The biggest problem with parents today is that they grew up questioning authority -- and don't have the moral courage to exercise it!
"In order to become individuals capable of self-determination -- capable of freedom -- we need years of surveillance, orders, and control," observes Kay Hymowitz in the current issue of City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute. "During their early years children must be taught to make a habit of the self-restraint required for life in society, to control and modify their raw impulses and drives," Hymowitz explains. "Many Americans, secure in their own completion of this process, have come to take basic moral education for granted or to assume our liberated age can go easy on it," she laments. "But, in a free, temptation-filled society, the civilizing process needs to be more demanding than ever."
Hymowitz criticizes "mainstream American child experts" for neglecting the subject of self-control. "Children everywhere learn manners very early in their development," she insists, "for manners offer the particular habitual forms of behavior that promote harmonious social life. But American experts are grudging, almost tongue-tied, on this subject. After all, manners often require individuals to restrain their personal inclinations; they are necessarily formulaic and often insincere -- the very opposite of true expressions of feeling."
Everything (and everyone) is supposed to be "natural" nowadays. No one wants to be "inhibited," or a "phony." Never mind that the state of Nature is a fearsome one, and not one in ten modern Americans could survive in it. Rousseau's "noble savage" never existed, but there'll be plenty of ignoble ones around by the time the current crop of kids reaches maturity -- or the age of maturity, anyway. What they need -- the one love token that their doting parents refuse to offer -- is a good swift kick.
Hymowitz concedes that "a suspicion of authority is central to the American outlook. And, certainly, many of our experts' suggestions -- such as giving children reasons for rules or allowing small negotiations over them -- when done in moderation with older children are fine means of promoting independent minds capable of carrying on that tradition. But," she insists, "what was once a healthy wariness about raw power has hardened into a debilitating taboo. . . . Experts reveal it in the way they advise parents, particularly those with toddlers, to engage in almost any charade to hide the fact that they [the parents] are in charge: bargaining, just-a-few-minutes-more negotiating, bribing."
Hymowitz chastises such "experts" for their inability to evoke "the adult's role in introducing children to their basic obligations." She accuses them of promoting "the myth of an autonomous child-artist who can design his own moral picture. The danger, as we are discovering, is that the picture will be an ugly one. At the very least, the myth leads to nonsensical conclusions: that we can live in society but be completely self-made, that we can be attached but unencumbered, that we can have relationships without obligations. No country," says Hymowitz, "can be that free."
