Miki Dedijer

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Overparenting and social monoculture

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Parenting implodes in a social monoculture.

The social ecology we’ve depended on as parents until recently, is today many times frail and tattered. There is little social cohesion around our homes, few of us have a living community in which to plant our children.

In a few generations, the communal life that held our children even in cities has been replaced by single-parent households, frequent divorces, forced schooling, estrangement from neighbors, urban sprawl into forests and meadows, booming traffic, repeatedly moving homes, scattered blood families, exhausting work-schedules, urban commutes, globe-trotting teenagers, business travels, busy or absent grandparents, rampant digitalization.

Overparenting is an understandable response to communal collapse–we anxiously attempt to control our children’s lives to shield them from a world that seems increasingly fragmented, erratic and hostile.

Surrounded by communal disarray, we try to be all we can for our children, serving as fathers and mothers, as grandparents, as playmates, as teachers, elders, supervisors, guides, protectors, confidants, supportive listeners, storytellers, personal assistants.

Maybe you recognize something of that. I’ve certainly heard from enough parents now to know this is not uncommon, not unknown. Yet overparenting is too much to ask of any one of us.

And it’s not healthy for our children. Our conscious or unconscious attempts to compensate for communal erosion deprive our children of their need of failure, frustration, discomfort, disappointment, adversity, uncertainty as well as free play, timelessness, aimless wandering and all other ways we learn to become resilient humans.

The quick fix? No, there isn’t one. But if you’re the parent of a young child, or an expectant parent, mending community is good parenting. You still have time, just.

Cultural repair mends the family, and lessens the stresses on all, but it’s a long haul. Few of us know what we’re doing, or how to proceed. Yet the signs are there, and the obligation is upon us. And so we must proceed, not knowing how.


Home as a place that doesn’t exist

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The global village tends no fire around which the children can gather.

Its sophisticated arrogance is politely to sneer at domesticity as a lovely ideal, but ultimately a naive and inevitably temporary undertaking.

It announces to anyone seeking to grow roots, that home is to be found everywhere, making sure that it is nowhere to be found.

No wonder then that many of us are part of a deracinated throng that for generations has wandered towards an elusive somewhere we are told is both here and there, homeless people forever on our way towards the rumour of a village hearth.

The denigration of the homebody and the dismissal of a place-bound life has ripped into the fabric of most lineages, leaving its bloodied mark on the words once spoken there.

If you doubt whether this is so, and has been for centuries, consider the old Latin word villain, which means ‘inhabitant of a farm,’ or ‘the scoundrel in thrall to the villa for his life’.

The Swedish word ‘hemsk’ today means horrible, terrible, frightening. Follow it back in time to the 1800s, and you find the meaning changes slightly to anxious and gloomy, even stupid. Further back yet, and it speaks of a person who spends most of his or her time being at home.

Of all the myriad challenges parents grapple with as they raise a child in a culture such as this, one of the more common ones is the feeling of being unsettled, literally without a seat to rest on.

Many fathers and mothers are overcome with the experience of being adrift and isolated. Wanting to pass on a greater sense of stillness and belonging to their children, they wish for their lives to be held with more groundedness. But even meditation or its equivalents offer a weak medicine for the affliction of endless perambulation.

The path that meets these needs passes instead through the willingness to stay put long enough for the whole family to become so enthralled by the intimacy of a place, that they may one day proudly reclaim their role as villains.

Then home becomes truly irreplacable, a somewhere not found anywhere else but here, and that alone is enough to kindle a fire that draws others towards an actual hearth.

The spell of potential

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There are a few spells around, beliefs that are so common we hardly notice their insidious impact on how we lead our lives.

Like when we tell a child “You can be anything you want to be”, without us actually having any way to know what that child’s potential truly is.

Potential has no definite shape, nor a given end. It’s amorphous and limitless.

