Since I wrote my piece on The
Invisible Suffering of Children, I have received a fair amount of
commentary, both on the blog and off it. I am not surprised, as I knew I was
walking into charged territory. In this response, I want to address some of the
threads of what came.
I want to reflect, in particular, about three comments I got
from father, mother, and late teen son from the same family, Rick, Sarah, and
Leo, all of whom I know personally and love. What a treasure that has been.
What most surprised me is that it was Leo, the son, who is the oldest of three,
not his parents, who raised the issue of boundaries and the question of
children’s need for security. Rick and Sarah, on the other hand, were speaking,
in different ways, for the excruciating struggle of what it’s like to want to parent in the ways I describe and to run against
obstacles – both external and internal. The external obstacles take the form of
inability to manage it all alone in a society that leaves parents without clear
support structures and makes their children their own problems. This is
contrasted with societies in which the village that it proverbially takes to
raise a child is actually there, and children are tended to by everyone. How
can one parent, even two, handle three or more children with challenges, and
provide the level of presence, engagement, creative thinking, and flexibility
that are required for living a collaborative life? This echoes, also, the
comment by another person that invited me to think and reflect more prominently
about the role of the systems and structures within which parents raise their
children. It’s a pioneering act to parent children in the ways I allude to in
our kind of culture. Pioneering anything means, by necessity, not having
sufficient support structures, and therefore being called to task more than is
sometimes humanly possible.
