“As much as you love your baby, you’re going to ask
yourself, What the hell did we do? It doesn’t mean
that you love your baby any less, but this new life
is a scary adjustment…nobody can truly prepare you.” New mother
“We feed children in order that they may soon be able to
feed themselves, we teach them in order that they may
soon not need our teaching. This heavy task is laid upon
Gift-love. It must work towards it own abdication.”
C. S. Lewis
The Four Loaves
“We believe that the world is a place of beauty, harmony and love,” write Joseph Bentley and Michael Toth in the introduction to Exploring Wicked Problems, published in 2020. “We also know that it is a place of confusion and discontent, contention and conflict, failure and sorrow. Life acquaints us not only with goodness but with disappointment, pain and disorder.”
While there are many explanations for a world that is at the same time both lovely and harmonious and full of contention and conflict, among the most instructive is one offered by German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk: “It is characteristic of being human than human beings are presented with tasks that are too difficult for them, without having the option of avoiding them because of their difficulty. ” The world is beautiful to us because, at times, we are able experience it as beautiful because our genes and our culture help us see it as beautiful. It is also difficult and depressing because it also demands more from us than we can give, and yet does not excuse us from making the effort.
Five Adults in a Room
Five adults are in a room: Two couples – Betty and Josh are in their mid- 80’s, Lucy and Max are in the middle 60’s, and Peter is 35 or so. They make up three generations of the same family. The older couple, Betty and Josh, are the parents of Lucy, which makes her husband, Max, their son-in-law. Lucy and Max are the parents of Peter, which makes him Betty and Josh’s grandson.
Problem solving has been going on in the room for over an hour, but the reality is that it has been going on for years. During the past 15 years or so, Peter has been struggling with a personal problem that he has been unable resolve. In the past, his parents and grandparents have made numerous attempts to be helpful, usually by long distance – letters and phone calls – and with little success. They have also contributed financially to helping Peter find a solution. This three-generational meeting has been arranged by Lucy, Peter’s mother, who is hopeful that the experiences and wisdom that the older couples bring to the meeting will be helpful. As they talk, all five share the same assumption: that the problem they are wrestling with is Peter’s and it is Peter that needs help. Yet in ways that are only dimly understood by them, the problem is not just Peter’s. Each of the adults in the room is also experiencing the problem but in different ways. Everyone in the room is struggling.
Peter’s dream is to spend his life writing fiction. His success at an early age led him to the conclusion that he had talent. While he was a graduate student in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa, he wrote and published a book for young adults – Sisyphus’ Triumph – that was not only widely praised but won the Blueberry Award for the best book for young people published that year. When he graduated his advisor told him that he had a special talent and, if he would work hard and dedicate his life to writing, he could be an author of the first rank. At graduation that year, his fellow students voted him as the “Most Likely to Be Famous by 40.” Yet 15 years later, approaching his 40th birthday, he was far from famous. Since graduation he has written four novels, all of which had been rejected by the publishers to whom he had sent them. In spite of working hard and making what seemed to his wife and family, endless sacrifices, it was clear that he was not going to be famous by the age of 40. His agent, perhaps sensing that he was backing a loser, had recently informed him that he was dropping him as a client.
Peter felt that he had reached a crossroads: either continue to chase his dream, or give up and try something else. He had discussed his dilemma with his parents. If he continued to try and become a renowned author, he would need financial support for him and his family for the next two years he would need to finish a new novel. His parents, struggling with financial pressures of their own, had turned to Lucy’s parents for help.
And so, on a warm, sunny day in late October, five adults meet in a room to try and help Peter as he struggles with his difficult decision.
Here is what each one is thinking:
Betty, his grandmother: “Peter must not give up. He has a wonderful talent and sooner or later will break through. I’m in favor of continuing whatever it takes to support him as long as it takes, even if it means using our retirement funds.”
Josh, his grandfather: “He doesn’t have it, and it’s time for him to give it up. He can’t seem to face the fact that he will never be a great writer. Four rejections should make that clear. It’s time to sell insurance.”
Lucy, his mother: “For all of these years I was Peter’s greatest fan. Now I’m confused and really worried. If he decides to quit, what will he do. He has over 15 years invested in this dream.”
Max, his father: “I now believe that he isn’t the writer we all thought he was. But I would continue to support him, except that we’re out of money. We took out a second mortgage to support him for two years the two years it took to write his last novel and nothing came of it. We can barely make ends meet as it is.”
Peter: “I feel torn between pushing on and giving up. I had pretty much decided to quit until last week when I talked to my graduate advisor. He said I shouldn’t quit. He told me again the same story he told me almost 15 years ago: that I have a great gift that I shouldn’t waste. But how it is that others don’t seem to agree?”
