In a review of Sue Klebold’s book A Mother’s Reckoning (her son Dylan was one of the perpetrators of the Columbine, Colorado, school shooting), Holly Math Nerd might well indict me:
The Klebolds were running a parenting operating system that is extremely common in non-poor American households — and I suspect it is the dominant mode in middle-class white America — and the system was running as designed.
The problem was not malfunction.
The problem was the system itself, and what it cannot do.
I am going to call this mode role-execution parenting, because performative parenting sounds like an accusation of phoniness and that is not what I mean. Role-execution parenting is sincere. It is loving. It is competent. It is the mode in which parents identify the tasks and milestones and observable indicators of good parenting, execute them well, and treat successful execution as evidence that the parenting itself is succeeding.
Feed the child nutritious meals. Read to the child at bedtime. Drive the child to soccer practice. Attend the parent-teacher conferences. Set bedtimes and curfews. Provide structure. Provide opportunities. Provide consequences when warranted. Provide praise when earned. Do the things the parenting books say to do, with sincerity and attention.
Most American parents who are not poor are running some version of this mode. It mostly works. Most children raised in it grow up reasonably well.
Ah, gentle reader. My youngest just turned 18 and graduated from high school. My oldest has gotten a job which should allow him to move out on his own. And how have I done with them? How can I know?
Role-execution parenting tends not to develop the skills of interior attunement — the slow, patient, often uncomfortable practice of being present to a child’s internal weather independent of the child’s external performance.
To be honest, I am not sure what this means. Of course, I think that you cannot really know someone aside from their actions–I believe the oldest actually asked me about something like this based on something he’s recently read or has seen in an Internet video.
And I’ll never know how I’ve done as a parent because I’ll hopefully never know how their entire lives have gone.
