Everyone Chill Out About Other People’s Parenting

Tags

ozy blog post, parentings, scrupulosity cw, seriously everyone who gives parenting advice needs to collectively CHILL

Parenting is scrupulosity hell, and I don’t even have a kid yet.

Like, effective altruism gets a bad rap, but at least most effective altruists are aware that excessive guilt is an issue and try to combat it. The parenting advice world, however, is full of articles with titles like If You Send Your Kid To Private School You Are A Bad Person, Facebook friends-of-friends who say that not homeschooling your child is child abuse, comment sections who think that agoraphobics shouldn’t have children, and parenting books that say that if you tell your baby not to cry you better put aside a lot of money for their therapy bills.

I don’t mean to say that there’s no such thing as bad parenting. It’s a bad idea to call your kid a stupid lazy failure who will go nowhere in life. You should probably take your children to the doctor on a regular basis. It is not a good idea to give your child lead lightly sprinkled with arsenic and botulism for dinner. Notably, sending your child to private school, not homeschooling your child, parenting with a mental illness, and saying “don’t cry” are not actually in any of those categories.

First of all, there’s not actually a whole lot of evidence that parenting does much of anything. Of course, don’t abuse or neglect your kids and don’t decide that the Vitamin K shot is a bad idea because technology is bad epidemiology is scary and Thomas Edison was a witch. And you have a lot of control over how happy your kids are in childhood and, relatedly, how much they hate your guts as adults– and substantial control over how happy a human being is for literally two decades is nothing to sneeze at. But for a lot of the things the Mommy Wars are over– formula vs. breastfeeding, homeschool vs. private school vs. public school, positive discipline vs. timeouts vs. nonabusive spanking– the best evidence shows little to no effect on long-term outcomes. (For more, check out The Nurture Assumption and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.)

On a related note, for a lot of parenting, the evidence is very mixed. Bob doesn’t let his children under two watch television, following the advice of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Alice, on the other hand, notes that a lot of the research the AAP relies on is correlational, and better designed studies suggest that television is, if anything, mildly positive. It can make sense for Bob to explain to Alice why he trusts experts more than his own assessment of the literature, or for Alice to explain the studies she’s relying on. Yelling at each other about how they are terrible parents doesn’t promote sharing information; it just makes people feel like shit.

Even if the evidence is clear, parents have different needs and constraints. Charlie’s kid is being severely bullied in public school, and sending him to private school is the only way Charlie can think of to keep them from being repeatedly assaulted. Dana is a single mom who works two jobs, and frankly she barely has time to sleep, much less homeschool– she knows that if she homeschooled her children they’d wind up being educationally neglected. Eve has wanted children for her entire life, but she’s struggled with agoraphobia for years: right now, thanks partially to good coping mechanisms and partially to working from home and Instacart, she’s managed to minimize its interference with her daily activities, but she knows that eliminating her agoraphobia will take years and may never happen. She has planned to live with roommates and to have her husband drive the children to activities.

I don’t think that Charlie is a bad person, Dana is a child abuser, or Eve shouldn’t have children. They are doing the best they can in their circumstances. Even someone who’s a hardcore homeschooler can admit that public school is better than educational neglect or homelessness, even someone who’s very much in favor of diversity in schooling can admit that a child being assaulted is too high a price to pay, and even someone who’s leery about mentally ill people having children in general can recognize that a manageable, chronic condition does not necessarily mean one shouldn’t have kids. Since they agree with those statements, they need to stop using the harsh rhetoric that makes it look like they don’t.

The most important thing any child needs is a happy and healthy parent. If you’re running yourself ragged trying to be Supermom, all that’s going to happen is that you’re going to stress yourself out, snap at your kids, make your kids feel guilty because of all the sacrifices you’re making for them, and make parenting decisions you wouldn’t have made in the right state of mind. If you have to bedshare (increased risk of SIDS!) or let the baby cry it out (not respectful of your baby’s needs!) in order to get a good night’s sleep, do it; I’m pretty sure either way the downsides are outweighed just by the risk of you falling asleep at the wheel of a car, not to mention all the other benefits of actually getting to sleep. If breastfeeding is ruining your relationship with your baby, don’t breastfeed. If driving kids to fourteen activities leaves you with no time for yourself, ask them which activities they really want. Even if the only thing you care about is your children, in the long run the right decision is to take care of yourself.

