This is like the mumsnet version of the post immediately below it.
Did Isaiah Berlin write a parenting book?
I want to try topiary parenting. Who wrote that one?
"What about this parenting guide? 'Preparing the Young Like a Walrus or Like a Carpenter'."
(later)
"It's a cookbook!
"Battle Hymn of the Orca Mom."
I want to try topiary parenting.
Because it's a combination of "Gardener" and "Carpenter", hopefully with the best bits of both, right?
One might say you're...
[sunglasses]
hedging your bets.
What if you're a gardener-parent and you start to think of one of your kids as a weed?
This book should probably have a chapter about Geppetto and Pinocchio.
What if you're a gardener-parent and you start to think of one of your kids as a weed?
also as a wet and an utter clot. i suggest you diskard him.
Bonsai parenting is the new helicoptering.
Bonsai parenting is a thing, we discussed it here last year IIRC.
God as gardener-parent --
Let me sing now for my well-beloved
A song of my beloved concerning His vineyard.
My well-beloved had a vineyard on [a]a fertile hill.
He dug it all around, removed its stones,
And planted it with [b]the choicest vine.
And He built a tower in the middle of it
And also hewed out a [c]wine vat in it;
Then He expected it to produce good grapes,
But it produced only [d]worthless ones.
"And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah,
Judge between Me and My vineyard.
"What more was there to do for My vineyard [e]that I have not done in it?
Why, when I expected it to produce good grapes did it produce [f]worthless ones?
"So now let Me tell you what I am going to do to My vineyard:
I will remove its hedge and it will be consumed;
I will break down its wall and it will become trampled ground.
"I will lay it waste;
It will not be pruned or hoed,
But briars and thorns will come up.
I will also charge the clouds to rain no rain on it."
For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel
And the men of Judah His delightful plant.
Thus He looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed;
For righteousness, but behold, a cry of distress
God as gardener-parent --
Let me sing now for my well-beloved
A song of my beloved concerning His vineyard.
My well-beloved had a vineyard on [a]a fertile hill.
He dug it all around, removed its stones,
And planted it with [b]the choicest vine.
And He built a tower in the middle of it
And also hewed out a [c]wine vat in it;
Then He expected it to produce good grapes,
But it produced only [d]worthless ones.
"And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah,
Judge between Me and My vineyard.
"What more was there to do for My vineyard [e]that I have not done in it?
Why, when I expected it to produce good grapes did it produce [f]worthless ones?
"So now let Me tell you what I am going to do to My vineyard:
I will remove its hedge and it will be consumed;
I will break down its wall and it will become trampled ground.
"I will lay it waste;
It will not be pruned or hoed,
But briars and thorns will come up.
I will also charge the clouds to rain no rain on it."
For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel
And the men of Judah His delightful plant.
Thus He looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed;
For righteousness, but behold, a cry of distress
Scripture does gain from repetition.
1: I was enjoying the contrast.
GARDENING IS FOR PUSSIES. MY SCARED STRAIGHT PLAN WOULDN'T HAVE WORKED IF THERE HADN'T BEEN A TANGLED BRIAR PATCH, LIKE, RIGHT THERE.
12
Is that where you bind your children's limbs so they don't grow, to improve their ability to beg on the street as little people?
Begging, or getting award-winning roles on cable television.
18: no, just for convenience.
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2016_03_27.html#015293
Oh, right, I didn't read that thread. Thanks for highlighting my bad taste there.
20
Ah. I suppose that's a different issue than these gardener parents are facing.
Not really. We just wanted golden lotuses.
Re: whether Carpenter parent is a straw man, I'd have to say no. I know a few folks who are pretty fucking rigid about their kids. I mean, they don't think they are, but it's low level alarming. Other than really young kids wanting food they won't eat, it drives me a little bananas when parents correct their kids with "No, you don't like X." (Ex: Can I go play in the snow? No, you don't like the cold and wet.) You don't have to literally force a kid to do things to limit their options and guide their preferences. Not that I think that's always a bad thing, since kids would never learn how to share or be polite.
