Everybody Hates Arithmetic

My clinical clients frequently come to me to discuss their day-to-day familial problems.

Such quotidian concerns are insidious. Their habitual and predictable occurrence makes them appear trivial.

But that appearance of triviality is deceptive: it is the things that occur every single day that truly make up our lives, and time spent the same way over and again adds up at an alarming rate.

One father recently spoke with me about the trouble he was having putting his son to sleep at night —a ritual that typically involved about three-quarters of an hour of fighting. We did the arithmetic.

Forty-five minutes a day, seven days a week—that's three hundred minutes, or five hours, a week. Five hours for each of the four weeks of a month—that's twenty hours per month. Twenty hours a month for twelve months is two hundred and forty hours a year. That's a month and a half of standard forty- hour work weeks.

My client was spending a month and a half of work weeks per year fighting ineffectually and miserably with his son. Needless to say, both were suffering for it. No matter how good your intentions, or how sweet and tolerant your temperament, you will not maintain good relations with someone you fight with for a month and a half of work weeks per year.

Resentment will inevitably build. Even if it doesn't, all that wasted, unpleasant time could clearly be spent in more productive and useful and less stressful and more enjoyable activity. How are such situations to be understood? Where does the fault lie, in child or in parent? In nature or society? And what, if anything, is to be done?

Some localize all such problems in the adult, whether in the parent or broader society. "There are no bad children," such people think, "only bad parents." When the idealized image of an unsullied child is brought to mind, this notion appears fully justified. The beauty, openness, joy, trust and capacity for love characterizing children makes it easy to attribute full culpability to the adults on the scene.

But such an attitude is dangerously and naively romantic.

It's too one-sided, in the case of parents granted a particularly difficult son or daughter. It's also not for the best that all human corruption is uncritically laid at society's feet. That conclusion merely displaces the problem, back in time. It explains nothing, and solves no problems. If society is corrupt, but not the individuals within it, then where

did the corruption originate? How is it propagated? It's a one-sided, deeply ideological theory.

Even more problematic is the insistence logically stemming from this presumption of social corruption that all individual problems, no matter how rare, must be solved by cultural restructuring, no matter how radical.

Our society faces the increasing call to deconstruct its stabilizing traditions to include smaller and smaller numbers of people who do not or will not fit into the categories upon which even our perceptions are based.

This is not a good thing. Each person's private trouble cannot be solved by a social revolution, because revolutions are destabilizing and dangerous.

We have learned to live together and organize our complex societies slowly and incrementally, over vast stretches of time, and we do not understand with sufficient exactitude why what we are doing works. Thus, altering our ways of social being carelessly in the name of some ideological shibboleth (diversity springs to mind) is likely to produce far more trouble than good, given the suffering that even small revolutions generally produce.

Was it really a good thing, for example, to so dramatically liberalize the divorce laws in the 1960s? It's not clear to me that the children whose lives were destabilized by the hypothetical freedom this attempt at liberation introduced would say so.

Horror and terror lurk behind the walls provided so wisely by our ancestors. We tear them down at our peril. We skate, unconsciously, on thin ice, with deep, cold waters below, where unimaginable monsters lurk.

I see today's parents as terrified by their children, not least because they have been deemed the proximal agents of this hypothetical social tyranny, and simultaneously denied credit for their role as benevolent and necessary agents of discipline, order and conventionality.

They dwell uncomfortably and self-consciously in the shadow of the all-too-powerful shadow of the adolescent ethos of the 1960s, a decade whose excesses led to a general denigration of adulthood, an unthinking disbelief in the existence of competent power, and the inability to distinguish between the chaos of immaturity and responsible freedom.

This has increased parental sensitivity to the short-term emotional suffering of their children, while heightening their fear of damaging their children to a painful and counterproductive degree.

Better this than the reverse, you might argue—but there are catastrophes lurking at the extremes of every moral continuum.