No one is a perfect parent. Even parents who are committed to respect and kindness get pissed and scream at their kids. Even parents who care a lot about their children’s autonomy have days where they don’t care about respecting your ability to choose the pink shoes or the purple shoes, just wear this one and get in the car we’re fucking late. Even parents who care a lot about their children’s nutrition have weeks where they get McDonalds for every dinner because they’ve been on their feet for fourteen hours and they can’t bear to cook from scratch.There is not a person in the world who manages to go eighteen years without making a mistake. Think of it like a primary relationship: even if you’re committed to good communication, self-awareness, and emotional maturity, there are going to be times when you say things that you don’t really mean, you have stupid fights that could have been avoided if you just explained what you meant, or you skulk around the house saying you are FINE just FINE when you are clearly no such thing. That’s not to say that it’s a good idea to skulk around the house saying you’re FINE, any more than it’s a good idea to scream at your kids. But what it means is that you should apologize, say you were having a rough day, and stop beating yourself up about it. And it means that if you’re being judgmental of someone for screaming at their kids, you should stop, unless you would like to go through the greatest hits of times you did things that went against your values.

But my most important point is that children are different from each other. Again, think of it like a primary relationship. Obviously, there are some baselines that apply to everyone: it’s a bad idea to have contempt for your partner, you ought to respect your partner’s needs and boundaries, you should own up when you’ve done something wrong, and so on. But a lot of advice simply doesn’t generalize to everyone. “Watching porn is a great way to strengthen your relationship!” works for sex-positive people but not for the serious Catholics. Some people find playfully calling each other assholes breaks the tension, while other people would find that tremendously disrespectful. Some people take time for their weekly date night, while other people find that unnecessary and stuffy. Some people sit down for State of the Relationship talks, while other people just bring up things as they come up. People need different things in their relationships, and so naturally relationships are going to work differently from each other.

The difference between parenting and primary relationships is that children spend quite a few years without a good model of their long-term needs (“I need ice cream for dinner and all the toys in the store!”) and even after they develop such a model are powerless to leave the relationship if it doesn’t suit their needs. It’s very possible for a parent– even a good, loving parent– to make mistakes about what their child needs. So where you might shrug and go “well, I guess it works for them” at a friend’s incomprehensible primary relationship, a friend’s incomprehensible parenting style might prompt you to go “holy shit! That’s horrible for your child!”– even if it’s exactly what their child needs. And of course this bitterness is most natural on the part of children whose parents had a parenting style or practices that just didn’t work for them.

To pick an example close to my heart: Borderline personality disorder is caused by a combination of a genetic predisposition to BPD and an invalidating environment in childhood. Some invalidating environments are genuinely awful, such as being a victim of child sexual abuse or being abused. But some invalidating environments are just what’s called, evocatively, “a tulip in a rose garden”. Borderlines get born in families that are very emotionally controlled, that encourage stoicism, and that teach them to keep a stiff upper lip. If your child has a genetic predisposition to BPD, that makes them feel like their emotions are stupid and that they’re worthless, fails to teach them any useful coping mechanisms for extreme emotions, and encourages them to make their emotions bigger so that people will pay attention to their pain– all of which lead ultimately to having a personality disorder.

The problem here is that encouraging stoicism and emotional control are great ways of parenting some children. Saying “look, it’s not that big a deal” can help teach a child to reframe the situation and look at the bigger picture. Modeling control of your emotions in the face of negative life events helps many children learn to face their problems effectively. Most of the parents who teach their children emotional control do that because it’s what worked for them as kids.

There’s no such thing as a perfect parenting style for every child. There’s not even any such thing as a parenting style that is 100% guaranteed not to give your child a personality disorder. Even if you do the best you can, you might hurt your kid. That’s terrifying. And I understand why people back away from this terrifying reality by claiming that they know the One True Right Way To Parent and if anybody else disagrees it’s because they’re horrible people and child abusers. But it still has the possibility to hurt other parents and your own children.

Before you criticize parenting decisions, consider why you believe what you believe. Do you believe it because of:

• High-quality academic evidence, like twin studies or Cochrane reviews
• Low-quality academic evidence, like correlational research
• Ethical principles (e.g. “don’t hit people unless you have a really good reason”)
• Anecdotes about what worked for you (either as a kid or a parent) or kids or parents you know
• Having read a parenting book that includes wildly enthusiastic testimonials from people without surnames

If you believe something because of relatively less valuable evidence, consider toning down how angry you are about people not following it.

Consider the context as well. If someone is treating your child in a way you consider disrespectful, it’s totally justified to complain to a friend or in a Facebook post. If a stranger is making a parenting decision you consider unwise, or you have read an article about a parenting technique you think is evil, maybe consider toning it down and recognizing that things that work for you don’t necessarily work for others. And when you issue general advice, always be aware of the many circumstances that keep people from following any piece of ethical advice; make it clear that you believe that people should do the best they can, and there is no shame in not doing something you’re not able to do.