My favorite story along these lines is one a friend told about her father and brother. Father tells kid, you're going to Johns Hopkins (why, I don't know). Kid has no interest in going there. Doesn't apply to Hopkins. Without telling the kid anything, the dad complete the entire application himself. The application is accepted. Kid goes to Hopkins.
I can't recall precisely, but I think that if the kids have any relationship with the dad now, it's distant and strained.
Why is the interview insufferable?
Yes, there are carpenter parents. I think the style only works with some children and with others it seems like it's working but then they grow up and write books about how damaged they were.
I think carpentering is a result of the combination of time (smaller families, high SES families with lots of resources, including parents who can concentrate on their children) and fear (that a life similar to the one they are providing will only be available for their children if their children are properly cultivated).
Oh, things like the combination of this:
Q: With your own children, were you ever tempted to intervene more than you think healthy? A: It all just goes by so quickly that you really are just reacting to emergencies. Just like all those other middle-class parents, I worried. I like to say there should be a worry bank for parents so that all the things you worry about that don't happen could be deposited in the worry bank, and the next time something happens, you wouldn't have to worry about it. I certainly would've had a substantial account in the worry bank.
with this:
A: Children are the most amazing thing in the universe, as far as I'm concerned. If you're worrying about how it's going to turn out, you aren't experiencing that day-to-day satisfaction of being with these incredible, extraordinary creatures. Every single one of them is the most incredible, extraordinary creature that you're ever going to want to see. I think the joy of having that deep relationship--that's the core of what being a parent is.My husband just spent last weekend digging out a model dinosaur with my grandson. About 3 o'clock in the morning I woke up and went into the other room and I saw that he was there, playing with his dinosaur. I spent most of yesterday morning climbing around underneath a dinner table with a bunch of Australian animals and my two grandchildren. Not usually the way I spend my [time].Q: What do you think parenting will look like at the end of the century?A: We'll have a generation of parents and a generation of children who won't have had the deep satisfactions of being parents and being children in the way that they might have and are going to spend a lot of time fretting and worrying and being hovered over for nothing. The question isn't so much "What will happen in the long run?" but "What's happening to people's lives right now?"
I interpret that to mean, "I too was an overanxious helicopter parent, but today's parents are overanxious all wrong!!! They're not deeply connecting with their kids because I played with a dinosaur yesterday."
Or this part:
Part of the inspiration for this book was my own parents. They came from pretty poor immigrant families. My parents dropped out of school and had six children, starting when my mom was 19. We lived in public housing projects to begin with. By most people's standards, you'd say their children have really excelled. One of my brothers is a writer for The New Yorker. One of my other brothers was the art critic for the The Globe and Mail for many years. All of my three sisters are very successful doing a very wide range of things. But the funny thing was, growing up, we never felt as though we were under any particular pressure to do anything. My parents believed so profoundly in their values, which were all about art and science, that we all just thought about them as being part of everyday life.All of us at one point or another rebelled and dropped out and did all sorts of things that I shudder to think about now, certainly in my case, but we had a sense of stability and love that led us to go on and shape independent lives of our own. And I hope that's what I've done with my children, too.
So, the author is a new grandmother. Let's say she grew up in the 50s. What else might account for her parents being so relaxed about the lifetime outcomes of their kids?
I'm not saying that the actual message is wrong - yay gardeners! boo carpenters! - I just got annoyed by how the interview plays out. If she'd said, "I got really stressed out when I was raising my kids and I feel like I was not able to recreate what my parents did, but times have changed and here's what you'd have to do to recreate that easy-going dynamic in much more uncertain times" or something I might have more sympathy.
The overbearing stage-parent or sports-parent comes to mind as a Carpenter-type, and at the extremes of behavior, it's not a strawman. Marv Marinovich, who decided when his son Todd was in the cradle that he was going to create the perfect environment and raise an NFL quarterback, comes to mind*. How useful that is as a "type" I don't know, because I don't know at what decreased level of intensity you say it's not fair to call them a Carpenter anymore.
*Todd made it to the NFL and was a famous bust, having started to develop a serious drug problem during high school.
