In Spite of Everything Read Free Page A

combat boots and the nursing bra. The adorable baby girl in her Clash onesie. You get the idea.
    A lot of this is a result of the parenting style with which so many of us were raised: “benign neglect.” It is a recognizable outcropping of the “good-enough mother” ideal proposed by the great child psychologist D. W. Winnicott, in which the imperfectly conscientious mother does a better job than the “perfect” one by allowing her child to develop as an independent being rather than smothering him with attention. If you are an X parent, you have likely heard your Boomer parents’ thoughts on the subject. The salient points are “When we were kids, our mothers just told us to be home by dinnertime” and “We would just hop on our bikes and roam the neighborhood” or “play stickball in the street”—and how sad it is that “kids today just don’t get that kind of freedom” because it is “so important to their development.” *
    But what Boomers often omit from these object lessons is that in the 1950s and ’60s, their mothers were at home to tell them to get on their bikes, and the reason they had to be at home by dinnertime is that their fathers would be expecting the whole family to sit down together. As Dr. Spock had advised that generation of parents, there were clear house rules, no spanking, attentiveness to the children. By contrast, for most of us who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, life at home revolved around a pattern of benign neglect that looked something like this: We watched Saturday morning cartoons and
Brady Bunch
reruns while playing with
Star Wars
and
Transformers
action figures or Strawberry Shortcake and My Pretty Pony dolls. Our parents got divorced, and when our moms went to work, they gave us the house keys so that we could let ourselves in after school. We helped ourselves to something in the orange category of snack, like Cheetos and Doritos, or in the white—Top Ramen noodles, Pringles, Fluffernutter sandwiches—while we watched ABC After-School Specials like
My Dad Lives in a Downtown Hotel
and
The Boy Who Drank Too Much
. When Mom came home, she was too tired to cook, so it was either TV dinners at home or stuffed potato skins at Houlihan’s. We saw our dads every other weekend, and after they bought us more
Star Wars
stuff, sometimes they’d take us to their single-guy apartments, which looked like the last day of a Macy’s clearance sale. Lunch? Bennigan’s.
    Where was the “benign” part in this “benign neglect”? Friends and I often joke that whereas Baby Boomers’ mothers actually did practice Winnicott’s counsel, our own mothers just went for “neglect neglect.” To this, our mothers often bring up feminism and all the important ways in which the women’s movement made it possible for their daughters to go to college and launch real careers. No one would wish to minimize this effort. After all, most of us who have had a higher education and a career to go with it—whether Boomer or Xer—can affirm that we would not wish the repressive delirium of the Feminine Mystique or Yellow Wallpaper on any woman. Neither would we want to yoke men with the albatross of disaffected breadwinner. Yet what the X mother cannot shake is this: In the realm of the child, whose worst fear is to be alone and unprotected, such feminist affirmations mean nothing. If children are alone and unprotected, they are damaged—period.
    In other words, for “benign neglect” to function as a parenting style, there must be the presumption of “benign” for children to reap the developmental benefits of “neglect”—and “benign” amounts to the security of knowing that they are
not
really on their own, having to fend for themselves. This is why, according to many child development experts, alone and unprotected is the chief condition of fairy-tale protagonists—and why they must find parental surrogates to prevail. Where, after all, would Cinderella be without her fairy