The two older couples are also thinking some variation of this: “I love Peter and what him to be happy. Yet we have been struggling with this for over 10 years. Why are we doing this all over again? I thought we would be through trying to solve our children’s problem twenty years ago and could go on to other things. Yet here we are.”
The room is filled with love, pain, admiration, despair, concern, and frustration, all at the same time.
One Challenge After Another
“Marriage presents one challenge after another,” wrote marriage therapist Daphne de Marneffe in The Rough Patch, “and so we need to bring our best resources to it…Three of the biggest challenges – children, sex, and work – pervade the emotional climate of marriage.” Among our “best” resources for dealing with these three challenges, two stand out above the rest: First, adequate and relevant knowledge about what should be done to deal with the challenges of children, sex, and work; and second, having the necessary skills to translate this knowledge into successful actions and behaviors. The quantity and quality of these resources can make the difference between a successful marriage or relationship or a failed one.
Time Marches On – And Drags Us Along
With the passage of time, the challenges people face in relationships change. Some fade into the background while new ones emerge and take center stage. For example, most people in their 70’s, are surprised about how much they talk about their health problems. And most people who stay together into their 70’s and beyond learn that both the tensions and the satisfactions of their sex lives are moderated either by familiarity and habit, or by the inexorable timetable of biology. “As one gets older, litigation replaces sex,” wrote British novelist Martin Amis. And if not litigation, then golf, soap operas or naps in the afternoon.
The importance of work as a source of both tension and satisfaction also tends to diminish with the passing of time. Either people experience a leveling-out of ambition and drive, or an increasing reduction in energy, or both, and, begin to think about their lives beyond work. By the time most people reach their early 60’s, they have begun the psychological transition from “My job is really important to me,” to “Perhaps it’s time to think about retiring.”
While the challenges of managing sex and work tend to recede into the background, the same does not seem to be true of the challenges involved in raising children. Parents raise their children, help them get started with their own lives, and then are often surprised with the continuation of a parent-child relationship not unlike the one in earlier years, and one that continues to be both involving and compelling. “Once a parent, always a parent” is a constant for both parents and children.
Tasks That Are “Too Difficult” for Parents.
Earlier we quoted philosopher Peter Sloterdijk who wrote that the dilemma for human beings is having to grapple with tasks that are too difficult for them, and yet having no choice but to try. Being a parent is clearly one of these tasks.
In 2001, scholars from MIT and Harvard published a report titled Raising Teens: Project on the Parenting of Adolescents. In their introduction the authors state that “The report is written for all those who work with on and on behalf of parents, adolescents and families.” In a previous chapter titled “The ‘Wickedness’ of Adolescence,” our focus was on the ten developmental tasks that were identified in the report as being crucial for adolescents to master as they made the transition from adolescence to early adulthood. In this chapter, we shift the focus from the wicked problems that belong to adolescents to the equally wicked challenges that parents face as they try to help their children move from childhood to adulthood and beyond.
The Five Basic Tasks of Parenting
The MIT and Harvard scholars concluded the basis of effective parenting consist of five basic
responsibilities :
I. Love and Connect:
– Children need parents to develop and maintain
a relationship with them that offers support and
acceptance.
II. Monitor and Observe
– Children need parents to be aware of their
activities through a process that, over time,
involves less direct supervision and more
communication and networking.
III. Guide and Limit
– Children need parents to uphold a clear
but evolving set of boundaries, maintaining
important family rules and values, but
but also encouraging increased competence,
maturity and separation.
IV. Model and Consultant
– Children need parents to provide ongoing
information and support around decision
making, values, and navigating the larger
world, teaching by example and ongoing
dialogue.
V. Provide and Advocate
– When children are young, they need parents
to make available not only adequate nutrition,
clothing, shelter, and health care, but also
when they are older, a supportive family
relationship and a network of caring adults.
“Ay, There’s the Rub”
Like most lists of desirable actions, attitudes, approaches and behaviors, it is one thing to write them down, it is quite another to put them into practice. Here are four obstacles that stand in the way of parents implementing these recommendations:
First, even if parents were to become aware of these or other guidelines and recommendations, putting them into practice, may be beyond their capabilities. For example, how does one learn to go about “develop[ing] and maintain[ing] a relationship that offers support and acceptance?” or how is one to master the skills of “upholding a clear but evolving set of boundaries?”
Second, people become parents without having received any helpful information or instruction about being an adequate, let alone an effective, parent. When parents take a new baby home, someone may step in to help – the grandmother, a neighbor, or a friend. But once a baby has survived its first few months, parents usually rely upon doing what their parents did as they were growing up. Even learning what the desirable practices and behaviors consist of is beyond them, let alone learning to do them.