I think I would have tried gardener parenting except that it just got impossible for me to watch him talk with so very much food in his mouth that I switched.
The garden is a metaphor, Mobes.
Right. How long does that work for? I meant to look it up last week but got distracted.
Carpenters are real, and they're insufferable.
The Missus is very much a Carpenter, and I am by temperament a Gardener. Since she is a stay-at-home mom, that means that our kids are being raised Carpenter-style. So far, I am compelled to admit, this has worked out very well.
I don't know where it comes from, though. Her mother, like my parents, was very much in the Gardener mode.
A real carpenter is something to watch. They can eyeball and angle and cut a 2x4 while holding it in the air better that I can with a jig and clamps.
34: All morning long my eyes keep playing tricks on me, that you commented in the sidebar.
A real, non-metaphorical carpenter. Somehow I thought this was the thread about sawing stuff.
AS LONG AS THE ROOTS ARE NOT SEVERED, ALL IS WELL. AND ALL WILL BE WELL IN THE GARDEN.
I use "parent" as a verb. I don't think I'm a carpenter in terms of looking for a particular outcome or pushing kids to things they hate, but gardening sounds a little more recreational than the work involved in pruning and repotting and spending four hours in small rooms with my ex so our littlest can get her tonsils and adenoids out or whatever. Hmm.
I resisting using "parent" as a verb until I read "Dirtybag Athena" and now I think of that when I use it.
I really liked the book. Gopnik's an entertaining writer, and I remember it being mostly a gentle-push-back on modern parenting trends (and she sees herself as having been subject to them.) I think she's right that expectations have changed since the 50s, especially for mothers, because everything is supposed to be about building the perfect child. Prenatal rules, breastfeeding, schooling, edutainment, screen time.
Also, she's totally in thrall to her grandkids, which makes for entertaining stories.
37 I almost went with Opinionated Teri Hatcher.
I'm pretty much a gardener, much to the chagrin of the wife, who always wants me to be more carpenter. My toolbox does have a few items related to my line of work, and I use them from time to time to deal with external issues. But that's still gardening, I think: you fence out the deer, maybe change the watering schedule depending on the weather, etc.
I can't remember parenting discussions in The Cook and the Carpenter. Surely some?
I have been incredibly fortunate as a parent to have a kid who made it easy, but this summer has been rough. He wanted time to "work on his own projects," which has degenerated into near-complete lethargy and sloth. You can't force motivation, but this is ridiculous.
OT: My child is disappointed in me. I won my first raid battle against a legendary Pokemon, but I didn't catch it.
Psychologist Alison Gopnik's new book looks at the trouble with "expert" child-rearing .... but it is not a parenting book
Everyone else is wrong but I have no advice? Well, it turns out, not exactly that since she will tell you that Carpenter parents are doing it wrong vs Gardener parents are doing it right, though it sounds from Heebie's description more like free range parenting because gardening as "creating a fertile ground" without very active and persistent tending makes for happy purslane and tasty vegetables for chipmunks, woodchucks et al.
I used to be impressed with woodchucks until I figured out they were just groundhogs.
One group that I encounter a fair bit: Carpenters pretending to be Gardeners. But "pretend" isn't the right term, exactly, since they genuinely aspire to more of a Gardening mode, and would probably describe themselves as Gardeners (if asked to choose between two equally reductive poles of a probably false dichotomy, that is!).
Anyway, they tend to be white UMCs, highly educated, professional class, with very liberal/progressive views on almost any social issue imaginable (as heebie notes, they're not "the same group as the Fear of Public Schools/Wrong School District group"), and they explicitly disavow an authoritarian parenting model. But the thing is, they do sort of micro-manage their kid's lives, because they do seem to subscribe to the doctrine of the perfectibility of man, or at least of their own children.
That said, I already feel a little bit guilty about writing the above. There's so much contempt for mothers and motherhood in this culture, and so little support for families with children, and so much criticism aimed at "parents" (but let's be honest, it's mostly aimed at mothers) for doing too much, for not doing enough, for doing the wrong thing...when most of us are just trying to muddle through, I guess.
