Kirsten Mortensen's blog

Get ready. This is a Dark Post. Perhaps it being November & gray . . .

I remember years ago reading about the Little Emperor syndrome in China: families forced to limit their offspring to one child ended up raising spoilt little boys. I think we’re seeing a similar effect in the US, albeit through slightly different mechanisms.

We’re trying to correct course, now, some of us. This article in the NY Times discusses how parents are using techniques borrowed from dog training, of all things, to try to recapture some of the authority they’ve ceded in their relationship to their kids.

Let’s hope it’s not too little, too late.

Here’s the thing. Children used to be an unavoidable consequence of sex/marriage. Now they’re something we acquire, one at a time, like art objects, to enhance our lives.

When modern educated women have a child, we’re encouraged to cherish the child and the experience of having that child in our lives. They grow up so quickly, after all! Drop everything and pay attention. Make that child the center of your life.

How unlike 100 years ago when we may well be on our 10th or 15th baby after #1 has already grown up & moved out of the house — 17 or 18 years of straight baby.

Now we savor every second — photograph it, blog it, wonder at it, analyze it. We labor over our parenting styles. And we fall prey, some of us, to being over-awed. I’ve observed parents — my peers — who seem to think their child is as equipped to make decisions as adults are. After all, my son/daughter is so smart, has so many brilliant insights, is so articulate, precocious, mature for his/her age . . .

That’s where the damage is done. Children aren’t equipped to make decisions. They don’t really know very much, and won’t for decades. They aren’t “mature.” Their brilliant insights are not all that special.

And our awe has terrible consequences, because when parents cede so much authority to their children, it puts the children on horribly shaky ground.

Imagine how it feels. You’re small, physically weak, inexperienced, new to everything — but the grown-ups around you, the ones who clearly have uncounted advantages in the world, who de facto control so much — are turning to you for guidance.

So what do you do? Depends on the child. But you must find some sort of coping mechanism.

Perhaps you learn to bluff — you develop a habit of always “knowing the answer,” because after all your parents seem to think you should. This could take the form of being a “little know it all” or of outright lying.

You might become insolent, another mechanism to hide the insecurity that gnaws at you. Better to be on the attack than admit that there’s something terrible wrong — that you don’t really feel the authority with which you’ve been vested.

You will certainly be neurotic. You don’t have the benefit of those few short years, in childhood, when somebody had all the answers: the years that form a kind of experiential bedrock for our personalities, that give us an underlying sense of order and certainty. You will be anxious, fearful — you will have been exposed to a sense of how much is unknown before you were developmentally equipped to handle it.

You will have trouble empathizing with others, because your parents never required you to try to read them. You didn’t have to check their faces to detect how your decisions or opinions might be received — on the contrary, the exchange was all going in the other direction, one way only, as your parents watched you to see what your opinions were and how the things they said/decided were affecting you.

You won’t know how to wield authority or make your peace with it. When you weren’t taught to live under the benign authority of a parent, you can’t internalize its use or learn to cope with it. You will grate at it unnecessarily when you encounter it as an adult. Your ability to recognize true injustice will be crippled. You may well become a compulsive rule-breaker — your knee-jerk defiance of authority might cause you to continually sabotage yourself, your professional standing, your reputation.

If you find yourself in a position of authority, you will use it unevenly. You may become a tyrant. At best, you’ll be unpredictable and inconsistent as a boss/teacher/parent.

I’ve observed that many of these children go on to find themselves “corrected” by their peers — i.e. teased, bullied, or ostracized — because their lack of social skills causes them to run afoul of other emotionally damaged children. Others end up medicated, because their poor impulse control is misdiagnosed as having some sort of physiological component, when the real cause is the family dynamic — and because as they get older, parents find themselves unable to handle with their undisciplined behavior. Drugging the child at least mutes the behavior’s more disruptive manifestations.

What remains to be seen, of course, is what effect these children will have on our social fabric as a whole when they are in their 30s and 40s and 50s.

Personally, I think it’s going to be ugly.

But they won’t listen to their critics — they won’t know how.

We’re just going to have to live with the little, grown up brats, whether we want to or not . . .