The whole job of parenting seems set up for conditionality.
Sometimes the basic task can seem like an impossible contradiction: to both accept your children exactly as they are and also spend 18 years working to turn them into something fit for purpose in the wider world. |
 | | Allie Sullberg |
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As a mother of three young sons, and an author writing a book about raising boys in the age of the #MeToo movement, I spend a lot of my time thinking about parenthood. How much control do we really have over who our kids become? |
My sons are very different from me as a child — I was an approval-addicted, people-pleasing good girl; they are rambunctious and wild. Clearly these traits track closely with some gender stereotypes. But of course, it's impossible to tell just how much of a role, if any, gender plays in our differences. As a feminist, even asking the question can feel fraught. |
In this era, the task of raising good sons has become highly politically charged. I am working hard to raise respectful, thoughtful young men, but day to day, my sons often don't want to comply with my efforts. It can be tempting to embrace the excuse that "boys will be boys," a cliché that would certainly make me feel better about my own parenting shortcomings. But I try hard to resist this cliché, knowing that it belongs to the very enabling narrative that brought us toxic masculinity in the first place. Sometimes it can feel as though I am caught in my own ideological trap. |
The push-pull dynamic between my sons and me became even more pressing recently when they started piano lessons, and I too decided to take up the piano again after 30 years away from the instrument. As a child, I embraced music lessons diligently and conscientiously, desperate to gain my mother's approval; my sons are maddeningly uninterested in gaining mine. The whole experience has been both torturous and humbling, pushing me to think hard about the baggage we pass down through the generations and about what unconditional love really means in practice. |
As I explore in my essay for Times Opinion this week, I am starting to realize that parenting cannot be a political project or a strategic direction, but is rather a complex, evolving relationship between humans, inevitably rife with contradictions and ambivalent feelings. Rather than denying that complexity or burying it in shame, we would do better to examine it with honesty and self-reflection. |
| READ RUTH'S FULL ESSAY HERE | | |
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