Not so long ago, parents were generally looked upon as repositories of wisdom and rectitude, and they were the unchallenged custodians of their children’s welfare. But today parents are relentlessly assailed as abusive, and unworthy of their authority over children.
Just take television, where last season alone, Americans have seen and heard countless tales of parental cruelty and lasciviousness—child beatings, sexual molestations, and even murder. From the testimonials of the Oprah Winfrey show, to the movie Child of Rage, to the Prime Time segment devoted to “Satanic Child Abuse,” TV has spread the disconcerting impression that everywhere sick and/or evil parents are brutalizing the young lives so carelessly entrusted to their care.
TV, however, is neither the author nor the major panderer of this view of parental behavior. For well over a decade now, a number of personal confessions coming from celebrities and especially their children—such as the memoirs of Joan Crawford’s daughter, and of the former Miss America, Marilyn van Derbur—have fostered a ferocious image of parenthood. These confessions seem to have convinced the American public that behind even the most glamorous lives lie tawdry sagas of family violence and depravity.
On top of these, the “parenting” sections of bookstores have been flooded with child-rearing tomes portraying parents as lethally dangerous. A recent visit to one Barnes & Noble outlet revealed no fewer than 84 current titles on the subject of child abuse—many of them best-sellers, and almost all boasting authors with fancy academic credentials.
Then, too, there is an exploding “self-help” literary genre which specializes in parent-bashing. Perhaps the best-known example is Susan Forward’s Toxic Parents (1989). Forward, one of the first psychotherapists to charge that there is widespread child abuse going on in America, has made a veritable science of ferreting out ways in which parents can oppress children. The behavior she assails in her book as “abusive” ranges all the way from incest to occasional moralizing, from life-threatening beatings to the demand that children show up for Christmas dinner. Whether horrific or harmless, every parental demand is treated by Forward as a display of power hunger. Subtle psychological pressures, in her view, can be just as destructive as brutal beatings. “Many civic authorities,” she warns, “have come to recognize the need for new procedures to deal with . . . physical and sexual abuse. But even the most concerned authorities can do nothing for the verbally-abused child. He is all alone.”
A more recent book, Claudette Wassil-Grimm’s How to Avoid Your Parents’ Mistakes When You Raise Your Children (1990), indulges in less gruesome imagery than the forbidding skull-and-bones metaphor of Toxic Parents. But it offers an even broader definition of parental impropriety. According to Wassil-Grimm, children are ruined not only by parental substance abuse, mental illness, divorce, and desertion, but also by parental “overworking,” “overeating,” “overspending,” “moodiness,” “illness,” and even “death.”
Lest any parents come away from Wassil-Grimm still believing their family records clean, a number of books will divest them of their smugness—particularly those exposing the double-edged sword of parental affection. One such, published in 1990, bears the provocative title, When Parents Love Too Much, and is written by Mitch Meyerson, a family therapist, and Laurie Ashner, an educator. Here are horror stories of parents who purchase apartments for their children, help them find jobs, render judgments on the characters of their suitors. Such parents, the authors declare, cleverly deceive themselves and their children into thinking they are generous and loving, when what they really are is “controlling” and “manipulative.”
Another volume, also published in 1990, bears the titillating title, The Emotional Incest Syndrome: What to Do When a Parent’s Love Rules Your Life. Here, Patricia Love, a doctor of educational psychology, mercilessly prosecutes parents who are not quick enough to detach themselves from their offspring. These parents, it seems, promote insidious syndromes of “codependency” that recur generation after generation. Among other crimes, they may have educated their children at home, they may have spent time with them in the pursuit of common interests and hobbies, and—worst of all—they may have taken them into their beds for cuddles. It is all too easy, says Love, to trespass into that danger zone of family life where love becomes “overinvolvement.” Parents must watch themselves; for they are a source of incalculable emotional anguish to children who, even in adulthood, cannot wrest independence from them.
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When one stops to consider that the parents now derogated as so abusive are for the most part those who raised the baby-boom generation, one’s head can begin to spin. For the baby boomers grew up in a charmed era for children—an era in which a truly gentle child-rearing ethos began to permeate society at all levels.
At the source was Freud, whose discoveries had given rise to the idea that, as early as infancy, parental mistakes could wreak lifelong damage upon a child. Then came Dr. Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician whose book, Baby And Child Care (first published in 1945), exerted a greater influence over the parents of the first postwar decades in America than any other. The key to raising happy children, said Spock, was to relinquish the “biblical” model of parenthood and relieve children of those pressures of parental power and authority which supposedly created dependent and inhibited adults. Traditional discipline—with its harsh sting of anger and reprobation—was Spock’s great bugaboo. In Baby and Child Care, for example, he suggested that parents might respond to school-age stealing by “thinking over” whether their child might “need more . . . approval at home,” and even a raise in allowance!
