a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

I went to Pennsylvania again (see blog # 18) at the beginning of the week to help my 88 year-old parents transition back to their home after a few weeks in a rehab facility. The Jamaican cab driver whom I had hired to return me to the train station for my trek home to Toronto kindly asked about them. Growing old, we agreed, certainly has its challenges, for the old ones and for their families. He had been fortunate, he told me, that when he went to Jamaica last November to bury his father , who had “passed on” at the age of 95, he had felt only a deep sadness –“I think on him every day”—but no regret: “He live a good life, he a good man, he say it his time to go, the Lord want him home.”

I asked my driver if he was a father himself, and that started a conversation. I want to tell you about it because he took up the theme of my last post on parenting and respectful conversation. I’ll try to render for you what he said in an approximation of his lilting Jamaican English, so spare and to the point. “Oh, yes, Miss,” he replied, “ I got four growed up children. And now this little one.” He pointed to a picture of Christian, age five, his first grandson, which he has Scotch-taped onto the cab’s dashboard. “This little one a blessing. He so smart! It like he been on this earth a long time, and I jus’ come to know him when he got born.”

We chatted on about what a delight grandparenting is. He told me about his grandparents, and how important they had been in his life when his parents were off in a nearby Jamaican city earning money for the extended family. “My grandfather a deacon in our church. The head was white, from England, but my grandfather he give sermons, too, every other week. He full of Bible sayings. My grandmother direct the choir. She have some sayings on her own that I use to run my life. My life teach me she right. What she say always work out good. She say: ‘Behave respectful to other people, and they behave respectful to you.’ She say: ‘If you behave respectful, you go through life without a penny but you get respect and things work out.’ That’s right! When people don’t treat me respectful, I just say to myself ‘Mister, you gonna regret that you not be a good man.’”

I sat thinking to myself about his variant on the Golden Rule, and how focused it is around respect, reciprocal respect. But he also wanted to talk about something else –the other subject of my last post! It was as though he were reading my mind while he was speaking his mind (as people often do when they are with a psychoanalyst, even if they have no conscious idea they are with a professional listener). “My daughter makin’ me real sad now. ‘Cause she don’t understand her child. She treating him mean. She get angry, she yell at him. Sometimes, she hit him. She have no patience. She always in a rush, and he a child. He go slow and take a look at everything, real curious. He in love with the computer –only five! She too busy with herself. I take him to school now in this taxi, and we go slow, have a nice time. He play with my phone. He say: ’Popsie, I goin’ send Mummy a text.” I say: ‘What you goin’ say?’ He say: ‘Don’t you be mean.’”

We rode along in silence for a while, through the icey rain, and then he said: “My daughter
marry a man that’s not a good father. He not real bad, but he not good. He busy with himself, too. I say to him: ‘When the baby born, the party over. You should not come in your house drunk, you should not show your baby boy a father who live at the bar.” My driver then told me about his grandparents’ parenting style, which was very different. His grandfather told him he needed to be “presentable,” at all times, and polite, with good manners. “He iron my white Sunday shirt.” No grandson of his would ever hear him use a bad word or blaspheme. What he said when he was mad or upset was “I feel real mad,” or “I feel upset.” His grandfather said you should never blame anyone else and certainly not God by saying “Goddamn.” It is very important to take responsibility for your own feelings, his grandfather told him. Other people might do bad things, and they should be held responsible for those bad things, but you are always responsible for your own feelings. His grandmother had a belt that she used to deliver her message when she judged he had done something wrong, but she never hit him without first explaining to him exactly why. And then she would say the hit would be soft, just enough to make him concentrate on her words and realize these words were different than her words of love and praise. He had decided, however, that he would never hit Christian, he would only explain when something was wrong, and this is because Christian’s mother, who has no patience, just hits him, with no explanation. And it is obvious that the child is hurt and angry.

I remarked that I thought children are much more insightful than many adults know or take the time to observe. My driver agreed, and said that he thinks children come into the world with wisdom from another world, and they start using it as soon as they open their eyes. “Christian say to me when I come home late from drivin’ that he afraid to sleep until I come. He like to sleep in a little bed near me and my wife. My wife a nurse, real kind. It okay. But it not okay that he afraid.”

I asked him why his grandmother’s belt had not made him afraid. And he explained to me
that his grandmother had only wanted him to stop and think what he was doing, and that he knew she was trying to help him make good decisions. “She have patience. Patience the
most important thing when you be a parent. She want me to be a thinking person.” I asked
him about his grandmother’s attitude –how had it developed? “She say Jesus say ‘suffer
the little children unto me.’ She say Jesus was a teacher, a real good teacher like a teacher
should be.” And then he told me that his grandmother would tell the people in her choir that when they sang the hymns they should think of themselves as teachers. People need to have hymns in their minds –to hear and to sing to themselves –because hymns are full of wisdom and comfort. She told him that when people can sing they are never alone and they always feel “Be not afraid.”

