Super Duper Foolproof Parenting Advice That Works Every Time

Experts, research, and why this is all just someone's opinion

A month into the pandemic, I wrote a post urging parents to eschew the “make your kids a schedule!” advice of the moment, and embrace the joys of parenting without a plan. I got some good feedback (mostly from my mom, as per usual, but I’ll take it, hi Mom!), and was very proud of myself for delivering what I considered to be a helpful little nugget of wisdom to my fellow parents-in-crisis. You’re welcome world.

A few days later, I caught up with an old friend from the East Coast, who was happy to report that, though her four-year-old son had been extremely anxious for a while under quarantine, he was now thriving after she created, you guessed it, a very comprehensive daily schedule. I was grateful that she had, clearly, not read my post. It would have been bad parenting advice.

In graduate school, I took a course called Socialization Processes in the Family, with the clever and delightful Dr. Susan Holloway, someone who continually took the stance of curiosity and nuance in a field stocked with know-it-alls. What we learned is this: Parenting is really complicated and parents are not supported well by our societies. Most parenting research has been conducted on white, middle-to-upper-middle-class families who live near research universities (Also, if you’ve ever conducted a research study, you should agree with me that most research conclusions are somewhere on the spectrum from “gently massaged” to “wildly overblown.”) Different dynamics play out differently in different cultures (I was aghast to learn that in some families, mild corporal punishment, done as a consequence and not out of anger, doesn’t seem to fuck kids up). With some key exceptions (extreme abuse and neglect, forcing your child to deny their identity, letting your child listen to prog rock), there is less research than you would think to show that anything we do as parents has a long term impact on our children.

Even the “parenting styles” paradigm, that piece de résistance of parenting literature, hasn’t held up when it’s been taken on the road. This idea, spearheaded by Diana Baumrind of UC Berkeley in the 1960s, puts forth that parents can be sorted into four “styles” (authoritarian (too harsh), uninvolved (too checked out), permissive (too indulgent) and authoritative (just right - the goldilocks parent)), with varying influences on children. The original research was done with you-know-what-kind-of-people, and it’s been replicated numerous times with inconsistent effects. If you look at some of the literature, and you squint a bit, you would conclude, like this article in Verywell Family, that goldilocks parenting (authoritative style) has all sorts of positive outcomes for kids, even better grades. If you look at other research, you see that this effect, and just the concept that parenting can be classified in this way, doesn’t hold up when done with other kinds of families.

Baumrind was a badass — she championed ethics and humanism in psychology at a time when doing so, and just being a prominent psychologist with a vagina, was not the norm. Also, I used to see her the in the Cal gym locker room every morning at the age of like 80-million and think “why can’t I have a body like that??!” True story. So am I saying her research is bunk and it’s cool to be super harsh or to not-give-a-shit about your kids? Not necessarily. What I’m saying is, we don’t really know as much as we think we do. Telling people that one kind of parenting leads to success and another kind leads to problems is oversimplifying, and it’s also buying into the idea of white, middle-class parenting values being the only show in town. As it turns out, white, middle-class parents (yours truly included) are an eager audience for parenting advice. We have been given an endless string of visible and invisible privileges, at the expense of others whose parenting stories are almost always written about with sociological intrigue, pity, or thinly veiled derision, and we often approach parenting as if it were just one more system to game.

In actuality, parenting is not an input/output experience. Each parent, couple, child, household, and community, have different skills, constraints, and values that make a one-size-fits-all perspective laughable. If you’ve ever tried to implement some of the advice you’ve read about, and failed miserably, you know this to be true. But it’s not easy to write a book or teach a workshop about how it’s all kind of a crapshoot and you’ve just got to hold on to what’s important to you and let the rest lay as it may.

Parenting really is more akin to the risk/reward, now/later, endless stew of gnawing uncertainty that we have been experiencing with the outbreak of the novel coronavirus. Is it safe for our kids to go back to school? Kiss their grandparents? Lick that sidewalk (whelp, that one already happened, there’s nothing you can do now!)? These questions and their possible outcomes are agonizing to mull over. There is no way to know their impact now or years from now. That’s what parenting is really like. No guarantees, insufficient research, and a lot of wondering if you’re doing things “right” when there are some clues, but not an absolute framework for what right is. In this great “slowing down,” where we have finally had the time to see some things with more clarity (turns out offices are dumb!), maybe we don’t need more parenting advice. Maybe the advice tells us more about the “experts” (that piece I wrote was really just about me) than about ourselves, our children, and our families.

When my first child was a few weeks old, my mother visited. I was explaining the ethos of the “Happiest Baby on the Block” to her, criticizing some irrelevant thing that a woman who had raised five goddamned children was doing to a lump of flesh that didn’t give two shits about whether it was “swung” or “jiggled.” “In the 80s,” she told me, diplomatically, “we didn’t have the internet, or even really many books. All we had were our friends, and of course, our instincts.”

Right now, we are in a very intense parenting moment. We don't have the teachers we usually rely on to show our kids how to be in the world. Most of us don't have our mothers or fathers to share their intergenerational wisdom. Maybe all we can do is look for our values, what we want our children to see and hear from us right now. We don’t know if it will stick, we don’t know if they will be very happy, successful people for many years and then stumble into something awful and painful. We do have a lot of people trying, mostly with good intention, to tell us how to do things right. And that’s okay. Sometimes it’s even helpful. Even reading your horoscope can occasionally lead to a better understanding of some facet of yourself. But when we see the words “expert” or “advice” or “how to…" perhaps we should replace them with “opinions and anecdotes about things that seem to work for some parents and some kids in the culture this person comes from.” It’s not as catchy, I know.

My mother put everything she knew into raising me, and I’ve never thought to ask her if the outcome was what she’d expected. She is, for example, the best listener I know, and I have trouble following a conversation even in my own head. But, in these endless hours with my children where everything is unknown except for what’s for dinner (just kidding, we have no plan for that), I’m going to try a little bit harder to listen to my instincts.

Read till the end?? Here’s more!

Listen to this piece from Carvell Wallace, where he describes the lack of control we have as parents but, like, he’s a real writer…

Read about initiatives to publish failed research - what an idea!