It is important to recognize the extent to which Spock and his disciples stood the ideal of good parenthood on its head. For them, “good” parents were not those who got their children to behave, but those who understood why their children might not behave. Good parents did not depend upon wielding power in rearing their children. They did not demand; they did not rage; they were careful not to react to provocation with anger. Rather, they empathized with the arduous process of psychic development, and coped with—rather than fought—the passing stages.
Much of the popular child-rearing advice that followed Spock’s amounted to an elaboration of this essentially psychoanalytic model of parenthood. The most famous child-rearing authors of the late 60’s and early 70’s, Haim Ginott and Thomas Gordon, wrote their books at a time when the baby boomers had grown into rebellious teenagers, and were testing parental tempers to the limit. Ginott and Gordon advised that parents try to bridge the generation gap with therapeutic and counseling techniques—that they turn themselves, in effect, into therapists.
Thus, the traditional arsenals of parental authority—shouting, chiding, slapping, and threatening—were no longer regarded by “enlightened” thought as immutable prerogatives for making kids behave. In fact, this new attitude had long since spread into education, social work, and even the mass media. Parents who continued to rely on physical punishment or verbal rebuke as means of child management learned from such TV shows as Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver that a powerful cultural elite considered them backward.
Not surprisingly, this permissive school was due to come in for some criticism. The late 60’s and early 70’s were, after all, a period when a fair number of people who had granted their children “voting rights” and power to negotiate all the household rules found themselves forced to rescue these same children from the dreadful embarrassments of drug busts, religious cults, and arrests for political subversion. Indeed, by the 80’s, faced with statistical evidence of ever-rising substance abuse, violence, delinquency, and teen pregnancy, a new school of child-rearing experts was calling for a return to more authority and discipline in child-rearing.
Not that the theorists of the so-called “assertive-discipline” school relinquished the therapeutic notion that children who misbehaved were unhappy rather than naughty. Nor were they prepared to give up on the idea of parenthood by social contract rather than by natural authority. Demanding obedience, displaying anger, spanking, reproving, or moralizing, the new theorists continued to make clear, were ignoble ways of managing children.
What then should parents do? They should “withhold friendliness” or “remove special privileges” when their children acted up, and they should “encourage good behavior with rewards . . . and with promises of more rewards.” So advised a slew of new books on the subject of “assertive discipline.” Their model was the personnel-management techniques of the workplace.
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The “assertive-discipline” school of child-rearing still boasts a number of adherents today, especially among teachers and behavioral psychologists. But it, along with the Spock-Ginott line, has been eclipsed by the work of a Swiss psychoanalyst, Alice Miller. Two of Miller’s books, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child (the first published here in translation in 1983, and the second in 1984), dealt shattering blows to the optimistic notion that parents, with a few tips, could be taught to raise their children without doing them permanent harm.
Miller presented the analytic community with a devastating critique of modern advice for parents. Parenthood, Miller insisted, was not a rational, conscious process dictated by a set of beliefs about how children should be raised. It was an unconscious power struggle between adults and their children, and one which invariably ended with the former emerging victorious and the latter crushed.
The roots of all hatred, violence, and criminality, Miller argued, were to be traced to one source and one source alone: the pathological acts of sadism perpetrated every day, and in every home, by parents on their children—regardless of their child-rearing philosophy. Parents could not choose to be good or bad. For they were unwitting slaves to the dark secrets of their own childhoods.
“The individual psychological stages in the lives of most people,” Miller wrote, “are . . . to be hurt as a small child, . . . to fail to react to the resulting suffering with anger, to show gratitude for what are supposed to be good intentions, . . . [and] to discharge the stored-up anger onto others [namely, one’s own defenseless children] in adulthood. . . .”
According to Miller, even parents who never uttered a harsh word, much less raised a hand to their children, visited upon them unbearable psychological pain and cruelty. By the mere exercise of their instincts, parents promulgated a process of submission to authority and self-denial that amounted to “soul murder.” Thus was a legacy of abuse haplessly transmitted from generation to generation, with neither parents nor children aware of its cruelty. Religion, education, even psychoanalysis, she charged, encouraged children to idealize parents for mistreating them, and the child-rearing conventions of Western culture congratulated parents for abusing their offspring in the names of discipline and civilization.