Assorted Thoughts On Scrupulosity

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post, scrupulosity cw

[Attention conservation notice: Navel-gaze-y.]
[Content warning: brief discussion of eating disorders.]

I.

This essay is very personal. On scrupulosity, even more so than on other issues, I am acutely aware of the reality that different things work for different people, and that the advice that saves and soothes me is poison to someone else. We do not have best practices for dealing with scrupulosity yet. And for scrupulous people even more than for other groups, advice may be easily taken as orders; if the things that work for me don’t work for you, you can conclude that you are evil because they don’t work for you. This is not my intention. If my strategies work for you, excellent; if they do not, try something else. Write about it. We need more people who deal with scrupulosity talking about the techniques that work for them.

II.

I recently read an essay by Peter Singer, Ethics Beyond Species and Beyond Instincts, in which he defined the moral as that which is universalizable, in this sense: “We can distinguish the moral from the nonmoral by appeal to the idea that when we think, judge, or act within the realm of the moral, we do so in a manner that we are prepared to apply to all others who are similarly placed.”

I read that, sat back, and said to myself: “I cannot do morality.”

I cannot do it in the same sense that an alcoholic cannot drink, and a person with an eating disorder cannot go on a diet. I am incapable of engaging with universalizable morality in a way that does not cause me severe mental harm. While I can reject a universalizable moral claim on an intellectual level, I am incapable of rejecting them– no matter how absurd or contradictory to other things I accept– on an emotional level. If I fail to live up to such a claim, I will hate myself and curl in a ball and be utterly nonfunctional for a few hours, causing harm to both myself and those who have to put up with me.

So (with much backsliding) I have started to make an effort to weed out the universalizable morality from my brain. I do things I want to do, and I don’t do things I don’t want to do. I do not mean a simplistic sense of ‘want’ here. If a person is trying to kick the caffeine habit, they may deeply crave a cup of coffee, but they can still be said to “really want” to not drink caffeine. Notably, this does not require that we create a universalizable moral rule that no one ought to drink caffeinated beverages.

This resolution may prompt the question of why I’m an effective altruist. Well, I want to. It is nowhere written that I am not allowed to have preferences about states of the world, and as it happens I prefer worlds in which fewer people die horrible painful deaths to worlds in which more people do. I do not care about it as the most important thing in my life, but as one of perhaps half a dozen equally important goals. I would, of course, prefer that more people become effective altruists, and I will act in such a way that more people become effective altruists, but that does not require any justification other than my own preferences.

This is the reason, I think, that I am triggered by so much discourse around scrupulosity. It is not engaged in the project of stepping away from universalizable morality and learning to live without it; instead, it is engaged in the project of coming up with a form of universalizable morality that most people can achieve, and (often) of criticizing other systems as unrealistic and inhuman. (See that fucking Moral Saints essay.) For me, this is sort of like going up to an anorexic and saying “look, that diet you’re on is very unrealistic! You need to get on Weight Watchers instead.” If the anorexic could get on Weight Watchers and not have this predictably result in eating-disordered behavior, they wouldn’t fucking have anorexia anymore.

(People actually do give that advice, because people are the worst at putting themselves in other people’s shoes.)

Also, like, what if I want to be more morally saintly than Susan Wolf prefers? At least utilitarianism has the advantage that when it’s telling me to do shit I don’t want to do, it’s telling me to prevent children dying horrible deaths, rather than telling me to be someone Susan Wolf wants to hang out with. Why do I care whom you want to hang out with, Susan Wolf? I have literally never met you!

III.

One of the most useful techniques for me in coping with my scrupulosity is training myself to respond to universalizable moral claims by adopting the attitude in this picture:

BDSM is disrespectful to the dignity of the human person? Literally no one asked for your opinion!

Effective altruism is wrong because we should help people in our own neighborhoods first? Remind me again why I care?

Promiscuous women are being unfair to men because they only have sex with attractive men and not with the unattractive ones? Uh, who asked you?

Being fat is morally wrong because of the burden on our healthcare system and because people should be physically fit? I don’t recall asking for your input!

I am working on trying to parse universalizable moral claims as people having opinions about their own preferences which they then choose to extend to me. “I want there not to be any promiscuous women, therefore you have to want there not to be any promiscuous women!” No, I don’t. In fact, I am generally in favor of the existence of promiscuous women. It is an argument as absurd as saying that because you like dark chocolate therefore I must like dark chocolate.

(I know this isn’t actually true– universalizable moral claims are actually different than statements of preferences– but it’s sure as hell useful.)

