All Kids Are Good

In our two wonderful years as parents, my wife and I have had a hard time "talking shop" with other young parents because, while our beautiful daughters present innovatinve challenges on a regular basis, we simply do not have the complaints that most parents seem to have. But the very fact that so many young parents would rather commiserate than hear about how much sleep we get, or that our older daughter hugs crying children on the playground suggests to me a fundamentally flawed approach to the whole parenting enterprise.

Let me say right now that we are not those annoying Brooklyn over-parenters who are prepping our daughters for lives of academic overachievement tempered by a lot of 60's residual hootenannie bullshit. Our one expectation of both of our daughters is that they are nice people.

And it is with this cardinal principal in mind that I take issue with one universally accepted aspect of parenting that is not nearly as okay as 98% of the parents I've met seem to think that it is- the notion of the "good" child. Every single time I have heard "she's so good!" or "Is he/she a good baby?" what is really meant is "That child is minimally intrusive into what I would rather be doing." In fact, if you take the vast majority of usages of the word "good" as most people apply it to children and substitute the word "quiet," the meanings and intentions of most utterances would be unchanged. Now look, I am not advocating for loud, unruly children. But what I am saying is that there is a big difference between GOOD and QUIET, and if we go around blithely conflating our children's goodness with how much television we're able to watch without interruption, we are neither checking our own selfishness, nor are we imparting to our children the true meaning of goodness.

This may sound like another judgemental pile of bullshit to you. But the more conversations I have with other parents, and the more of their children I meet, the more convinced I become that I am right and they are wrong. I recognize how smug, how disgusting that sounds. But in the coming posts, I intend to explicate my wife's and my approach to child-rearing in the hopes that the scant few of you who will read this may take away something useful.

Maybe the blog is the perfect format for such view-airing. I can be as smug and confrontational as I want, but you can agree with me without your pride being injured, because not only will I never know, but I will always assume that you are rolling your eyes and making gagging noises.

So I begin by saying that children are not supposed to be convenient. They are demanding, unreasonable, fearful, messy, uninterested in long-form narrative, and cry for silly reasons. But all of them are good.