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Bleg: I remember seeing a chain of tweets or something within the past year. It goes something like this. "How could Nazis possibly believe all the horrible, ridiculous things they said about Jews. Blood libel? It's just ridiculous. But eventually I realized that believing it wasn't important. It was true to them because it had to be true, to justify what they wanted to do next." Comes to mind for obvious reasons but I'd like to be able to link to the original and I can't find it. Anyone know what I'm talking about?
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That's probably way wordier than a tweet stream.
Here's an advertisement for the Half Plus Seven Rule.
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I beat my speeding ticket! Turned up at the courtroom earlier this evening (well, courtroom: it was a man wearing a black robe behind a desk at a municipal building just off the highway, and he mostly deals with hunting, trapping, and fishing licenses), all ready to fight. Judge couldn't find my paperwork, or "docket," as he called it. "It's your lucky day!" said the judge. Either the cop who stopped me never filed the paperwork in the first place, or else it got lost in the shuffle (and therefore I'm not entirely convinced that this municipality is particularly well-run). "Now, whether or not you were speeding," said the judge, "I hope you pay attention to the posted signs. And have a good evening."
Case closed: no ticket, no fine.
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if the kids have any relationship with the dad now, it's distant and strained.
Yeah, there certainly are carpenter parents but the tragedy for them is that ultimately this approach both fails on its own terms and also ruins the relationship with the kids. I know for sure my mother can't be satisfied with the result of her efforts, or with the amount of contact we have now. The sad thing is that I don't have any doubt that she loves me like crazy (no seriously: crazy) but if you can't stop treating an autonomous human being like an optimisation project under your control, then after a while they don't want to be around you any more.
I went, for a while, to a sort of match-making group for gay people who wanted to find a co-parent (i.e., matching up fags & dykes) and we were always encouraged to discuss our "deal-killer" issues. I quickly identified people whose deal-killers were matters of low-stakes lifestyle choices ("must be raised vegan/Kosher/on a farm/uncircumcised") as people to run away from. Not because these kinds of things aren't personally fine to want for your children, but because of the inflexibility it signalled at the very beginning of undertaking parenthood. These were, after all, "deal-killers" for people who already had limited options when it came to reproducing, and I always thought, if you're so firm on this stuff that you'd risk not having kids at all, then what happens when your kid turns out to be a different person than who you've constructed (carpentered!) in your parenthood fantasy? I never read Andrew Solomon's book about parents learning to love gay/transgendered/disabled kids (still on my list), but interviews with him from the promotional tour really fleshed out my feelings on this.
My, my, that's all very personal. Musta touched a nerve. Parents, be gardeners!
56 Congrats! Reading that has cheered me up considerably.
56. Nice to get some good news for a change.
52 was right. I don't know where I originally saw it, but the text quoted here is what I was thinking of.
Case closed: no ticket, no fine.
You're basically OJ.
I've heard of 25 in the context of legacies at snooty schools. But, "Without telling the kid anything, the dad complete the entire application himself"- Doesn't the kid have to sign the application at some point? Maybe dad pulled the, "here's a bunch of boring legal stuff we have to sign for some inheritance/bank/school regulations" and slipped the application into the pile.
We're trying not to push our kids in any particular direction, but our oldest one flitters between obsessions quickly so it's kind of annoying. I think I'm being nice and buying him a present of Magic cards or whatever and he's like, that was so last week. In a couple years he's gone through serious obsessions with Lego robotics, competitive Rubik's cube, magic/card tricks, playing baseball, playing hockey, playing Minecraft, hosting a Minecraft server, pokemon (electronic and card), Magic, hacking (that's only a partial list.) Which reminds me, he wants me to ask my nerd acquaintances how to learn white-hat hacking, he says he's tried online courses but they're boring. I guess I'm being too carpenter-like in that he can choose what he wants but then I over-support him and wind up with expensive hockey pads or sets of toys he is no longer interested in.
