The artisanal child

by David Benjamin

“‘No grownups allowed’ was, after all, the principle that defined every kid’s kidhood. You took orders from grownups. You ate the food they fed you (unless it was liver or Brussels sprouts). You went to bed when they said. You went to school because they said. You got stuff from them—clothes, dimes, Christmas presents. But they had their problems, we had ours.” ―David Benjamin, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked

MADISON, Wis.—In the current sense of the term “parents rights,” my parents had none. Nor did they want the aggravation.
Of course, my mom and dad enjoyed in theory all the civic rights guaranteed by the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and a host of unwritten social norms. I had none. As a kid, I enjoyed only the revocable privileges granted by my parents, who had the unwritten right, if felt they urge, to abuse me. In my case, neither Mom nor Dad exercised this right but, in those days, a kid subject to abuse by his mother, his father or his priest was pretty much up the creek without Olivia Benson.

The rub is that, as long as I was a kid, I never heard a grownup express any interest in his or her “rights” as a parent, particularly in reference to school. Horace Mann, John Dewey and a national network of local school boards had not so much poached from child-bearing grownups their parental rights but had, more accurately, liberated them blissfully for eight daily hours from Labor Day to Memorial Day—not counting weekends and holidays—from the cares, woes, whining and pouting of their children. The school acted in loco parentis, “in the place of parents.”

When I went out the door bound for for St. Mary’s School, I entered a parentless parallel plane sealed off from any adult—even Mom and Dad—except the nuns, the lay teachers, Father Mulligan and the kitchen ladies who served our lunch but never, as I recall, ever talked to any kid.

Only once, in my 2,160 days of parochial and public matriculation, did Mom ever set foot in my school, and only because she’d been summoned by my high-school principal. She was there for my court martial for having written something unseemly. Remembering the horror of her own school days and the nuns who brandished razor-edged rulers and breathed brimstone, Mom attended reluctantly, listened meekly and fled hurriedly. She never forgave me.

(This, by the way, was not the last time my prose got me into trouble.)

There were reasons, going back centuries, for parents to keep a loose grip on their offspring. Until well into the twentieth century, people tended to breed like rabbits and kids tended to die like flies—from afflictions that ranged from smallpox, diphtheria, typhus and polio to floods, fire, famine and overwork in the farms, factories and sweatshops that gladly accepted the surplus children of any family that couldn’t to feed and clothe them all. Any parents who wanted to see some of their issue survive the prevailing gauntlet of disease and disaster had to produce as many as possible. My mom, for instance, was one of twelve.

I was only one of three, but I grew up according to the laissez faire parental ethos that sent Huck Finn—unmissed and unlamented—down the Mississippi. Before I was twelve, my dad had become a distant and somewhat mythic figure in my life. My mom, a single parent, was too busy surviving to guide my learning curve or envision my career path. Later, when it was too late, I found out that she would have preferred that I’d aspired to the insurance industry.

Operating with virtually no grownup scrutiny, my siblings and I traced separate courses that were sufficiently independent to verge on recklessness. We each made fateful choices that we might not have reconsidered if we’d been counseled by wise and watchful parents. But, like so many grownups I knew, Mom and Dad were too young to be wise and too frazzled to be watchful.

There are blessings and curses to a hands-off childhood. It affords a kid the opportunity and challenge of creating a self that’s free of parental pressure and true to one’s unique aptitudes.

Question is: What aptitudes?

My generation, and those before me, bred lots of “delinquent” kids who were rebellious but couldn’t explain against what, exactly, they were rebelling. James Dean, as both himself and as Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause, was—more or less by default—the essential Angry Young Man, patron saint of aimless youth. True to his code, he was dead before thirty.

Of course, whether we were rebellious or merely autonomous, kids had ample role models for how families are supposed to be. We watched Wally and Beaver on TV with a mixture of envy and sarcasm. Secretly, however, we harked to Eddie Haskell, the charming conniver whose presence was the devil on the shoulder of the ideal nuclear family. He was also the most familiar character in the show. In school, we saw few analogs to the Beav, but every classroom had its Eddie Haskell, sucking up to teachers and backstabbing his peers. We had to assume, because the Cleavers were on TV, that they had a factual precedent. There might be live similar families out there somewhere. We just didn’t know any of them in real life. Nor did we expect to see a future generation that was determined to replicate the Cleaver ideal.

And yet …

Everywhere in our midst today, there are couples diligently molding what can only be termed the artisanal child—that single, precious offspring who’s watched over, guided, molded, scheduled and chauffeured hither and yon, from fetus to Harvard. by a smothering mom and a mothering dad. There’s a telling instant in a TV ad for a financial planning outfit during which a newlywed woman corrects her husband’s desire for “babies” by saying, “baby.” I can see the wheels turning in her head. This solitary kid will never be out of her sight, free of her clutches. In her exercise of parental rights, the kid will be a butterfly in a Mason jar.

The artisanal child has assumed political form in a “parents rights” fad that has spawned home-schooling, curriculum meddling, banned books in school libraries, Little League instead of sandlot ball, soccer instead of football, granola, vaccination panic, an epidemic of allergies and a gender war over toilets. Fortunately, however, this ephemeral movement of, by and for grownups is easily foiled by kids.
Because I sponsor a scholarship program, I still frequent my old high school, where there is little evidence that kids have surrendered to parents rights.

School’s still school, hard to penetrate by all but the most fanatic parental intrusion. It remains a refuge where kids can cultivate autonomy and mount their resistance to the fever dreams of mom and dad. In my high school days, I sank into books, poetry and a cabal of friends unknown to Mom, who was working two jobs and relieved by my alienation. Nowadays, kids can’t read books and don’t read poetry. They don’t even watch much TV. They enact their rebellion by withdrawing into a smartphone netherworld, sealed off from adult scrutiny among tenuous BFFs, digital strangers and AI bots, watching mindless videos and playing Jumanjic games incomprehensible to any adult with an occupation and a mortgage.

I worry that these kids, gaping for hours at a touch-screen dispensing pablum and porn, will warp their minds irreparably and render themselves incapable of rearing their own only-children. However, I’m consoled by the awareness that they are frustrating their loving elders and invalidating their parents’ “rights” as effectively as I did—and as Jim Stark decried—in times gone by.

The Beav may be dead, but Eddie Haskell is eternal.