We arrived at the station, and I paid my driver, thanked him for our conversation. He said: “Thank you, Miss, for the good time. It give me a thought jus’ now.” “What’s your thought?” “I think my daughter have no patience because she afraid. People get mean when they afraid. They act stupid when they afraid. They too fast, don’t think.” I told him that a teacher of mine –this was actually one of my supervisors when I was training to be a psychoanalyst–had once told me “anxiety makes people stupid.” He laughed, and said he wished his grandmother was still alive so he could tell her that saying because she would have liked it so much.

So, we parted –although I will call him next time I need him to drive me to my parents’ home. And I got on the train with my coffee and my file of things to read. My file contained a collection of articles and print-outs about a new book that my former student and friend Dominique Browning has recently written about on her blog (www.slowlovelife.com). The book is Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, by Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law School. It’s not a book about a hymn that gives wisdom and comfort!

A hornet’s nest of discussion in print and in the blogosphere has been stirred up by Amy Chua’s brief for strict, punitive, unrelentingly demanding, “Chinese” parenting of the sort that will produce A+ children who can play the piano professionally, ace their exams, and never think for themselves. The book was designed to get a reaction and hit the best-seller list, and its mission has been accomplished. The excerpt of it that I read in the Wall Street Journal (8 January) is frightening.

If a demonstration were needed of what non-violent narcissistic childism consists of, here it is. This Tiger Mother wants her children to be perfect, and perfect reflections of her own self-regard, and to that end she set out to erase any wisdom the children have, any spontaneity, curiosity or joy. Of course, because she does not wish to be perceived as a monster-parent, Amy Chua writes into the tract the story of her own comeuppance as her thirteen-year-old refuses to get with the program. But this humble-pie story rings so false that you know it is there to enhance even further the Tiger Mother’s narcissism. Because she is capable of a bit of humility, she is all the more perfect. You do, however, have to admire the resilience of the child who was not deadened by the Tiger Mother’s perfectionistic regime.

It is ironic that Americans are, at this moment in time, going to have another round of
their unending debate about child-rearing methods, a debate that has been particularly
intense during my lifetime, as my parents’ generation reacted to the first edition, in the year of my birth,1946, of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. It is no exaggeration to say that this best-selling book, now in its eighth edition, launched a thousand ships into what we now know as “the cultural wars.” Spock continued to be a major figure in those wars by opposing the Vietnam War, being arrested during a protest, and figuring in a galvanizing court case. The debate that grew up around him and his book was between those who subscribed to something called “permissive parenting” and those who felt that the permissive Dr. Spock had encouraged the corruption of an entire generation—my own– with his criticism of over-strict, rigid, one-size-fits-all parenting. You could see his baleful influence on the streets of American cities in 1968, conservatives asserted. He had sparked a conflict of the generations.

Spock was a pediatrician trained in psychoanalysis, and he, like the pediatrician psychoanalyst Donald Winicott in England, who delivered a series of immensely popular BBC broadcasts just after the Second World War, was convinced that all mothers who could use their common sense could be what Winnicott called “the good enough mother.” Spock and Winnicott held that mothers have the common sense to respect their children and not impose on them any regime dictated by experts. Both advocated for parenting based on tuning into the individual child and encouraging the individual child’s growth and development. Cherishing and educating.

Of course, both camps of the parenting debate grew adamant and strident over the
years, so we now have one of those debates that is not a debate, it is a war. A debate about the family that is now a war. Tiger Mother is one of the conservative warriors, her
narcissism reinforced by the self-righteous, “my way or the highway” narcissism
of a whole troubled nation and its “culture of narcissism” (a phrase contributed by the culture critic Christopher Lasch in the late 1970s).

Wouldn’t it be a fine thing, I thought to myself on the train heading home, if more
people could have a thought like the one my thoughtful driver had as we parted. A thought
that went something like this: the parents who are not treating their children cherishingly and educatively are afraid. They have no patience, because they are afraid; their anxiety
is making them stupid. They do not have hymns of wisdom and comfort in their
minds. They have battle hymns. And those who have had the good fortune to be raised
to stop and think, to make good decisions, need to help these frightened parents, not
just their frightened and angry children. I think this is the realization my driver came
to while we were saying good-bye that cold and icey morning at the station.