A notable exception to this technique is moral philosophy, where I simply extended my eyes-glazed-over “why does anyone care about this bullshit?” attitude to metaphysics to normative ethics as well.

IV.

Part of my problem, I think, is that I don’t feel guilty enough.

This is an odd problem for a scrupulous person to have, but I think it’s true. An observation that comes up a lot in dialectical behavioral therapy is that for people with severely dysregulated emotions, an emotion that you have too much of is often a result of using that emotion to cope with another emotion you’re afraid to feel. For instance, a person who feels angry all the time might be shutting down their natural feelings of sadness at a loss, because they feel like if they start crying they might never stop.

Whenever I’m in a situation that should logically prompt guilt, instead I feel shame. I do not recognize that I have done something that goes against my long-term desires and acknowledge that I want to do better in the future. Instead, I think that I am a bad person, that others will hate me, that I am inherently evil and nothing I can do will wash the impurities away, that I will never be approved of or praised…

Of course, this is not right. The usefulness of guilt is in pointing out when I have violated my own standards; the approval or disapproval of other people does not particularly matter, except that they have an outside view and might be able to tell when I am being too hard or easy on myself. But, like I said, I care about my own preferences; while I do care about other people’s happiness, I do not give a flying fuck about their thoughts on whether parents should sacrifice everything for their kids or whatthefuckever.

But my brain slides, so subtly that I don’t even notice it, from the question of “did I do something that I don’t really want to do?” to the question of “does everyone hate me? am I inherently evil?” That first question is scary. It involves things like ‘taking responsibility’ and ‘making amends’ and ‘self-improvement’. All of that sounds like work. On the other hand, if you’re inherently evil, you don’t have to try to get better; you just have to try to stop existing, which is much easier. And if most people don’t care about me failing my own standards (which they don’t, because they don’t even know me, and also my standards are higher than most people care about), then I can determine that they don’t hate me, and never address the question of whether I’m failing to reach my goals. Because, you know, that would be hard. Self-flagellation is easy.

V.

Recently, I was having a conversation with an acquaintance who’s a negative utilitarian. He asked what my particular brand of morality was, and I began my usual “well, it’s kind of handwavey, but…” spiel, bracing myself for an argument about why I cared about things other than suffering and didn’t I realize that suffering was the most important issue and blah blah. Part of the way through, he interrupted me, smiled, and said “oh! You have complex values!” and the conversation moved on.

This made me feel really nice. Part of the reason, I think, is that I didn’t have to defend my position. He was a negative utilitarian. I was not. There were ways in which we could benefit each other: after all, I don’t particularly like suffering either, and so we could help each other on the common project of making there be less suffering in the world. Agreement on normative ethics or on ultimate goals was not necessary.

It felt freeing. He had his own morals, but (at least in that conversation) they didn’t have to be universalizable; he was comfortable with me believing differently from him. I didn’t have to be ashamed. It was great.

Scrupulosity

Tags

mental illness, my issues with sj let me show you them, ozy blog post, scrupulosity cw

One of the most valuable things my brief stint in Christianity gave me– along with some interesting stories, a fairly impressive knowledge of the historical and linguistic context of New Testament references to homosexuality, and the concept that I could, conceivably, perhaps not be the worst person since Hitler– was the concept of scrupulosity.

Some people, perhaps most people, have lax consciences– that is, they tend to believe that they didn’t do anything wrong when, in fact, they did. However, many people, particularly but not solely people with OCD or anxiety disorders, have scrupulous consciences: they believe that they’ve done wrong things all the time, even when they haven’t; they are afraid that something is wrong, even when it isn’t; they believe, for silly reasons, that something is sinful when it isn’t.

I am an incredibly scrupulous person. Many of my readers are also very scrupulous people; in particular, I think a lot of my anti-social-justice readers are anti-social-justice because when they tried to be pro-social-justice they landed in really awful scrupulosity spirals. So I figured I would provide some advice about how to deal with moral claims as a scrupulous person. I will be talking about this primarily in a social-justice context, because that’s the ideology I’m most familiar with (exciting flings with Christianity aside), but I believe similar principles can apply to many ideologies.

Scrupulosity is bad. It is really easy to fall into the trap of “oh, my scrupulosity is the only thing that is making me be a good person.” This is not true. In my experience, when I am trying to obey arbitrary rules that my brain makes up to hurt me, I am less kind, empathetic, and hard-working than I would be otherwise. It isn’t even good on a social justice level: a lot of times, scrupulous people wind up obeying the rules rather than actually engaging with the marginalized people they’re interacting with, many of whom don’t agree with or are even harmed by the rules. And think about it: even if you stop hating yourself, you’ll still prefer that people not be hurt and want to help them be happy. Your morality will still be there if you stop hating yourself. I promise.

