Parent Groups

To summarize the ideas from the last three crumbs:

 

The utopian impulse to wipe away everything, to start from scratch, puts theory too far ahead of practice. This is dealing in fantasies. Even if such a project could get off the ground, it would be doomed to recreate the worst aspects of everything it sought to leave behind: only by engaging in a dialectical relationship with a set of cultural practices can we hope to pass beyond them. But, at the same time, incremental reform and small changes in lifestyle (attending protests, voting in local elections, buying organic) are incommensurate with the scale of our problems. These things are worth doing, but they cannot satisfy our sense that something must be done.

 

We need to change our form of life fundamentally but gradually. We must rebuild the house room by room, while living in it; not once and for all according to a perfect plan, but trying now this, now that, in a process of ongoing experimentation, so that practical problems and abstract ideals are worked out together. This cannot happen in anything so big as a modern city. It is something that only groups of willing individuals can carry out. If the experiments succeed, more people will follow; but even if they fail, it will be better to have tried.

 

What matters finally is not whether individual experiments succeed or fail. An individual experiment will always be a stab at one piece of the vast problem of modern life; its success will not save us, its failure does not doom us. My radical hope is that many individual experiments conducted by interconnected and overlapping groups of people coalesce into a process of ongoing cultural rebuilding, so that it once again becomes possible to think that we have a future, so that human life as a whole may once again become a project we can believe in. Only then will the mass of despair be converted (according to Einstein’s famous equation) into the energy of hope.

 

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Keeping this general picture in mind, it will be helpful to turn to some particular examples. I’ll start with a fairly modest proposal, which I alluded to in the last crumb: parent groups for people concerned about children’s relationship to technology.

 

Technology addiction is a major problem in contemporary child-rearing (I take this as obvious, not requiring any argument or illustration), but although many parents are at least nominally aware of this, very few do much about it. We keep buying kids devices at younger and younger ages, using these devices to pacify them—and then, when we take them away, they scream so horribly we immediately give them back. The solution, as with any addiction, is to keep them away from the drug in the first place. 

 

This is not as easy as it sounds. If all the other kids around have smart phones, play videogames, etc., then the kids who don’t will feel left out; they’ll be cut off from their peers, lonely, isolated, bored. A kid ought to play with other kids, and if all the other kids are playing videogames, what’s there to do but play with them? At age three or four, this already creates pressure on parents. By seven or eight, the pressure is almost irresistible. So each parent is trapped by the inaction of the others, and no one can take the first step.

 

The exception is parents in strong religious communities. These communities are precisely groups of people who have chosen to live differently from the mainstream together. Their members are already outsiders to the surrounding culture and not afraid of that state. They offer ready-made peer groups of non-technology-addled kids, as well as mutual support, both emotional and practical, for parents. This is why almost the only schools that actually have strict policies about screen use for kids above fifth grade are Waldorf schools.

 

But if you’re not an Anthroposophist or a Mormon or a Mennonite or etc., then you need a secular (or at least non-denominational) group of likeminded parents to provide all three of these crucial supports: a sense of stable identity outside the mainstream (so that you feel you’re part of a way of life, not just a lone crank), peer-groups for kids, mutual support for parents. 

 

Interestingly, the internet is full of websites and articles for parents about technology addiction—but these articles are all about what you can do within your nuclear family; there’s virtually nothing about peer groups. The oversight is glaring, and therefore it’s telling: it reflects the general orientation away from group action, towards the privatization and self-helpification of problems; a mentality in which problems are seen not as arising from the conditions of life but as isolated disorders. Everything I am saying in these crumbs is based on the opposite outlook.

 

(Tanya, who's much better at research than I am, was able to find one website that looks like it might be connecting parents who are concerned about this issue. I’m looking into it currently.)

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Technology addiction is not the only child-rearing issue that’s subject to intense pressure from peer groups. Since I do not (yet) have kids, I want to be cautious in my claims here, but it looks to me like we buy kids much too much stuff. This starts with the baby-industry, but there is already a movement in some circles against this, and maybe that’s because babies don’t get envious of other babies’ perambulators. But starting around age four, there is a perpetual longing after the prosperity of their peers, and a resulting arms race of objects, apartments overflowing with toys—cheap, plastic and ugly, or else ostentatiously and smugly expensive. Thus we teach our children consumption, self-indulgence, avarice and waste; and in giving over our homes to these objects, we give them no vision of adult culture to aspire to, no sense of a more beautiful, wider, and elevated world that they will grow into. 

 

A very different kind of peer-group effect occurs around the issue of supervision. We (middle- and upper-class Americans) monitor kids much too completely. Just as they need to know how to behave according to adult mores in restaurants and theaters, they need time when they can follow their own impulses; they need space to make mistakes and figure things out on their own without being either helped or observed. And we need them out of our hair sometimes (but not glued to a screen). Now, a big pack of kids out together in a park are pretty safe: the older ones can look out for the younger (from which they will learn responsibility and gain self-confidence), there’s always someone to go get help if anyone gets hurt, and predators will be intimidated by the numbers. But if all the other kids are inside where their parents can keep an eye on them, then the one or two kids out by themselves is not so safe at all. 

 

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With these issues as with almost any other, individual families may try to create their own culture, but as they grow older, kids need wider worlds to move in; they must come to feel at home in something larger than the home. So they should pass beyond parental influence and reexamine their parents’ values in the light of larger experience. If outside the home they find nothing but the addiction, materialism, and paranoid safety-ism that their parents have rejected, then they will begin to see that their parents are weirdos (and in fact to hold out alone against mainstream values, the parents will have to be not only weirdos, but probably snobs and cranks too). If the kids are socially comfortable and get on well with their peers, they will reject their parents and embrace the mainstream. If they are socially isolated and feel at home only with Mom and Dad, will reject their peers. Neither outcome is happy.

 

To hold onto a set of values opposed to the values of the mainstream, without allowing those values either to fray and dissolve or else to harden into cranky isolating snobbery, one needs a little world of people who uphold those values. 

 

Through the very simple and modest mechanism of the parent group, the critical consciousness that would otherwise be impotent and frustrated becomes the basis for an evolving form of life. The theoretical becomes actual, and both the merits of the theory and its challenges come to light and are worked out in a living practice.

 

The challenge is scale. In general, the bigger these groups are, the more stable they’ll be, the less prone to schismatic conflicts (because more people means less pressure on individual relationships), and the more effective at producing the feeling of what I have called “a little world.” One couple and their friends with kids will be too small. (This is why the “pods” of the pandemic mostly dissolved even before the pandemic was over.) To form a large enough group, you will need to cast a considerably wider net than immediate personal acquaintance. So we return once again to the question of where and how to find and gather the people.

 

But our example of parent groups clarifies the question considerably, because in this case it is easy to see what kind of people we’re looking for: parents who share a set of beliefs about how to raise kids—or, maybe more saliently, a set of critiques of how they see other people raising kids. 

 

But equally important, and less obvious, is what these parents don’t need to share. For example, do they need to share views on social justice, on gender and sexuality, on immigration, on religion, on Israel and Palestine, etc.? More or less all parental beliefs affect kids, and there is a part of us that longs for a community of absolute agreement: a group of people who think exactly how we think. But obviously (a) we can’t have this and (b) we shouldn’t have it. Some diversity of opinions is important. But how much?