One might expect that in attempting to support a psychoanalytic theory so new and so radical, a theory that posed the existence of a crime inherent in parenthood—“soul murder”—Miller would call upon her clinical records. But, pleading discretion, she disdained the obligation to produce empirical proof of this parental crime from her own patients’ histories. One wonders if the real reason for her reticence was that she considered the lives of her patients too banal, their sufferings too quotidian, or their diagnoses too commonplace to lend her argument the resonance she wanted it to have. In any event, the case histories she called to account were almost exclusively those of well-known personalities, with Adolf Hitler leading the parade.
Thus Miller traced Hitler’s monstrous deeds to childhood thrashings. In persecuting the Jews, Miller contended, Hitler reenacted the crimes perpetrated against him by his father, who had in turn been mistreated by his own father. “The fact that Hitler had so many enthusiastic followers,” she added, “proves that they had a personality structure similar to his . . . and a similar upbringing.”
By setting up Hitler as a casualty of a despotic parent, and Nazi terror as a reenactment of child-rearing conventions, Miller, whether deliberately or not, offered an apology for German political sins. But she also rendered a portrait of German family life as a veritable seedbed of Nazism. The Germans, she said,
had been raised to be obedient, had grown up in an atmosphere of duty and Christian virtues; they had to learn at a very early age to repress their hatred and their needs. And now along came a man who did not question the underpinnings of this bourgeois morality, . . . someone who . . . put the obedience that had been instilled in them to good use, who never confronted them with searching questions or inner crises, but instead provided them with a universal means for finally being able to live out in a thoroughly acceptable and legal way the hatred they had been repressing all their lives.
In short, “bourgeois” family life “could well be characterized as the prototype of a totalitarian regime.”
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Yet criminals, Miller contended, did not only emerge, as Hitler did, from homes where they were subjected to consistent physical brutality at the hands of unloving parents. Criminals were also bred in circumstances where parents interspersed much subtler tortures with expressions of love.
It was this insidious interplay of parental love and hate that for Miller lay at the foundation of most antisocial behavior. The seemingly arbitrary combination of restrictions and indulgences, humiliations and caresses, spankings and kisses that parents dealt out to children confused, demoralized, and terrified them. Even the most gruesome of criminal acts were simply recastings of the precipitous pains and pleasures to which parents all too commonly subjected their children—reenactments of the at-once violent and erotic drama of childhood as distilled in the child’s psyche.
To demonstrate the evil repercussions of this love/hate dynamic, Miller summoned the example of a sex criminal by the name of Jürgen Bartsch.
Between the ages of sixteen and twenty (1962-66), Bartsch, the adopted son of a butcher in Essen, Germany, murdered four little boys. First he lured them into deserted air-raid shelters, then beat them, then tied them up with a butcher’s string, then manipulated them while masturbating himself, and then killed them with a butcher’s knife—cutting open their bodies and emptying from their cavities whichever organs he happened to be obsessed with at the time. It was during this prolonged activity of smelling the warm, freshly cut flesh, Bartsch confessed during police questioning, that he experienced orgasm.
For this creature of hell, Miller urged compassion: “Once we have become familiar with the mechanisms that turn child-rearing into a form of persecution . . . and we realize the powerful effect these mechanisms have on the individual, . . . we see in the life of every ‘monster’ the logical consequences of childhood.”
Miller blamed Bartsch’s mental state entirely on his parents. His horrific “repetition compulsion” derived from the combination of injunctions and punishments, indulgences and displays of affection, to which his parents had subjected him throughout childhood. For human beings were not born to such outbursts of violence as Jürgen Bartsch’s. They were instructed in these horrors by adults who, by virtue of their child-rearing and disciplinary practices, were the mortal enemies of public safety and world peace.
“Until the general public becomes aware that countless children are subjected to soul murder every day and that society as a whole must suffer as a result,” Miller wrote, “we are groping in a dark labyrinth, in spite of all our well-meaning efforts to bring about disarmament among nations.”
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An enthusiastic reception of Miller’s ideas in the American academic community had long been prepared. Her depiction of bourgeois family life as an authoritarian political model was already quite familiar to social thinkers here from the writings of the neo-Marxist scholars of the Frankfurt School. But what was to guarantee the success of Miller’s ideas among the broader public was not their affinity to an academic school of thought, or the sponsorship of several stars of the therapeutic world—among them the renegade Freudian, Jeffrey Masson. It was their ready solution to the putative evils of family life.
