The Parenting-Industrial Complex

     One of the important things to learn from Gabor Mate's The Myth of Normal is that the western version of parenting is toxic to culture.  Self-soothing, shaming, ignoring, teaching them to sleep alone, no breastfeeding- these are all symptoms of a backwards philosophy we inherited from the Puritans, who sought to enhance the Protestant work ethic by sacrificing the child's well-being.  Because now we don't have the time, energy, or patience to always be by our child's side.  We don't have multiple caregivers like the thousands of hunter-gatherer societies before us, all through history, that rarely left infants alone.  We're lucky to even have children in multiple age groups living near us, for our children to interact with.  And if we don't, we have to pay thousands of dollars for daycare or preschool just to buy them a social life.  In my case, I have taken a second job- a labor-intensive one as a package handler at FedEx- largely to pay for preschool expenses.

    This is something I have never been more wrong about.  Four years ago, I agreed with Dr. Benjamin Spock in his most-popular-selling-parenting-book-of-all-time that discipline should be taught as early as possible, and with our pediatrician that letting a baby cry to sleep won't do it any harm.  I tried to enforce these views on my wife and firstborn for a long time, but neither would succumb to these westernized violations of nature.  Every time I made a stressful situation worse by trying to force compliance, it made my son that much more defiant.  My wife was right all along; we needed to hold him as much as possible, no matter how tired this sick society made us.  And no matter how little help we got.  

    My mother has the same disease I have, the expectation that a child should have minimal contact in order not to spoil them.  It is a disease of our culture and society and goes a long way to explaining how neurotic these generations have become, at least in the west.  I see no such symptoms in places like Thailand, my wife's homeland, where younglings are given as much attention as any other mammalian species gives to theirs.  It is even a crisis of evolution, that we are teaching our children to be as unemotional and detached from nature as possible, going against the fiber of every other upbringing in our kingdom, the mammals, where we inherited a natural need to be touched, held, and loved unconditionally.  

    I have not seen evidence that being fully attentive to children aged 1-5 spoils them.  My feeling is that it only happens if parents continue doing it past an appropriate age.  The whole idea is fodder for the parenting-industrial complex, which publishes books that indoctrinate us with the capitalist suburbia mantra that before we can care for our children, we must make the money to support them.  If we must teach them to be alone at an early age, all for that glorious dollar, so that we can prove how successful we are as individuals, then it is a total sham in the eyes of nature, which judges us from afar, mocking us with the evidence that all mammals care for their young more than we do, as did every human culture before ours.  It proves how much the western lifestyle is a neurotic function of individualism, a crippling detergent from reality, which has not only damaged our minds but the world around us as well.