In a doctor’s office when M is 18 months old, he is sitting in a corner reciting a book out loud as he turns the pages, giving a convincing impression that he is reading. The doctor and medical assistant ooh and aah. During the intake process, they ask us several questions about our daily routine. When they hear that my husband is home full-time with M and that my work schedule at the time includes working from home a few afternoons a week, the doctor nods knowingly at the book in M’s hands. “Well, with two parents at home, no wonder he’s doing so well.”
A year later, I spend a weekend at the beach with some co-workers and our kids. It is a few months after M’s autism diagnosis, and the beginning of our brief and ill-fated experiment with the DAN! protocol. I have lugged 6 different supplements with me, which I stir into M’s juice each morning. One co-worker, with a child M’s age, stares slack-jawed as he does his usual parlor tricks: counting to 1000 in several languages, reciting the alphabet backwards, writing and solving math problems on the Magna-Doodle. Later, she asks me about the supplements. I explain that we are hoping they will help with M’s anxiety, aggressive and violent behavior, and digestive problems (update: they don’t). “We’ve got to get some of these for my son,” she says. Her son, of course, does not have issues with anxiety or aggression. But she seems convinced that the supplements might make him smarter.
At every visit with my in-laws, the universal response after M ‘performs’ is “You guys are doing such a great job with him!” The response to his autism diagnosis is “It’s all in your head. He can’t be autistic — he’s talking already,” or “Well, he’s obviously very bright. You must be doing something right.”
❧
An essay I wrote several months ago — about parental competitiveness, hyperlexia, and our cultural focus on reading as the only measure of intelligence — was recently re-published on The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism. In the essay, I said that I struggled with how to respond to people who repeatedly complimented my son for his precocious ability to recite the alphabet but failed to notice any of his other achievements or good qualities.
Several people who left comments on the post seemed confused, sad, and even angry that I would not simply accept any praise of my child at face value, or that I would feel conflicted about this kind of praise but not about praise for other skills or personality traits. I floundered around trying to re-state my point after each comment, usually not very coherently or concisely. (Concise, it’s not my strong suit).
But I think I’ve finally put my finger on what bothers me, which I was unable to explain clearly either in the first essay or in the many explanatory comments. The reason the incessant praise of my son’s hyperlexia grates on me is not because I am not proud of his skills, or because I think other people should or should not be proud of them. It’s because the praise is invariably accompanied by praise for my parenting — implying that through hard work and willpower, I trained my child to read before his second birthday.
❧
The belief underlying this praise is that it is in parents’ power to make their children bright — if only we buy the right toys, administer the right supplements, stay home with them full time, read them the right books. It is this belief that makes parents drill their kids with flashcards before preschool, subject them to those make-your-baby-a-genius-in-20-minutes-a-day DVDs, and buy all that other crap that we’re told we’d better get because otherwise our kid will be left behind.
This line of thinking — the right kind of parenting produces perfect kids — repels me, because the necessary corollary is so ugly and cruel: If you insist that your child’s above-average skills are the result of good parenting, then his delays and shortcomings are evidence of your failure. This is the kind of thinking that gave us Bettelheim’s “refrigerator mothers.” And the parents of children with severe disabilities or life-threatening illnesses or even just below-average IQs — I guess they just didn’t try hard enough.
If I take credit for my son’s ability to read at two, then I also accept that I am at fault for his anxiety disorder, his “delayed” gross motor skills, and his huge struggles with social communication. As the parent of a child with very visible gifts as well as very visible developmental delays, I feel the sting of this theory acutely. Every time someone tells me what a great job I’m doing because M is a precocious reader, I hear an accusation: if I just tried harder, took him outside to play catch more often, quit my job to focus more on his therapy, then he’d “catch up” in all the areas where he doesn’t excel. This theory places an impossible burden of guilt on parents of kids who are not perfect (that is to say, all parents). It’s also not true.
