The ambivalence and dilemmas of “acceptance parenting”

Earlier this year, I reviewed Tim Carney’s new book Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be.  Carney’s thesis is that the movers and shakers of our culture have created such daunting expectations of “good” parenting that people are intimidated to undertake parenthood.

Even when people finally do commit to getting married, the fact of “moving from a couple to a family is, increasingly, a second great leap forward.”

Carney’s book came to mind as I read another new book, written from a completely different angle: Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice.  The authors cannot decide whether to have children and, as Kirkus Review notes, they “are careful to avoid a prescriptive conclusion.”

Berg and Wiseman probe their ambivalence about parenthood by starting from reflecting on their own childhood. Their anecdotes—like having gone to “peace camp” in the summer or one child remaining in Massachusetts for pre-college schooling while the rest of the family moved for professional career reasons to Maine—quickly reminded me of Carney’s insight into how modern expectations overcomplicate parenthood. Then the authors laid it out barely:

…[T]here is something different about how parents think of their role today: ‘Whether radically new is not, at heart, how concerned or permissive we’ve become, but how fully we have given over to our children the job of defining ‘happiness.’” Caillard calls this new paradigm ‘acceptance parenting.’ “Traditional” parents … drew ‘on culture and tradition to set standards relative to which children are to be assessed.’ (Think of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof …). Those standards now come from the people they are to be applied to—more specifically, from future, which is to say, not yet existent, versions of those people.’ Instead of moral guides, parents become talent scouts and trend forecasters in their own homes, doing their best to expose their children to as many activities and opportunities as possible in the hope that something will succeed. Naturally, parents still wish … their kids ‘succeed,’ in some ways perhaps more than ever before, but the onus is on the children to figure out what that actually means.”

Please read that last clause carefully: “the onus is on the children to figure out what [success] actually means.” Berg and Wiseman’s observation crystallized a whole perspective on what’s afoot in contemporary parenting—and how Catholics might think about it.

“Acceptance parenting” is the social expression of the dictatorship of relativism. Parents set no concrete norms. The norm is “success,” but “success” is a form with no inherent content: whatever fills it is “undefined,” not unlike a Baskin Robbins ice cream cone one can pack with any of 31 different flavors.

How inhuman such “parenting” is! A “child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care,” as the Convention on the Child reminds us. A child is not a small adult. A child’s physical and mental immaturity requires parents–a mother and a father–to shape him.

Berg and Wiseman speak about how indeterminate they feel about their lives in their thirties. One is almost tempted to ask, “What do you want to be when you finally grow up?” They concede that their decision to defer parenthood is less an active decision than a passive acquiescence in the continuation of the status quo—in other words, inertia. But if two privileged women in the fourth decade of their lives haven’t figured out their defining values, how do they realistically expect a child to create and define a world of meaning and value? How dare they impose so gargantuan, so impossible, a task on a child?

How huge a task this is for parents! As Carney points out, the open-ended expectations of “ideal” parenting–especially parenting according to elite models–simply does not work for the typical American parent of middle- or working-class means, the single parent, or the parent with multiple children. It creates expectations no ordinary parent can meet and fans them in children who thereby learn nothing about realism, much less self-denial or sacrifice.

The authors drop hints, however, that there is some unspoken gap between what they profess and what they really think. They admit that modernity dictates we should leave children with open-ended choices, but they wonder what their “accepting” parents would have said if they had come home and announced they were leaving Judaism to become fundamentalist Christians.

In other words, while the panoply of “choices” is theoretically open-ended in this nonjudgmental world, the dirty little secret is that there is a certain normativity to what one really should choose.

The religious example, I think, is telling. There’s no small number of moderns who, unwilling to “impose” a faith on their child, defer infant baptism with the retort that “the child will choose when he’s old enough.” Mary McAleese, the former President of Ireland now turned canon lawyer, pushed this view. Lots of Catholic parents practice a modified version of this religious indifferentism, either leaving the reception of Confirmation up to a child or treating it as the “sacrament of exodus” from the Church until an ecclesiastical photographic backdrop might be in demand for those still believing in marriage. What can be said of religious dogma can also be said of religious morality.

As in the case of a progressive Jew becoming a fundamentalist Christian, however, some choices might be gauche. As long as the “choice” defaults to some version of amorphous “spirituality” or religious indifference, that’s acceptable. If it results in a serious religious commitment, say, an active orthodox Catholic, one might even want the FBI to monitor such “Christian nationalist” extremists.

So, the question for Catholic parents becomes: What kind of parent will I be? Am I an “accepting” or a “traditional” parent? In other words, do I see my role as that of “moral guide” or “talent scout?” Am I looking to cultivate virtues that lead to life eternal or talents leading to temporal “success?” (And, let’s be honest, amidst all this “value agnosticism,” if little Liam and Olivia focused on UMass versus Harvard, would their talent scouts, er, parents, likely remain indifferent?)

In no other area of human knowing can such agnosticism reign. Traditional education presupposed the necessity of students acquiring a basic fund of knowledge—a fixed set of facts and axioms—before one could expect a student to engage in “critical thinking” about the subject matter. Substance has been subordinated to incessant “dialogue.” Contemporary educational achievement levels question to what practically the consequences of such agnosticism leads.

If one has any doubts about the degree to which the parental indifference of the “accepting parent” can lead, consider the current issue of “transgender” genital mutilation promoted as “healthcare” among minors. While much focus has been placed on states and governors that are protecting children against these abuses, there are states and governors who have declared their fealty to “choice” in this respect. Just as the past fifty years have seen some states and governors excise parental control over minor children in the area of abortion–denying parents’ rights to consent or even know of a minor daughter’s abortion–so the same phenomenon is repeating itself over genital mutilation.

Take Minnesota’s Tim Walz. In 2023, he signed legislation making Minnesota a “transgender sanctuary state,” immunizing anyone who performs genital mutilation on a minor from another state. It gave Minnesota courts temporary jurisdiction over such children and makes parental receptivity (like a good “accepting” parent) a criterion in child custody cases.

The most telling comment, however, during Walz’s ceremony celebrating his transgender “executive order” came from Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan. Lecturing parents attending the event, she told them: “When our children tell us who they are, it is our job as grownups to listen and to believe them. That’s what it means to be a good parent.”

Apparently, an “accepting” parent will be “open” to a son thinking he’s a girl or a daughter thinking she’s a boy or either thinking they’re a pussycat. Apparently, the non-normative parent should happily wish his child never to be what he himself is: a parent. To deprive a child even before puberty of the capacity ever to be a parent. But that, of course, tallies with the ambivalence of Berg and Wiseman towards parenthood.

As for me and my house, Lt. Governor Flanagan, I tell you: my job as a parent is not to “listen and believe” but to guide my child towards real good and real value. Even if they—or you—don’t think me “accepting.”

What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice
By Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman
MacMillan, 2024
Hardcover, 336 pages