The Child Trap: Books: The New Yorker
Joseph Epstein recently contributed to The Weekly Standard. "My mother never read to me, and my father took me to no ballgames," Epstein writes. They took no photographs, avowed no love, of him. This, he says, was the general approach to child-rearing in the nineteen-forties and fifties, when he grew up, and children benefitted: they developed into regular people, "going about the world's business." As for the steamy devotion shown by later generations of parents, what it has produced are snotty little brats filled with "anger at such abstract enemies as The System," and intellectual lightweights, certain (because their parents told them so) that their every thought is of great consequence. Epstein says that, when he was teaching, he was often tempted to write on his students' papers: "D-. Too much love in the home." As his essay suggests, critics of overparenting have political concerns as well as moral ones. The politics go both ways, however. The conservatives are afraid that we're turning our children into pampered ninnies (that is, Democrats); the liberals that we're producing selfish, authoritarian robots (Republicans).
Joseph Epstein recently contributed to The Weekly Standard. "My mother never read to me, and my father took me to no ballgames," Epstein writes. They took no photographs, avowed no love, of him. This, he says, was the general approach to child-rearing in the nineteen-forties and fifties, when he grew up, and children benefitted: they developed into regular people, "going about the world's business." As for the steamy devotion shown by later generations of parents, what it has produced are snotty little brats filled with "anger at such abstract enemies as The System," and intellectual lightweights, certain (because their parents told them so) that their every thought is of great consequence. Epstein says that, when he was teaching, he was often tempted to write on his students' papers: "D-. Too much love in the home." As his essay suggests, critics of overparenting have political concerns as well as moral ones. The politics go both ways, however. The conservatives are afraid that we're turning our children into pampered ninnies (that is, Democrats); the liberals that we're producing selfish, authoritarian robots (Republicans).
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