Values are opinions; they are not absolutes
A few years ago, I became reacquainted with an old friend who had also had a child. She had made very different choices about raising her daughter and because we were very early in our motherhood careers, we were extremely threatened by each other’s choices. She felt guilty for focusing so strongly on her job, and I felt guilty because being a one income family put us in a very precarious financial position.
I’m embarrased to admit how unreasonable my thinking was. I assumed that her daughter would be some kind of unhappy sociopath because her parents did it “wrong” and weaned her too abruptly and that she would grow up with a feeling of emptiness and depression because her mother went on business trips leaving her in the (to my mind) second-rate care of her father. I assumed that I was doing everything right. My child would grow up happier, healthier, and far better adjusted.
How’s that for being shockingly narrow-minded? Hey, I never said I was perfect.
We used to make little remarks to each other subtly criticizing the other person’s choices or praising our own. It was awful. It ruined our friendship.
After I read the book Childhood, I realized that none of my assumptions were true. Actually, we were both doing a very good job of transmitting our values to our children and values are opinions, not absolutes. They certainly weren’t doing anything *wrong* by putting their daughter in daycare and focusing on their careers; it just wasn’t within my narrow value system. Did I renew our friendship? No, our values were too different to sustain a friendship but I no longer thought of her as bad and me as good.
Now I’m not saying that we should all chuck our values and go around telling everyone who lives differently than we do to go ahead with our blessing but I am saying that many of us need to lighten up.
This leads me to racist, heterosexist and classist assumptions.
I was very unhappy with my comments on Holly’s blog. I didn’t say what my mind thought I was saying and I think what I did end up saying was bigoted so I’m feeling the need to comment again here.
Our values are often racist, heterosexist and classist. They can’t help but be because we’re all of us trying to get out from under various -isms. I was thinking specifically about kids who cuss. Holly said something about kids cussing at the fair. Tacky, eh? I don’t like it. I admit it: I would look askance, wrinkle my nose, and pull my darling child away from those ruffians. But then I thought about someone that I know, someone within my circle of friends, who allows his kid to cuss. He’s made a conscious decision to “disempower words” and not limit his child’s “free expression.” I still don’t agree with him but I can nod my head respectfully and then lean down to tell Noah that little Elmer may say the f-word but that doesn’t fly in our family. Why do I cut my friend slack that I don’t allow for the people who were at the county fair? Class. Totally. Because he hails from the same middle-class background that I do, I’m more tolerant of my friend’s differing values. I hate to admit it but it’s true.
So I had to examine this. Was I saying that his decision counted more because he’s more like me? No! Of course not! “Those other kids are just unsupervised hellions!” I say to myself, “Not like my friend who is a devoted and thoughtful father.” Bullshit. How do I know that? I’m suspended in stereotypes. I haven’t been to the homes of the fair kids; I’m making conjectures based on how they look and yes, I have to admit that because they don’t look like me, I’m quicker to judge and quicker to condemn.
On to smoking. At the fair, there were lots of parents smoking around their kids. You can imagine my line of thinking: “If they don’t care about their kids’ lungs, they sure don’t give a damn about parenting attentively!” But is that true? I think it’s more complicated than that.
I disapprove of the act of smoking around children; I object to parents doing so. If a parent does smoke around his or her child, does that call every other parenting decision into question? Does that one choice disqualify them from making other good parenting choices? My thinking (I found) went, “Any parent who would smoke around his kid is probably abusing or neglecting their child in other ways.” But that’s not necessarily true. Sometimes it’s true but not always. The fact that at the fair the parents were smoking *as* their kids were cussing doesn’t mean that they don’t give a damn about their kids. I don’t know what it means. It *might* mean they don’t give a damn about their kids but since I haven’t talked to them, I can only judge their actions and not their whole parenting career. Does that make sense? I condemn their actions but only their actions. When my mind leaps forward to “trashy people!” I have to smack myself (figuratively, of course) because I’m being classist.
When I worked at the shelter, I had to confront the limitations and prejudices of my white, middle-class, college-educated background all the time. I had to learn how to think outside of them professionally even as I continued to operate within them in my personal life. I had to learn that my values were *my* values and that to inflict them on somebody else was wrong. I also had to learn when it was appropriate to hold someone to my values (when the safety of a child was at stake) and when it was inappropriate (when they were parenting in a way of which I didn’t approve). It was hard. It *still* is hard. In fact it’s harder because I no longer have that comforting delineation between my personal and professional life.
Of course having written all that, I don’t expect you to embrace *my* values about racism, heterosexism or classism. [insert annoying winkie smilie face here]
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