Let children be children, or, the pasta dinner from hell

The pasta dinner from hell

When my children were about one and three years old, my husband came home from work with a friend of his, completely unannounced. I was in my bathrobe, covered in various forms of gunk (pasta sauce, formula, probably a few stray hairs) desperately trying to get some food on the table for the kids. In those days, I found it nearly impossible to prepare a decent meal while my husband was at work and I had both children in my care. We ate a lot of pasta. I don’t remember exactly what phase of preparation our 165th pasta dinner was in at that precise moment in time - the boiling, the saucing, or the plating - but I do remember apologizing profusely for my attire and for the sad meal I was preparing, all while shooting dagger looks at my husband for pulling this stunt on me. 

The friend in question was French, as is my husband, visiting Silicon Valley to promote his technology startup. I had lived in Paris for eight years before having children, and we left before many of my friends started having children. Nevertheless, my impression of French culture was that the women are always supremely well put-together, no matter what. (Now that I actually have many French female friends with babies, I am no longer under this impression, and when they do have their shit together, I chalk it up to how much more support they get from the state). At this moment in time, however, I was mentally comparing myself to a slim, well-dressed French mother serving up some piping hot coq-au-vin while her children, dressed in matching striped tee-shirts and little red berets, helped to set the table. 

Now, you might point out that this is a ridiculous thing for a progressive, feminist, American mother to be thinking. Afterall, this is not the 1950s. Surely this man, this friend in his immaculate work attire complete with corporate lanyard and company-logo fleece vest who had just walked through my door, did not expect to encounter such a scene, especially since they were arriving announced, but about ten minutes into our gourmet pasta dinner I started to realize that on some level, that is what he expected. 

My children were not helping the situation. My son was jumping up and down on his chair yelling about transformers or superheroes or something. My daughter was joyously flinging her pasta about the room. I was too tired to try and control their behavior and experience had taught me that it never worked anyway. My husband chose this opportune moment to ask his friend whether his children behaved like this at the dinner table, to which the friend replied emphatically “bien sur que non!” That’s when I suggested that maybe they would like to go out somewhere quieter for a beer together, and began herding them gently towards the door. 

Children will learn to behave when they are ready 

One of the things I hate most about being a mother in contemporary America is the expectation that I should somehow be able to control my children’s behavior. In all fairness, I myself believed that other mothers should be able to control their children’s bad behavior before I had my own kids. I was so intent on not being one of “those moms” whose kid screamed for hours for a candy bar in the grocery store that I bought a whole stack of books on discipline while I was still pregnant. Surely if I mastered the techniques outlined in 1-2-3 Magic I would never find myself in such a situation. 

Fast forward five years and, like every other mother in America, I have weathered my fair share of grocery-store tantrums, airport meltdowns, embarrassingly public time-to-go-home playground battles. The discipline books grow dust on the shelves, none of them having fulfilled their grandiose promises of peace, order and calm. The thing is, kids will be kids. Babies evolved to cry in order to signal their needs. Toddlers in every culture around the world have tantrums. It’s a species universal, and the only thing we can do as parents (and as non-parent members of the broader community) is accept it. 

One of my absolute favorite passages from Melvin Konner’s masterwork, The Evolution of Childhood, is his explanation of the !Kung hunter gatherers’ theory of child development and discipline:

“The !Kung have essentially a Piagetian folk theory of child development: behavior is appropriate to the stage of development and changes naturally with growth. Children do not need to be beaten out of sinfulness, carefully taught every behavior, inclination and schema they must one day have, nor even consistently rewarded for desirable behavior. What they mainly need, according to this theory, is to grow, engage with the world, and learn on their own. Infants are said to teach themselves as they play with an unwieldy mortar and pestle or a heavy set of nutcracker stones. The word for teaching and the word for learning are the same - n!garo - and ‘she’s teaching/learning herself’ is a common phrase. As for undesirable behaviors such as crying, one mother said, ‘It’s a baby, and has no sense - that’s why it cries. Later, it will be older and have sense, it won’t cry so much.’”

When did we lose sight of this incredible wisdom? How much easier would our experience be as parents if we could adopt this mentality as a culture? To be clear, I am not advocating that we never say no to our children, or that we stop setting boundaries or even that we stop coaching them in prosocial behavior. The !Kung and other hunter gatherer societies actively coach their children in prosocial behaviors. Studies of multi-age playgroups in the !Ko San of Botswana revealed that older children play an active role in suppressing and even punishing smaller children’s aggressive acts, and encourage cooperative behaviors like sharing and giving. The difference is that there is no expectation in these societies that this coaching will yield any immediate, short-term results. When a toddler throws a tantrum, often yelling and hitting, the adult or older child who is the primary target of this misbehavior will typically do no more than fend them off and laugh. Certainly no one believes that the child’s bad behavior is somehow the mother’s moral failing. That would be absurd. Firstly, because the child was raised collectively by the community, and so the child’s behavior is not the responsibility of the mother any more than it is anyone else’s. Secondly, because tantrums and other bad behaviors are considered a normal part of growing up. There is a general recognition in these societies that there is an appropriate developmental stage for everything. Children are expected to begin acquiring culture and exhibiting more emotional maturity somewhere around the ages of five to seven. Middle childhood is widely held to be a time of calm, following the turmoil of the toddler years, in which children are more receptive to the acquisition of culture and grownup rules of emotional expression. 

What’s a mom to do?

What can we do if we live in France or America where this is decidedly not the cultural norm? In the absence of widespread shifts in attitude, there are a few things we can do individually as mothers to appropriate some of this sound wisdom into our everyday lives. First, we can say “no thank you” to events where we know our children will be expected to behave like little adults. I am not saying we should spend all of our time in romper rooms and playgrounds (although I certainly do a lot of that these days, and find it far more enjoyable than trying to keep a child from dirtying a white tablecloth at an upscale restaurant). Rather, we can prioritize outdoor or informal social meetups where our children are allowed to be themselves without constant adult oversight. When the weather is nice, we host regular outdoor barbecues and pizza parties with friends and neighbors in our back yard or at the local park. The adults can have a drink and relax and the children can be their wild selves, without any expectation that they sit still at the table and wipe their hands on a napkin. 

The other thing we can do, when we are occasionally required to attend more formal social events, or squeeze ourselves into the inhumanly small economy class seats at the back of an airplane, is to relinquish any guilt or sense of individual (gendered) responsibility for our children’s bad behavior. If my child has a meltdown on an international flight, I feel no need to apologize to my neighbors. I do not bring gift bags. I simply do whatever I feel is best for me and for my child at that moment. I try my best to calm them down and I remind myself that this too shall pass. If the childless people of the world cannot handle a toddler throwing a tantrum on a flight, then they should just stay home. Children have a right to exist in this world, and their behavior is largely outside of parental control.