While theorists of the family who came before Miller seemed unable to offer any remedy for its shortcomings except social revolution, Miller promised more immediate help through the “inner revolution” undertaken on the psychoanalytic couch. Psychoanalysis, she proposed, must concentrate on helping patients release their pent-up “narcissistic rage” against the parents who had mistreated them. Patients who by means of psychoanalytic catharsis reexperienced the sources and intensity of their childhood angers and resentments could then disengage themselves from the impulse to victimize their own children as they themselves had been victimized.
Still, Miller was relatively difficult to read, and she needed the help of a popularizer if her ideas were to be widely disseminated. Such help came five years after the English-language publication of For Your Own Good, in the person of John Bradshaw. Talk-show host, television producer, management consultant, best-selling author, Bradshaw brought Miller’s ideas forward in a version bound to appeal to the sensibilities of a mass audience.
In his ten-week PBS series and his book, The Family (both 1988), Bradshaw asked, after Miller: “How Could Hitler Happen?” And he presented an answer as succinct as anyone could take from a thorough reading of For Your Own Good: “Hitler and Black Nazism are a cruel caricature of what can happen in modern Western society if we do not stop promoting and proliferating family rules that kill the souls of human beings.” What rules? Rules of “obedience” and of “submission” to parental authority.
“Soul murder,” Bradshaw continued along Miller’s line, was the most “basic” problem in the world. It was not simply Germany’s problem. Americans, he alleged, pointing to Jonestown and Mylai, were also victims of the “poisonous pedagogy” (Miller’s phrase) of obedience. Even the most enlightened of modern American parents always fell back on “authoritarian” roles in times of “stress” and “crisis.” And it was in these times that they crushed the souls of their children. Indeed, “soul murder” was something that happened, according to Bradshaw, in 96 percent of American families.
Again basing himself on Miller, Bradshaw claimed to be able to reverse the process of “soul murder” by means of what he called a “revolutionary method of self-discovery and spiritual renewal.” This method would return adults to that “true” childhood self which had been so cruelly crushed by their parents. Though he suggested therapy as the best way to get to the bottom of the circumstances surrounding one’s own loss of self, he intimated that his TV show and book—a “healing” program based on the twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous—could substitute, in a pinch, for a more personalized therapeutic experience.
Bradshaw’s work has become a model for the many volumes on the subject of family disorders and child abuse which have appeared in the last five years—the same ones that crowd the self-help shelves of bookstores with such titles as Soul Survivors, Pockets of Craziness, and Twelve Steps to Self-Parenting.
Typically, the readers of these books are presented with a few checklist quizzes. Did their parents do things to them that had to be kept secret? As children, were they afraid of their parents? Did their parents ever use physical punishment to discipline them? Did their parents control them with threats or guilt? Did their parents ever ignore their needs? Did their parents ever tell them they were rude, stupid, or worthless? Did they feel that no matter what they did, it wasn’t good enough for Mom and Dad?
If readers can answer yes to even a few of these questions, they are told that they may well have been abused.
Readers are then steered through a longer account of parental sins and disorders. Should they not recognize their own parents among the manifold profiles of child-beaters, rapists, criticizers, controllers, substance-abusers, or love-smotherers, they are reminded that the self reading this book is (in Bradshaw’s words) the “false” or “lost” self—the self that denies parental depravity and childhood suffering, the self that therapists, too, until their recent enlightenment, have suppressed. The “real” self, the victim of “soul murder,” is still too weak to confront the abuse that has been heaped upon it. The cure therefore lies in coming to grips with this long-denied or totally forgotten reality.
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This entire complex of ideas has spread with such astounding success as to have become the dominant impression of family life in contemporary American culture. It has also led to a rash of accusations of sexual abuse against parents by grown children—accusations which (as is more and more coming to be recognized) are at least as likely to be the result of therapeutic suggestion as of actual abuse. Here, then, we have a 180-degree turn in psychotherapeutic theory. Freud tended to believe that memories of childhood abuse were fantasies; now such memories are automatically assumed by many therapists to be true. And even when no memories exist, patients are often induced by therapists to dig them up. The consequence has been embittered and broken family ties, with no one knows how many innocent aging parents now denounced for crimes they never committed.
Another consequence of the new ideas has been an explosion of communal activism and publicity intent on convincing parents of the present generation of their need for therapeutic help. In my own community—a small town in Fairfield County, Connecticut—invitations to join parent “support groups,” to attend lectures on parental “styles” and “stresses,” to take advantage of the services of school psychologists and social workers, and particularly to avail oneself of information on “codependency” and “abuse,” flood mailboxes and constitute a good portion of the literature sent home with children from the public schools.
