnik's most eloquent paragraph summarizes her understanding of these relationships in this way:
"Why be a parent, then? ...Being a parent isn't worthwhile because it will lead to some particular outcome in the future, because it will create a particular kind of valuable adult. Instead, being a parent allows a new kind of human being to come into the world, both literally and figuratively. Each new child is entirely unprecedented and unique -- the result of a new complicated combination of genes and experience, culture and luck. And each child, if cared for, will turn into an adult who can create a new, unprecedented, unique human life. That life may be happy or sad, successful or disappointing, full of pride or regret. If it's like most valuable human lives, it will be all of these things. The very specific, unconditional commitment we feel to the child we care for is a way of respecting and supporting that uniqueness. Part of the pathos, but also the moral depth, of being a parent is that a good parent creates an adult who can make his own choices, even disastrous choices.... But it's also true that being a good parent allows children to succeed in ways that we could never have predicted or imagined shaping."
So despite the fact that I didn't read a good chunk of this book very closely, I was enriched by reading it and reminded to relish the experiences that we have with our children and to fret less about the classes and lessons that they may not be taking part in or things they lack. I need to praise more and nag less. In the end, it all comes back to love.
