The destructive myth of ‘professional’ parenting

We’ve spent a century replacing the one thing that can never be replaced. So, let’s check the scoreboard. Today’s match pits the Progressive Era feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman against 21st-century memoirist Rob Henderson, and it’s a blowout.

As I never tire of saying, Gilman told a story about children by telling a story about loaves of bread. Home-baked loaves are inconsistent: different wheat and grind, different rise, different oven temperatures, different baking times. So, 100 loaves of home-baked bread are 100 different loaves. Some are burned on the outside, some are underbaked at the center.

The things we know about children, the things we’ve spent thousands of years of human experience learning through direct experience, are now controversial.

But industrial bread is consistent. The Second Industrial Revolution and the displacement of home industry by corporations, Gilman argued, standardized and professionalized the production of a thing that farm wives had been screwing up for centuries. Every loaf from the same giant commercial bakery was baked with the same ingredients, the same technique, the same ovens, the same temperature for the same amount of time, so the quality was predictable.

If all that is true of just one home function we’ve professionalized, she wrote, why not keep professionalizing more of the things we’ve regarded as home functions? Why not raise children through the standardized interventions of credentialed teachers, trained social workers, and a centralized moral and intellectual curriculum developed by licensed professionals?

Every loaf the same: the social vision of progressivism and the foundation of the displacement of family by the “helping professions.”

Rob Henderson grew up in foster care — “living with nine different families before my eighth birthday” — and then with a rotating cast of adoptive parent figures. He bounced through his childhood, spending a few months in one foster home and then watching the caseworker show up to take him to his next temporary family. He’s written about this experience in a new book, “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.” I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Very young children, Henderson writes, are answering a basic set of questions about who they are and what their lives mean. They watch the way adults treat them, and then they find out how much they're valued. Am I loved? Do I matter? Am I an object that gets discarded, or a person who is valued? That lesson makes their lives.

It also makes a part of our lives, because we live in contact with the discarded children who grow up to be troubled adults.

What children discover about themselves colors what they discover about the world that moves around them and shapes the way they live in it. Valueless life, valueless world.

“When kids are in a stable environment with reliable parents and predictable patterns,” Henderson writes, “they feel integrated into a social environment and find it easier to befriend peers who want the best for them.” This is why foster care is a pipeline to homelessness, drug addiction, and incarceration for so many children: Their childhood is teaching them instability and pain.

Henderson had extensive contact with caseworkers, counselors, school psychologists, and (finally) substance abuse counselors. What he always needed was a family — parents who showed up and then stayed there.

He quotes a sickening observation from a psychologist who treats abused children: “I have never met a child below age 10 who was tortured at home who would not have chosen to stay with his or her family rather than being placed in a foster home.” Young children who are brutally harmed by their parents nonetheless yearn for their mom and dad. They instinctively want a home, a family, a set of stable attachments. Dragged from abuse, they ache for home.

If you're a parent, it hurts to read this. Act on that pain.

We've spent decades making family unimportant, as deliberately designed public policy. We’ve torn down parenting as an honorable task and savaged the parent-child connection. California legislators mock the "talking points" of parental rights and explain that family is often very harmful. Children become mentally healthy and stable by receiving “mental health services” from trained professionals, who are obviously funded and provided by the government. The working assumption of the political class is that parents cannot meaningfully talk to children because they aren't even licensed to do that. Here, watch a legislator say it.

The things we know about children, the things we’ve spent thousands of years of human experience learning through direct experience, are now controversial — if not entirely discarded. We cannot replace family with the helping professions. We will never succeed at this. We're sowing destruction in the lives of children by discarding their most necessary connection. Don't worry, though, because we can just assign them all a caseworker.

Nothing else we ever do will be more shameful than this. We had a choice. We are now tolerating willful destruction.