finding shoes that fit

Growing up with parents who were a bad match (for me, and possibly for each other).

Growing up in a culture where all the needs of a child are expected to be met by the nuclear family, which in most cases means a single, un-supported parent (namely the mom) isolated in some economically desirable but socially disconnected suburb (and if you had a different experience, yay for you! I wouldn't wish that kind of childhood on anyone.)

These kids grow up in a nightmare of disconnection and isolation, with no recourse to alternatives outside whatever random roulette spin of a family they've ended up with: Naturally gifted artist types may be born to clueless, blue-collar parents with a near-terminally narrow world view (Billy Elliot, for example). Whale Rider is another favorite story of a mismatch between child and caregiver .





And don't kid yourself, many parents don't necessarily mean well (given that, by any obvious estimates, at least HALF of all children are born to parents who didn't plan to have that particular child). Which is not to discredit the parents who do do their best, once they discover they're going to be parents. But the capacity to procreate does not a good parent make.

It really does, as Hillary Clinton said, take a village. And when there's no village, everybody, not just children, suffers. But kids get the worst of the fallout because, in a dominator society, kids are at the bottom of the pecking order, the absolutely most oppressed human beings on the planet (in broad sweeping terms - obviously some kids are lucky and avoid this.)

Of course it's an old story: The expectations of the parents are handed down to the children unto the seventh generation, etc., ad nauseum. And yes, the opportunity to choose one's life path has, for most of human history, been a luxury reserved for the very rich. Children of tradespeople often learned their parents' trades, or inherited the family livelihood (such as a farm). And even nobility often had far fewer options than the mere possession of money might suggest - landed gentry had to maintain their social positions by following the same path as their predecessors; tradition dictated the course of most people's lives.

But why, in this modern world, when even the poorest among us are not really living a hardscrabble life, where we've spent countless human capital on the discovery of new paths, new ways of thinking and being - why are we still caught up in the same old paradigm? Where is the new way, the new style, the new and modern approach? Why are we not as advanced socially as we are technologically, for example?

It's not that there aren't other ways to rear children - for example, this article talks about the many ways a 'family' can be structured in different cultures:

In many societies, kin terms are also extended to include members of the same residential group. Among the Mbuti of Zaire, the hunting camp is considered to be a family, and the kin terms for father and mother are extended to all adults in the camp that are of the parents' generation. Each child will call several women "mother" and several men "father." When kin terms are extended to certain classes of relatives, the behaviors and expectations associated with these labels are also extended. Children know who their birth parents are, but the behavioral expectations of the terms "mother" and "father" are applied to everyone in the camp who is classified as a parent.

This was also interesting, from the same article:

Kinship in the United States has been studied on the basis of a very narrow view of biology that reduces the field to genetics. Yet, genetic connection is not the only biological system affecting kinship ties. Attachment to caregivers is itself a biologically mediated system that is not dependent upon genetic connections, as shown by cross-fostering experiments between animals of different species. For example, dogs will raise baby rhesus monkeys, and humans frequently raise the young of many species. This is also supported by ethological studies of releasing signals for nurturance in a variety of species, such as infantile facial features that include large eyes, a small nose, and distinctive coloring. The young of humans, monkeys, dogs, and other mammals are characterized by biological features that elicit a caretaking response.

This paragraph seems to support my original thesis that Americans, in particular, suffer from an extremely narrow and artificially constrained definition of 'family' (emphasis mine):

Throughout the world, humans classify kin according to cultural categories, not biological relatedness. Some people to whom we are emotionally attached are not genetically related to us, while we may feel no emotional attachment toward others to whom we are closely related genetically, and they may be excluded as relatives by the kinship system's terminology. For example, in unilineal descent systems, children are genetically related to both their maternal and paternal kin, but only one line of descent is used in reckoning lineage membership. Alternatively, some kinship systems apply the kin terms for parent or sibling to people who are more distantly related genetically. This lack of close correspondence between biological and cultural systems of relatedness is not simply a characteristic of so-called primitive people, but is a universal feature of human societies. The predominant view of kinship in the United States, however, equates family with biological connections, while the associated phenomena of attachment, care-giving, and co-residence are ignored.

And here's a beautiful story about bringing a child into the world, it makes me cry every time I read it:

When a woman in a certain African tribe knows she is pregnant, she goes out into the wilderness with a few friends and together they pray and chant and meditate until they hear the song of the unborn child. They recognize that every soul has its own vibration that expresses its unique flavor and purpose. When the women attune to the song, they sing it out loud. Then they return to the tribe and teach it to everyone there. When the child is born, the community gathers and sings the child's song to him or her. Later, when the child enters education, the village gathers and chants the child's song. When the child passes through the initiation into adulthood, the people again come together and sing their song. At the time of marriage, the person again hears her or his song. Finally, when the soul is about to pass from this world, the family and friends gather at the persons bed, just as they did at their birth and they sing the person into the next life.

Children are not possessions. Children are seeds, unknown quantities that require love, nurturance, and lots of tending to. When they begin to sprout, most of the time we have no idea what they'll grow into - we just have to watch and see, and do our best to discover what they need from us and how we can best help them grow into whatever it is they're meant to be. (Maybe one of these days I'll trying writing a children's story that tells how a child should be able to try different shoes til she finds a pair that fits, rather than being stuck with whatever pair happened to be next to her cradle when she arrived in this world...)

PS: Searching for a photo of Billy Elliot, I came across this one, which made me cry for my own lost potential and the fear that I'll never leap as high or freely as the boy in this picture: