Navigating between Opposite Extremes

The essay by Marilyn Charles contains many wise observations about parents and their children, enriched by anecdotes about her experiences as a mother and as a psychotherapist. An especially insightful anecdote as a parent was her quotation of advice to her: “Your job as a parent is to help your children with their problems. And you will be one of their problems.”

More than 40 years ago, three co-authors and I made and published quantitative scores on the degree to which children were inculcated to acquire several traits. They included two contrasting traits: obedience and self-reliance. The scores were applied to a world sample of 186 communities. They ranged from independent societies, such as tribes in small islands in the Pacific Ocean and Indian tribes in North America, to villages in nations, including Ireland and Russia. The information was obtained from books that described the cultural customs. Most of the books were by anthropologists who lived in the community for a year or more.

Inculcation of obedience usually exceeded self-reliance in communities that produced food by agriculture or domesticated animals. This child training was adaptive because most adults needed to obey the patriarchs who owned the agricultural land and the domesticated animals. Most of these communities had a higher level of government that also required obedience. Inculcation of self-reliance usually exceeded obedience in communities that collected external food by hunting large animals or collecting small animals, vegetables, fruits, and honey. This child training was adaptive because most adults needed to hunt or collect the external sources of food. Many of these communities were independent and migratory, requiring adult self-reliance.

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Inculcation of traits in children should be expected to be adaptive for adult behavior. Villages that survive for multiple generations need to develop child training that prepares the new generation for their adult roles. The United States of America is a complex nation. Some families inculcate their children to be highly obedient and also highly self-reliant. This can cause the children to become confused and ambivalent. An alternative potential benefit is that the children can adapt to their adult role, whether it requires obedience or self-reliance.

The essay by Marilyn Charles is primarily about relationships between parents and their children. Completely authoritarian parenting has often been attempted but it is maladaptive. An example I heard in a radio program many years ago was a child’s longing to go alone to the playground across the street from the home. The parents forbade their young daughter to walk by herself to the playground. After many years of her begging, they finally allowed her to do so. She rushed into the street, heedless of the automobile traffic, and was killed by a car. Her parents undoubtedly regretted giving her permission. They also should have regretted their failure to instruct her on techniques for crossing the street safely. Their fatal mistake was eventual permissiveness only because they failed to teach her how to cross the street safely.

Birth order of children is an influential variable not mentioned by Marilyn Charles. Parents tend to be more authoritarian toward their first child and more permissive toward their subsequent children. The preferable policy is the opposite. The first child is usually quite identified with and obedient toward the parents. The subsequent children are usually more individualistic, innovative, and oppositional toward their parents and older siblings. Irving D. Harris’ The Promised Seed; A Comparative Study of Eminent First and Later Sons (1964) reported evidence that eminent first sons were more connected to their parents. Eminent later sons were more disconnected from their parents. Similarly Frank J. Sulloway’s Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives (1996) reported that the first child is usually quite identified with and obedient toward the parents, while subsequent children tend to be oppositional toward their parents and older siblings.

St. Paul’s School, a pre-college boarding school near Concord, New Hampshire, was attended exclusively by boys when I was a student. Many of the students, but not I, were from wealthy families. I admired the performance of a history teacher who was scholarly instead of dominating. When several students acted disruptively in his class, the usual punishment was to give demerits. Instead, he assigned each of them to write an essay about a specified person or event included in the textbook for the course. The grade for the course would be influenced by the merit of the essay. These students complied, thereby obtaining further education.

A classmate of mine at that school subsequently became a teacher there. He told me that before he began teaching, a very ex-

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perienced teacher advised him to remember two things. First, the students are your enemies. Second, Jesus stated that you should love your enemies. The word “enemies” in a private conversation with a new colleague was intentionally an exaggeration of the antagonistic feelings of many boys toward the teachers in a boarding school that contained no female students and no female teachers.

Many conflicts between parents and their children originate from the assumption of many parents that they own and should control their child. An extreme contrary view is expressed by the Unitarian Universalist Churches in a ceremony when parents announce the personal name they have chosen for their child. The prescribed statements for the parents include the following:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you.

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

People need to navigate between opposite extremes, such as dominance or submission, boldness or caution, impulse or hesitation. This is especially true of the relationship that includes an intrinsically dominant person, such as a parent, teacher, employer, supervisor, or government official. The subordinate is dependent but has a strong desire to be independent. There is a saying that the young child learns to walk for the purpose of walking away from the mother. This probably applies less to the first child than to the subsequent children. Marilyn Charles’ essay concentrated on relationships between parent and child. Many social relationships are between potential equals. They include children who are classmates in school or neighbors in their community. Many adults are neighbors, classmates in college, and colleagues in their workplace. In these relationships, people need to navigate between excessive dominance and excessive subordination. Maladaptive behaviors include micromanagement by bosses and unquestioning obedience by subordinates.

Marriage brings together two adults who are potentially equal. They certainly differ from the dependent status of a young child and the dominant status of the parents. The conventional cultural expectation is that the husband dominates his wife. A contrary relationship was expressed in a cartoon I saw many years ago. The wife said to another couple “We agreed that he would make all the major deci-

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sions and I would make all the minor decisions. In 20 years of marriage, we have not had a major decision.”

The essay by Marilyn Charles emphasized that parents should not be completely authoritarian or completely permissive. Navigation between these opposite extremes should be more frequent by parents and also by people who are responsible for the welfare of other human beings. Social relationships are crucial for everybody.

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