Parent-shaming: Thoughts on judgement, shame, compassion, perfection, and control
You’ve certainly heard about the child who found his way into a gorilla’s enclosure at a zoo, leading to the tragic killing of that gorilla, and you’ve surely also heard the vitriolic comments levied against that child’s parents, or rather, towards the child’s mother, for her perceived neglectful failure to prevent the tragedy. It shakes me, because I know my 4.5 year old daughter could get away from me sometime, and something terrible could happen, but I also know that I am not a neglectful parent. Accidents happen, and they can be utterly horrifying, but the leap (which we make all the time, when a child is hurt or killed, or doing something socially unacceptable or annoying, etc) to blaming the parents (or rather, the mothers) is just not ok. It does nothing but heap shame on people who are experiencing a very scary or terrible thing, but of course, it makes the people who are heaping that shame feel “safe” — it reinforces their belief that these things only happen to “bad” parents. But nope — it can happen to any parent. Perfection in parenting is not possible, and would not save you, anyway.
Why is it always mom’s fault?
First, to the point about the vitriol being directed at the mother (see any number of comments about the “worthless mom who wasn’t paying attention to her kids”) when the father was there, too. This is very telling. I see this sort of double standard all the time, when my husband gets brownie points from strangers for handling a situation with our daughter in the exact same manner that would earn me reprobation for incompetence. Neither reaction is appropriate — we’re both just parenting, and I’d like to think we’re both doing a reasonably good job of it. The bar for fathers is so low as to be insulting, while the bar for mothers is so high as to be impossible, and this serves neither mothers nor fathers well, though I certainly think mothers get the worse end of the deal.
Accidents happen, and we are all vulnerable
But the larger point is this: Life is risky. Accidents happen. A momentary lapse in attention can be fatal — to you, to a loved one, to strangers, or to an endangered gorilla. And yet momentary lapses in attention are simply part of being human, of having a human brain. The potential fatality of lapses of attention does not make those lapses any less likely to happen, or any more within our control to prevent, and the fact that a lapse in attention resulted in a tragedy doesn’t inherently make it any more blame-worthy. Think of what would be required to avoid any tragedies that might result from momentary inattention: you would need to know, at any given moment, what thing (among the many possible stimuli in a complex environment) is the “right” thing to attend to, because we literally cannot attend to everything at once.
In short, it is impossible, and moments in which something important slips out of our attention will inevitably happen. This is a terrifying thing to realize as a parent of a small child, especially if your small child (like mine) has particular problems with impulse control compared to other small children (who are themselves no masters of impulse control). But it is true. It is an inherent human limit. We can only hope that those moments we lose track of our children do not have dire consequences.
To love is to risk. What’s that saying about kids? Something like “to love a child is to have part of your heart walking around outside your body”? And when you’re the parent of a young child, that part of your heart is walking around (or perhaps running out into traffic!) in the form of an individual with very poor impulse control. It leaves you vulnerable, almost unbearably so. And that’s where the parent-shaming comes from, I think.
Acknowledging the very real vulnerability each of us has by virtue of loving and being responsible for a child is very hard and very scary, and it’s so much easier to just heap shame on those who are part of a tragedy like this than to sit with that fear. I understand the reaction, though I don’t think it’s ok. That shame-heaping is, I think, a self-defense move, a move to shield ourselves from identifying with, empathizing with, seeing any commonality with, a person whose lapse in attention (or some other parental failing) has led to a dire consequence. If we aren’t like them (because we are the better sort of parent, the kind that would not let such a thing happen), then we are safe. But the thing is, we are like them (or at least, more like them than we would admit), and we are not safe. Not a single one of us.
Control is not possible (and is also not actually desirable)
The judgmental crowd likes to shame parents for “letting” things happen, or for “letting” their child do something of which our society does not approve (which, sometimes, seems to boil down to “existing”), but all of this assumes a power, a level of control, that not a single one of us actually has over another person. The only way to achieve “control” over another human being is to break that human being — and there, we are not talking about good parenting, or good discipline (let’s remember here, importantly, that “discipline” means “teaching”, not “punishing”)…there, we are talking about abuse. We don’t (or should not) actually want that kind of control, but that’s the only kind there is. Which is not to say that there aren’t effective disciplinary practices for increasing a child’s cooperation, and that these aren’t things that parents can and should learn, but rather, I hope to suggest a level of humility and acceptance of the limits of even those effective disciplinary practices. Even the best, most perfectly attentive parent in the world will sometimes sneeze, for example, and in the moment of sneezing, could lose track of an eager-to-sprint toddler. Life is risky. We don’t have control.