Even parents’ magazines propound the by-now popular view that conscientious mothers and fathers will seek help from psychotherapeutic resources as a preventive measure in child-rearing. Recently, a publication specializing in advertisements for birthday-party entertainment and nanny-referral services goaded parents to consider the benefits of family and twelve-step therapy, whether there were problems at home or not. Pointing to the ever-increasing suicide rate among teenagers, the article blamed parents who had not submitted themselves to the psychotherapeutic experience, declaring, in the spirit of John Bradshaw, “If we live in America in 1992, we are more than likely the product of a dysfunctional family system, carrying our pain into our new family.”
Children, too, are being targeted. My community newspaper recently printed a front-page article advertising the hotline services of a nearby Kids-in-Crisis center. The center expects children to call not only in cases where they are physically maltreated or demoralized by family conflict, but also when they might simply be “afraid to go home because of a problem at school”—that is, when they are looking for someone to defuse the force of parental discipline. Teachers also now commonly set aside daily or weekly time for the purpose of unveiling the specters hanging over each child—from the high tragedy of parental desertion to the low comedy of resented bedtimes.
Most of the time, such exercises in the confessional mode are performed within the context of “comprehensive-health” or “life-skills” curricula mandated by state governments. These programs instruct children in the delicate subjects of pedophilia, alcoholism, drug addiction, and other dangerous negative propensities of adults—and this introduction to the big, bad world of grown-ups begins in kindergarten.
For example, the Here’s Looking at You, 2000 comprehensive-health curriculum, now used in thousands of school districts throughout the nation, features a cuddly parrot puppet by the name of Miranda who instructs children in almost all the ins and outs of family pathology. In the opening lesson for second grade, Miranda implies that when adults scream at children, it usually means they have had one too many bottles of beer. Through songs, stories, films, and “role-playing,” she encourages kids to check the family cupboards for alcohol, nicotine, and other “poisons,” share their “feelings” about the “war” that is their “home life,” and confess “problems at home” by “writing secret messages” to the teacher.
My own eight-year-old worries now that her parents drink wine with dinner, that our marital spats will lead to divorce, and that we lack the wherewithal to handle an emergency properly. For that eventuality, she has memorized a host of 1-800 numbers given to her by her teacher.
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What is most bizarre about all this is that there is no evidence that child abuse has reached epidemic proportions in America. True, between 1976 and 1993, reports of child abuse skyrocketed from 669,000 to nearly three million a year. Yet less than 40 percent of these each year are substantiated. According to Douglas J. Besharov, founding director of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, around 80 percent of substantiated cases of child maltreatment pose no serious physical danger. In fact, only 3 percent of all substantiated reports involve an injury requiring medical attention.
But not even “substantiated” child-abuse cases can be taken at face value, since they have in recent years run the gamut of what most of us would consider pretty innocuous practices. Parents have actually been convicted of such “crimes” as restricting television viewing, or taking a child out of school for a few days for reasons unacceptable to school authorities. Even those parental foibles which used to be the object of good-natured jibes—chastising too much, demanding too much, worrying too much—are now widely depicted as abusive.
Is, then, the veritable hysteria over child abuse perhaps a symptom of increased sensitivity to the welfare of our children? Not according to Richard Elkind, who argues in his interesting book, The Hurried Child (1988), that the underlying impetus of the movement to “liberate” children from parental control and impositions has little to do with concern for the welfare of children. On the contrary, he writes, “Our new family styles (divorce, single parenting, two-parent working families, and blended families) make it next to impossible for the majority of parents to provide the kind of child-rearing that goes along with the image of children as in need of parental nurture.”
Here we may have the key to the puzzling obsession with child abuse: by imagining that even their own highly permissive parents were authoritarians who abused them; by buying into the theory that parenthood is inherently pathological; and by assuming the competency of schools and communal institutions to raise children or, worse, of children to raise themselves—the notoriously self-regarding baby-boom generation, now become parents themselves, can also imagine that they are doing the right thing in failing or refusing to accept full responsibility for the physical care and the moral education of their own children.
None of this is to deny that far too many children in contemporary America suffer—as children everywhere have, from time immemorial—the whims of ill-willed, immoral, vindictive, and even vicious parents; nor is it to deny that many small cups are filled to the brim with bitter oppression. But the truth is that many more children among us suffer from the opposite offense. For if there is a widespread criminal disposition to be feared in the current generation of parents, it is not their tendency to exceed the proper limits of their authority; it is their readiness to abdicate the parental role. And indeed, according to the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, parents today are far more likely to neglect their children than to abuse them. Which, no doubt, explains why there has been so much talk about abuse and so little about neglect.