Our girl, who has hated anything girly her whole life- to the point of saying Yuck, Blech if you offer her anything remotely pink or frilly. Then two days ago she said she wanted a dress, so we dug out a hand-me-down from her cousins that was purple with multicolored flowers, and she slept in it and said she loved it. We bought her a button-down shirt for a memorial service next week and she said she wants to bring both on our trip and she'll decide that day whether she wants a shirt like her brother or the dress.
If the paperwork is shit, you must acquit.
My mother just told that 'parent completes the entire college application' story about a friend of my sister's in high school. No idea if it was true.
56: Wow, I stand corrected. Well done. (Makes me wonder how many tickets they have the paperwork for at all.)
Back home, there was a judge who deliberately hid the paperwork for his son's speeding ticket. My dad was always baffled both that he did it (the fines aren't even very high) and that if he did it, he did it in such a way as to leave evidence (I think he left the ticket in his private office). I think the judge must have figured the cop would never dare bring the issue to anybody's attention.
Doesn't the kid have to sign the application at some point?
Forging a signature seems not at all inconsistent with the rest of the story as told.
Especially if the whole of the kid's application essay was about how great is dad was.
Re: carpenters vs. gardeners, I think and hope Cassandane and I will be more gardener-like (but then, who doesn't?), but it's too early to tell, Atossa is only 2.
40, 50: I would use "parenting" as a verb whenever we aren't taking the path of least resistance. When Atossa and I are playing with her dolls or blocks or balls or art supplies, or when we're out of the house as a family for something Cassandane and I wouldn't do if it were just the two of us, it's parenting. When Atossa is watching TV and I'm playing computer games, I'm not parenting. When she's watching TV and I'm cooking, gray area.
Sometimes I feel like this is because of where we live. We live in a 3-bedroom rowhouse with a roughly 20x20 backyard. My parents' house has 5 bedrooms (depending on what counts, but the point is it's significantly bigger than my house) and 20 acres. Even though Atossa is only two, it seems like we could turn her loose in my parent's backyard or a dedicated playroom with little supervision. At our house, though? We couldn't make a dedicated playroom if we wanted. Her toys are right next to our computers and books. There's a park nearby, but there are fountains she always wants to run through which she might not be dressed for, and other people there we might not want her playing with. (I mean, she can't join a soccer game.) Maybe this is just my imagination and I would hate living in a place where this problem doesn't exist at all, but if she's awake and not staring at a screen, she needs at least 75 percent of our attention. Planning things seems inevitable and that's a slippery slope to carpenterhood.
At our house, though? We couldn't make a dedicated playroom if we wanted.
Just curious, I'm childless and am probably missing something, but why can't she just have free run of the house, or a subset of rooms within it? Is she still at the age where that would be likely to lead to damaged property?
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NMM to the President's Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum.
"You can't quit, I'm firing you!"
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70: Yes, two years and one month is still young enough that there's a high chance of damaged property and/or injuries. She draws with crayons on grown-ups' books and the couch when she can. This morning she tried to climb up my bicycle, parked in our dining room. If it had fallen over on her, both she and some furniture could have been damaged. (In hindsight maybe we should let her have that experience once and hopefully she'll learn. But someday she'll try to climb the 7-foot-tall bookshelf, and that'll be a nightmare.) The closest thing we have to a playroom is her own room, and that still has some stuff in it she shouldn't play with freely, like books she's too young for and diaper-related stuff. The house I grew up in, there could be an entire room dedicated to child-friendly safe stuff. The backyard I grew up in, I think we could turn her loose with toys and she'd be fine for a long time as long as she was within sight of a grown-up.
Maybe this is just grass-is-always-greener stuff but I think it would be easier with more physical space. I dunno, but it's the first thing that comes to mind about this thread - we do schedule her a fair amount and actively direct her towards or away from things, but it feels like there's no alternative.
71: Hah. I just did a gnews search and found "40 minutes ago: council is disbanding" and "36 minutes ago: Campbell CEO resigns from council".
Probably the Campbells guy hadn't got the news.
Canned soup has been demonstrated to induce spontaneous gender change in frogs.
Great, we can spray the Pepes with it.
