"[D]reary, boring, sadly misguided Kindergarchy"

Joseph Epstein is an especial favorite of mine. The following is excerpted from a recent essay, "The Kindergarchy" (The Weekly Standard, June 9, 2008):

I knew where they came by their sense of their own deep significance and that this sense was utterly false to any conceivable reality. Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement. Besides, one of the first things that people who really are significant seem to know is that, in the grander scheme, they are themselves really quite insignificant.

Growing up with only minimal attention sharpened this sense of one's insignificance. One's fierce little opinions were all very well, but without the substance of accomplishment behind them, they meant nothing.

Six decades separate Epstein's childhood and this essay, so I suspect that his parents' approach was not quite as laissez-faire as he recalls, but he does expose essential truths about recent parenting philosophy:

On visits to the homes of friends with small children, one finds their toys strewn everywhere, their drawings on the refrigerator, television sets turned to their shows. Parents in this context seem less than secondary, little more than indentured servants. Under the Kindergarchy, all arrangements are centered on children: their schooling, their lessons, their predilections, their care and feeding and general high maintenance--children are the name of the game.

No other generations of kids have been so curried and cultivated, so pampered and primed, though primed for what exactly is a bit unclear.

If Epstein's remembrances of his childhood can be said to be one point and his description of the Kindergarchy can be said to be another, my own parenting can best be described as something in the middle of those two points. Raising and teaching my children is important work, but it is not my only work. "Mother" is not even among the first fistful of words in my working definition of self. How could it be? Long before I became a mother, I was just me. Certainly one's sense of self cannot be built on a role assumed nearly three decades into a life.

Or can it?

Many women redefine their lives through their roles as mothers. I just... can't. Won't. Although I will concede that I have become a better person -- a better version of myself, if you will -- because I became a parent.
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Sometimes I remind my husband of the day when I was about eight months pregnant with our firstborn and I said, "We'll just 'train' him to like what we like."

Maybe even more than "Put them in situations in which they can succeed" and "Focus on the moment that you're in" -- my two parenting mantras or refrains -- this describes my parenting plan.

And it worked.

We just trained them to like -- or at least show a durned healthy respect for -- what we liked.

Beginning with tidy surroundings and plenty of reading-thinking-learning space for the female parent.

Heh, heh, heh.

More on this some other time.

Added later: Girl Detective is talking about this piece, too.