But in saying that life is risky, and suggesting that it is better (though less comfortable) to sit with our fear and vulnerability and lack of control than to attempt to avoid it by heaping shame on others, I don’t mean to say that we should dwell on the fear and vulnerability and lack of control. That’s not particularly healthy or useful. I just mean that we need to accept it. Yes, the risk is there, but so is the reward for a life lived wholeheartedly and openly.
The hurt we cause by believing in control
I don’t normally begrudge people their pleasant fantasies — but this particular fantasy, the fantasy that as parents, we control and can perfectly attend to what our children do, and that therefore bad things only happen to the children of bad parents who fail at control or attention — this fantasy has a cost. This hurts people. Not just the people upon whom we heap judgement and shame, but every single person who parents a child. Holding on to these fantasies hurts the holder, too.
It hurts because it creates impossible standards. No one actually meets them, and I think that this contributes to some of the anxiety and depression that many new parents feel, when they realize they cannot meet these standards, but believe this is an individual, personal failing rather than a universal truth. I certainly know this contributed to my own post-partum depression.
And then when a bad thing happens at a time when those standards aren’t being met (which is pretty much any time a bad thing happens, because we are human and the standards are, after all, impossible), then we pile on, we shame, we hurl vitriol — all on someone who is, at that moment, experiencing something terrible that could happen to any one of us. If or when it happens to us, we’ll know that what we we actually need is compassion, rather than judgement and shame, and yet it doesn’t surprise me that we parents buy into these beliefs about control, and use shaming of others to maintain them. How much more terrifying it is, to have that part of your heart walking outside your body, when you know and truly acknowledge how little control you actually have over what it does and what happens to it.
But it also isn’t all that surprising to me when the judgement and shaming comes from non-parents; in our culture, we seem to have decided that children are an unnecessary inconvenience, and non-parents typically do not have anything like reasonable expectations for children OR for parents. And on some level, that makes sense — what it is like to be a parent, especially the parent of a small child, is not a thing you can truly know until you are one. It’s a life-changing thing, becoming a parent, and all of the knowledge in the world cannot prepare someone who isn’t a parent for what it will feel like if/when they become one; there’s just nothing sufficiently “like” being a parent that can serve as an analogy. Y’all, I read all the books, I “knew” all the things, and yet motherhood and post-partum depression slammed me like a ton of bricks! It’s that experience-driven knowledge that non-parents will never have. And that’s fine — if you don’t want to be a parent, don’t be one! I’m not saying that it’s necessary to have first-hand, experiential knowledge of parenting, or that you’re missing out on something crucial and your life is worse for not having it or anything like that. Just listen, and believe, when parents tell you what’s hard about parenting — and believe me, wrangling an active young child in a public place is hard.
What are we trying to accomplish with judgement and shame?
What is our aim, when we judge and shame another person? It seems to me that most of the time, the goal of judging and shaming someone else is to make ourselves feel better. Perhaps, as I suggested above, we are seeking to assuage the fear we have that something terrible could happen involving our loved ones by heaping judgement and shame upon the person to whom this did happen, for whatever part they played in “causing” it to happen (which surely we would never do). This is entirely understandable, but it has a cost, as I said earlier. As uncomfortable as it is to recognize our own very real vulnerability, this is what will allow us to meet those whose “failings” are on display with compassion, connection, and empathy. And that is worth doing…for everyone’s sake.
But the other side of “making ourselves feel better” isn’t about assuaging fear — it’s about amplifying ones’ own self-worth. And of course we want to feel better about ourselves! But I think the sense of our own worth and value that we’re working to reinforce when we self-righteously judge and shame other people is something we can get other places, without the cost to others. And there IS a cost. There is *always* a cost to reacting with judgement and shame, in that it disconnects us from those whom we are judging and shaming, and disconnection is a deep harm to such social beings as ourselves — harmful both to the person heaping the shame and the person it is being heaped upon.
And if the goal of shaming and judgement is to cause the person being shamed and judged to change their faulty ways, well, I applaud that goal…but I question the approach. Do you feel inclined to grow and change when you are being shamed for falling short? I know that I don’t — being shamed shuts me down. I think it shuts most people down. And I find, in the work that I do as a teacher, that it is far more effective to meet my students’ failures (and my own) with compassion; when someone feels understood and worthwhile, they are far more likely to listen and grow and change in the way that you might desire. Shame doesn’t have that power to promote growth. Shame makes people shrink, not grow.
In short, while I actually have a great deal of compassion for parents (and non-parents) who react to tragic accidents involving children with an outpouring of shame and vitriol, believing as I do that this comes from a place of fear and from a desire to maintain the illusion of control over a life that is imperfect and risky, what I wish for is a world where the parents who become targets of that shame and vitriol would instead be met with an outpouring of compassion. We are all vulnerable and we’re in this together.