The Campbell's CEO was 10% resigned already, still filling the can with water when the council disbanded.
The fearsome sporting parents who have their kids doing three hours of tennis serves a day at age four seem like Carpenters. Or John Stuart Mill's dad. No idea how common it really is though.
Always feel like I'm not being gardener enough myself which means I'm probably not one. Not the sporting type though.
69 It seems to me that the real cliff on the slippery slope to carpenter parenting is whether you let them quit an organized activity -- hockey, ballet, piano, choir, etc -- the first time they don't want to go. Fifth time? Ever? I guess even the cliff has slope and ledges.
If you let mine quit the first time, he'd do nothing but video games. It takes some persistence on his part before he can quit.
Do the cliff ledges have jello and cacti on them?
We dragged my stepdaughter to play soccer for years. And how many hours did I waste trying to teach her arithmetic! I was as much of a failure as a carpenter-parent as I am as an actual carpenter.
I called The Missus a carpenter above, and she is big on grades -- she makes the kids grind for school in a way that makes me a bit uncomfortable. But we don't make them take lessons if they don't want to, and when my daughter got into two different selective public middle schools -- one was math-oriented, the other more liberal artsy -- we let my daughter choose the literature track when I think we would have preferred the math one. We would have let my son go to the non-selective public high school if he had wanted to. (And, in fact, he did want to until his little sister got into the more elite program.)
Neither of the kids much resents my wife's whip-cracking on homework and whatnot. To the extent that I was subject to that sort of thing as a kid (not much) it made me crazy. For awhile, I was really worried that she was ruining her relationship with her kids, but there is zero actual evidence of that. (Though she has also moderated a bit.)
I took xelA to football for about 4 months and then gave up, because he was clearly not enjoying it. So far, no hot-housing tendencies from us. I think we tend toward the lazy gardener end of the spectrum, but that may be as much because we simply don't have _time_ to do all that careful shaping and guiding.
I think I'd be inclined to be a bit more dictatorial around school work at a certain age, simply because I know how high the stakes are. But, a big part of me thinks that kids above a certain age are old enough to motivate their own damn selves.*
* as a teenager I basically despised friends who had additional tutors and parents driving them on.
We've already had other parents ask us if we are considering getting a tutor for xelA when he starts school! FFS, he's 4. And when we were getting the tour of his school, the other couple on the tour kept asking what kinds of provision they had for gifted, intellectual genius type children. Again, FFS.
Maybe they were talking about getting a bigger house and trying to ask if it would be a Tudor.
I Aed the M about starting Selah in kindergarten "early" since our state changed the age cutoff from October 1 to August 1 this year. Our district decided younger kids who wanted waivers should take the kindergarten readiness test and score as well as a 5-year-old is supposed to, which she easily did. (She's five now but wasn't at the start of the month.) I heard some mothers at the YMCA pool in a wealthier suburb also talking about the chance. One has a son born in May, so three months older than Selah, and she was worried he wouldn't be mature and focused enough and she claims her pediatrician said all boys born May and after should be kept back. (He was about 2/3 of Selah's height and I suspect that factored in, though she's immense.) So there's an informal cutoff for wealthy people that's six months of extra maturity/whatever compared to what the state thought was adequate a year ago. I'm sure those parents think they're tending a garden but you have to be careful where you put your poisons I guess.
re: 88
I think that's less of a thing here, but I'm aware of a few parents whose kids are eligible to start school this year (the cut-off is 4 in August, for a school year starting in September) who are keeping them back for the following year, and I know of one kid in xelA's upcoming class who was held back a year. And, I know a couple who are hiring tutors to start around the time the kid starts school.
xelA will be 4 and 5.5 months, so pretty much bang in the middle of the age range, and we have _zero_ intention of doing any of that shit.
89: my own parents did the reverse and chucked me into school a year early. At the time I flattered myself that I must have been something of a prodigy. Now that I've spent some time sharing space with several small boys, I am fairly sure that they just wanted to get me out of the house and were able to buffalo the school into complying.
Parents only want what's best for their children five minutes to think.
My parents also sent me early. Never too young to reprobate!