There is overwhelming scientific evidence that parenting has very little impact on children’s intelligence, behavior, or temperament. In The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker summarizes decades of empirical results that show, time and time again, that “All human behavioral traits are heritable. The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes. …[G]rowing up in a particular family has little or no systemic effect on one’s intellect and personality.” Not only are autism and general intelligence heritable, so are behavioral traits like how proficient with language you are, how likely you are to become dependent on nicotine or alcohol, and how likely you are to experience depression or anxiety. So is every major axis of personality. All of these are largely unaffected by anything we do as parents.
This is not to say that parenting is meaningless or has no effect on children. Obviously what we do has a huge impact on our kids’ day-to-day happiness. Our job as parents is to love our kids unconditionally, to nurture them, to comfort them, to provide as many tools as we can to help them reach their potential, to do whatever is in our power to make them happy, to keep them alive. But, as Pinker argues so persuasively, our children are not lumps of clay that we mold in into a desired shape.
My discomfort with the way people praise my son does not in any way diminish my pride in him. If I sound snarky when I refer to his “parlor tricks,” the snark is directed at our cultural assumptions about parenting, “giftedness,” and disability; not at my child. I love watching his face light up when he notices a silent letter in a printed word or figures out how to count by sevens. I am willing to listen to him count by sevens a hundred times in a row (other parents of kids like M will recognize that I am not exaggerating here) just to see that look of pure joy on his face when he does it. I was an early reader too, and have always loved looking for patterns in words and numbers. Sharing that thrill with my son is one of the biggest pleasures I have found in parenting so far.
M’s abilities are part of who he is. I love those parts of him, just as I love all the other parts — including the many that others view as “below average,” “impaired,” “delayed,” “deficient,” and “abnormal.” But really, I didn’t have much to do with any of it. He was born that way.
Exactly.
oh do I ever get it. In the process of getting the girl a gifted IEP and having to be vocal about them still not getting how the dyspraxia fits in the picture. I have those days where I don’t care what she can do with pen and paper, it would be nice if someone could teach her how to spit so she could brush her own teeth, yk? If I had a nickel for every time I’ve had to say “that’s just who she is” I’d be wealthy.
It’s nice to hear there are other people who relate to this. Thanks for stopping by — I’m glad I found your blog.
I have the same visceral aversion to being complimented for child’s abilities as you do. When my daughter was younger, people would often say, “You’ve done a great job with her!” as though she were some sort of public works project. It was as though I’d helped build a dam, lay railroad tracks, *and* constructed a wonderful child in my spare time!
I always felt especially keenly about this kind of “compliment” because my parents took credit for my achievements throughout my childhood, to the point that I had no room to enjoy my own abilities at all. And the whole joke was that my parents were, in many ways, really bad parents, and that most of what I did, I did despite them. So I had sort of an allergy to being credited for my daughter’s abilities from the get-go.
After several years, I came up with a good response to people who gave me the credit. I’d say, “I really haven’t done anything but get out of her way. It’s my job to remove the roadblocks to her happiness and to make sure I don’t throw in any myself.” That tended to end the discussion. In this culture, people don’t know what to do when you don’t buy into the whole self-promotion thing.
I think it’s especially important to call a halt to this stuff with an autistic child, because pretty soon, people will be telling you what a great job you’re doing with him that he’s progressed so far, as though he hasn’t been doing any work at all.
Thanks Rachel.
I love the public works project analogy. I wish people would follow that out to its conclusion — and see that when a child doesn’t meet someone’s expectations in some way, then we’re talking about faulty engineering, substandard materials, or um… lazy contractors. It’s just so absurd to assign that kind of power (and responsibility) to parents, rather than recognize that all children are dealt different cards to begin with. And we all do the best we can with what we have.
I know some of my knee-jerk discomfort with this kind of praise comes from my own childhood experience. My parents never took credit for my skills, but there were many slick, self-congratulatory school administrators who were very interested in how my academic achievements might reflect positively on their careers. They spouted a lot of crap about how their excellent middle school curriculum shaped me into a contest winner. I was always offended by this, because it was so clear to me that they had nothing at all to do with my ability to win spelling contests, or to answer math questions on the SAT.