Stick to literal meanings. A lot of times, scrupulous people tend to take things to extremes. We read someone saying “it scares me when men follow me around on deserted streets at midnight” and conclude that we should not leave the house after 9 pm because what if we scare someone? We read “I don’t like it when people are only interested in my fat and not me as a person” and conclude that it’s morally wrong to be attracted to fat people at all. Instead, you should look at what each sentence actually means, and not go into what it could possibly conceivably mean in some alternate universe. If the person seems amenable to conversation, you can ask for clarification or examples.

What if it doesn’t seem to mean anything? Well…

Avoid vague or unbounded moral injunctions. If a statement does not provide a concrete set of actions to do (for instance, “deconstruct gender”), ignore it. If a statement does not include a reasonable stopping point (for instance, “question your sexual attractions”), ignore it. If it does both (“check your privilege”), definitely ignore it. You should treat them as equivalent to someone going BZZT BZZT BZZZZZZZZZT I AM SIGNALLING THAT I AM A GOOD SOCIAL JUSTICEY PERSON. This is true even though a lot of times “check your privilege” is, in fact, a meaningful statement in context. Whether or not it is a meaningful statement, you will not be able to interpret it as such.

Stay away from venting people. A lot of times, when people are angry, they do not exactly have much in the way of ‘nuance.’ I myself have occasionally said things along the lines of “why are cis people even allowed?” This does not mean I actually want to not allow cis people (for one thing, I love my cis friends and partners too much); it means I’m frustrated and upset. However, when I see a frustrated trans woman going “why are assigned-female-at-birth trans people even allowed”, my brain is like “OH GOD I’M HORRIBLE I SHOULD BE DEAD.” I am sure said trans woman does not mean that, any more than I seriously meant that cis people should be banned; she is just frustrated about the transmisogyny of many assigned-female-at-birth trans people. But that doesn’t change the effect on me. She has a right to vent, I have a right to stay far away from her venting.

Know your triggers. There are some ideas I am completely incapable of engaging with in a reasonable way. They dig in to the weak points in my psyche and no matter how good-faith I try to be my brain’s instant response is “oh god I am BAD I am BAD and deserve to be DEAD” and it is no good for anyone. The solution is that, when those ideas come up, I ignore them. It’s okay. No one can fully consider every idea that exists in the depth which it deserves. “This idea makes me feel scrupulous” is an excellent reason to stick it on the bottom of your respectful-engagement stack.

Something making you scrupulous doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Once you’ve internalized that scrupulosity is a bad thing, it’s easy to backlash against the ideologies that make you feel scrupulous: to go from “actually, hitting on women is not morally wrong” to “…and the feminists are evil bastards for trying to convince me of that.” Social justice is, I believe, right about a lot of problems in the world. This point is particularly true if you aren’t aware of how your brain is distorting literal meanings: it’s very plausible that the Evil Bastard Feminists do not exist anywhere outside your cranium, and your engagement with Evil Bastard Feminists is not an engagement with actual feminists’ actual beliefs.

Some people will want to take advantage of you. Sometimes it feels like scrupulous people are waving a giant sign saying HEY, JERKS, OVER HERE. If you have a bias towards believing you’re evil, there are many people who will be happy to take advantage of that. So: if someone thinks that you should do whatever they want or you are a Bad Person, they are a bad person and you should not listen to them. If someone thinks that you are a bad person for having honest and good-faith opinions, they are a bad person and you should not listen to them. (This does not mean it is always appropriate to bring up your honest and good-faith opinions– for instance, if someone has asked you to stop talking to them, or if the conversation is about a totally unrelated topic. But it is correct to have them.) If you think those things are true, you should not listen to that person, whether they are true or not, because you are clearly not in a state to engage in rational discussion.

Your mental health matters. You have a right not to be suicidal. You have a right to like yourself. You have a right to live your life. As the saying goes, put on your own oxygen mask before helping others. You will be much more capable of doing good if you don’t feel like shit all the time, because people who feel like shit all the time are generally not very good at things. And your pain matters just as much as anyone else’s does– even if they’re marginalized on a particular axis and you’re not.

You should still engage with criticism. This does not mean “you should agree with criticism.” It is possible to engage with criticism in good faith, seriously consider the evidence, and conclude that the person is wrong and you behaved appropriately. In fact, that’s necessary to be a moral human being! But as long as an idea is something that you are capable of handling, your scrupulosity does not mean you have a Get Out Of Criticism Free Card. It means that you have to take extra effort to make sure you’re listening to what people actually say, and not to what your self-hate is saying.