Under the spell of potential a child will always fall short, growing accustomed to never being all that she has been told she can be. She loses sight of her true value, and her natural capacity for belonging slowly withers.

You, I and our children cannot be anything we want to be. That’s good news.

Because once we recognize the spell for what it is–another expression of a culture that has fallen ill from all kinds of abstraction and excess–we can begin to accept who we actually are.

Most of us are quite ordinary, we suffer and we struggle, we are gifted in ways that bring us joy and some kind of income to help meet our needs, and if we’re fortunate, we have a place where we know the land and the people in it well enough to feel at home.

If we can accept the confines of our selves, we can more readily value our child for who he or she actually is. Then the child’s gifts, such as they are, become surprising treasures, tended through discipline, and complementing the gifts of others.

Your child’s spiritual doctor

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Your child’s nature unfolds like an oak from an acorn.

Once she has tumbled onto the ground from some mysterious height, it is the soil and the wind and the rains that give her ultimate expression its particular form.

Who she becomes when she’s well rooted and fully extended has painfully little to do with who you are as a parent.

And yet, we readily take it upon us to be our child’s spiritual doctor, to provide the way for her to become what we envision she ought to be.

This is too big a burden for someone as inconsequential as a father or a mother to the innate calling of the child. It’s also a position we don’t have the qualifications or skills for, whatever our ambition, unless that child is someone else’s. If she is, then we might serve her as an elder, a mentor, a trusted uncle or aunt.

Our own child’s spiritual path is laid down by her encounter with the world, what we used to know as the village. And if this village is now unknown to you, as it is to most of us here in the west, you might have placed the full weight of your child onto your weary lap. If you’re a single parent, you will know the strain of this burden all the more.

Parenting this way is an impossibility masquerading as a responsability.

If we take it as our task to be the spiritual doctor of our child, we close the door on the main generational work before all of us fathers and mothers, which is to tend to the threadbare remains of what was once the village, so that it may begin to remember why it came to be in the first place.

This is why parenting today as always before is village-making, not the spiritual doctoring of our own kind. It’s a gathering in of people and beings around all our children, so the world in which they come of age has the willingness and capacity to welcome them and steward them in ways we on our own cannot.

An invitation to lighten up

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Children are full of spirit, passion, life force, vitality. It overflows.

The world is new! The body amazing. Puddles are endless fun. Strawberries! The fur of a cat. Hard edge of a rock. (Ouch!) Tears. Up. Look. Sunlight through a fall leaf. The ocean waves.

Your child can point you to where you’ve grown stiff from age, routine, habit or lethargy. She reminds you of where your lust for life has atrophied. She shows you when you try to fit the universe in a square box, its sides made from logic, rationality, science and certainty.

Here’s her invitation: mom, dad, loosen up, get limber, lighten up. Do something ludicrous and lustful. Let go. Let’s play.

Be a hero and heed her call. Throw away your watch, and watch what you throw away. Let the dust rats run past you and hide behind the open door.

Step out of line, ditch a deadline, get offline, and join your child in a riotous tumble with the divine.

Your secret lover

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Your partner doesn’t know your secret lover called Plan B.

Plan B is softer, more loving, doesn’t smell of onions. It has nicer parents, better health, and always agrees with the values you want to share with your child. Plan B doesn’t age.

It is the other life you dream of when this one seems unbearably mundane, ordinary or average.

You call on Plan B by whispering to yourself  ‘if only…’, or ‘I want more…’ or ‘that’s it…’

Whenever you’re cradling Plan B, you’re not present to your relationship. You have one foot in, and one foot out the door running towards a mirage. A part of you is absent.

Are you ready to share your secret, and tell your partner about Plan B?

How sometimes you imagine living on your own again. How you worry sitting by the bedside of your sleeping child, that you might not be up to the task of parenting. Or that you long to rekindle a tenderness that used to be there but now seems atrophied somehow.

For as long as it lasts, true comittment doesn’t house a secret lover.