What a brilliant moment of clarity.
This post means something to me as an adoptive mom. I have always known that I can’t take credit for much of who my children are. But it’s been harder to not take the blame and feel guilty for this or that shortcoming.
I really like this post
BlogGems #9
Thanks Lori
I imagine as an adoptive parent you are encouraged to feel all of the guilt, even though people are less likely to assign you credit for your kids’ skills. But really, it shouldn’t be about guilt OR credit… Different kids are born with different sets of gifts and challenges.
gosh you are sooo right
I have grappled with this often
I have guilt over not being the perfect homeschooling therapy mom
My DH is the SAHD and I work full time ( and sometimes even travel .. sigh )
the other part that bothers me is what we value
we put value on a certain kind of cognition above all else
As a mother of a boy recently diagnosed as being on the spectrum, it’s so validating to hear this. I know my parenting did not create his issues or gifts, he was born that way.
However, respectfully I’d like to suggest a parent has more than a little impact on intelligence, behavior, and temperament…. particularly for kids on the spectrum who’s intelligence, behavior, and temperament are so uneven. ….at least from my non-scientific, personal, and anecdotal observations.
Parenting can’t change the hand the child is dealt…. Creative parenting can certainly influence the way the game is played – and cards can change. Temple Grandin, Clay Marsden come to mind – game changers on many levels.
That may not be possible for everyone – but I think it’s possible and is happening for a lot more people on the spectrum than we realize.
Hi Lucia
Thanks for your comment. I completely agree that parenting has an impact on skills and behavior. When I say “intelligence,” I am describing inborn capacity for learning, as opposed to what we do with that capacity. And all the evidence shows that our relative capacity to learn is heritable and not affected by parenting.
IQ tests claim to measure capacity as opposed to achievement, but most tests are skewed to reward those with a particular kind of verbal intelligence. So when we talk about “intelligence,” we have to clarify what we’re talking about.
I do agree that parenting can influence the way the game is played, and that supportive, nurturing parenting can make a huge difference in a child’s life. I just don’t think we can make our kids smarter by buying the right products or feeding them the right vitamins.
What a fantastic post. I’ve been writing drafts for a post on my own blog for a couple of weeks, trying to make this important point, but you’ve managed to do it just perfectly. Development is seen as teachable, parents pat each other on the back for teaching their children how to crawl, walk, talk, so in turn parents like us who have “failed” in this task, get endless advice from these “better” parents about what we should do differently. And as you point out, it’s not just other parents playing the blame / praise game, it’s also the professionals making the error. I am suspicious that some professions encourage the view because they make a lot of money from things like motion and music classes, but on the whole I think they genuinely believe that basic development reflects parenting skills. I still intend to do a post expanding on this at some point (otherwise I risk turning this comment into post length!), but now with betterment from having read your own. I’ll be linking back to your post once I manage to refine my own ideas a bit further. Thank you.
Yes, the unsolicited advice can really wear you down. Looking forward to reading your post.
[...] Born That Way appears here by permission. [...]
I’ve been on both sides (or maybe all three?) of this with my daughter. When she was at the beginning of her journey with Early Intervention, I had one family member call every other family member in a 50 mile radius and tell them there was “something wrong” with her. Which, I obviously had a problem with as it wasn’t her story to tell and my daughter may not be typical… but there is nothing WRONG with her.
I’ve been on the side where it’s mothers at the park… or even mothers now at EI, comparing kids… and I frankly never know what to say.
Then there’re the times like now, when she’s made a lot of progress … cognitively, she’s very smart, we know she is… functionally, behaviors and stims and sensory and social get in the way… and my MIL will say “that’s so TYPICAL” and yeah, but not so much… and that’s sorta what we love about her.