Third, even if parents are trying their best, what they lack in order to become more effective is useful feedback about what seems to be helpful and what is not. Even though parents may be open to learning better ways of raising their children, without timely and consistent feedback, no change can be expected. Their young children are unable to tell them, and as children grow older, there are no norms. mechanisms or traditions for a conversation which begins with the child saying, “Mom, Dad, I have some suggestions that you might try in order to do a better job of all of this.”
Fourth, over time, the responsibilities for parents toward their children evolve, becoming more simple and more complicated at the same time. What many parents do not expect nor plan for is that as they age, the bonds between them and their children continue to make demands of both parents and children. For some, these bonds eventually stretch beyond the breaking point and are severed, but for most parents, they continue in force as long as they live. Regardless of how the relationships play out over time, trying to withdraw from being a parent is like attempting to change one’s identity: people may think it is a good idea, but have no idea how difficult it is. Love it, tolerate it or deny it, no one ever really stops being a patent to their children.
It May Be Getting Worse
Research for the MIT and Harvard report that identified these five basic tasks of parenting was conducted during the last decade of the previous century. Since then, there is reason to believe that the challenges for parents have become even more difficult and demanding. Here are the titles of five recent articles:
-“Where Went My Empty Nest?” by Charles Blow was published in the New York Times on August 19, 2020. After Blow’s children left home, his friends asked him if he missed them.
Actually, what he felt was the opposite. “I told them I free I felt, how I felt I was entering
a new life of my own…But, now that the children…have moved back into my house as they
search for jobs…I will say the things we are not supposed to say: What happened to my empty nest?”
-” Stressed, Tired, Rushed: Portrait of the Modern Family,” by Claire Cain Miller, published in the New York Times on November 5, 2015. Children are much more likely to grow up in a household where both parents work, and unlike previous decades, nearly half of all two-parent families today, both work full time. “What hasn’t changed: the difficult of balancing it all,” writes Miller. “Working parents say they feel stressed, tired, rushed, and short on quality time with their children, friends, partners, of hobbies.”
– “Stress, Exhaustion and Guilt: Modern Parenting,” by Claire Cain Miller and published in the New York Times on December 25, 2018, explains that the stress and guilt that parents are experiencing today with the observation that “Parenthood in the United States has become much more demanding.”
– “For Parents, a New Level of Big-Picture Anxiety,” by Chris Colin was published in the New York Times on October 6, 2020. Surveying the challenges of raising children in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, Chris Colin observes that “Worry is devotion curdled into fear,” caused by the incredible speed with which new crises replace the old ones without any noticeable resolution. It’s as if things are piling up until they threaten to overwhelm us. ” What does it all mean?” he wonders. “I suppose this is why we worry in the first place,” he writes, “- we know so little. The world unspools a little each day and we strain to see over the horizon, but it never works. We’re just left to wonder.”
– The pandemic infects our lives with false choices writes Nancy Gibbs in an article titled “Why parents now face an impossible choice” published the Washington Post on July28, 2020: “Save lives or livelihoods? Defend freedom, or wear a mask? Protect the old, or teach the young?” But the choice about sending children back to school is anything but false she writes. “Everybody wants it,” insists President Trump, but the dilemma is not only what one wants. It is also it costs. “What is it worth to see the classrooms open?” asks Gibbs “- and how can parents possible do that calculation.” The answer is, of course, they can’t. It’s not a calculation that yields a number or a formula that can be used to provide an answer.
Parenting is a Wicked Problem
In Aging Thoughtfully, Martha Nussbaum, Distinguished Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, writes “We have made advances in agriculture, manufacturing, and aviation. It is less clear that we have done so with respect to partnering, parenting and choosing political leaders.” And why is this so? It is because these last three problems “are moving targets that are not conquered over time through incremental scientific progress.”
In other words, partnering, parenting, and choosing our political leaders are wicked problems.
While Nussbaum is probably unaware of it, she has reinforced an observation by former Secretary of State, George Schultz, “that some problems can be solved, while others can only be worked on.” Improving the way we partner, parent, and choose our leaders, are challenges that will never be solved – nor will they ever be finished – but can only be worked on.
In “Wicked Problems: An Idea Whose Time Has Come,” in Exploring Wicked Problems, Bentley and Toth identify over 50 problems that academics and authors have identified as wicked problems. Among them are aging and dementia, AIDS, dysfunctional relationships, social justice, forest management, terrorism, and food and water security. Also included among them are nurturing relationships and marriage, successful parenting, and unresponsive governments, three examples of wicked problems that correspond to Nussbaum’s examples of “moving targets” that cannot be successfully addressed by science or technology.
In 2017, in New Strategies for Wicked Problems, Edward Weber and his co-authors propose that wicked problems are defined by three characteristics: “They are unstructured, crosscutting and relentless.” By unstructured they mean that causes and effects are extremely difficult to identify, “thus adding complexity and uncertainty and engendering a high degree of conflict because there is little consensus on the problem or the solution.”
When they say that wicked problem are crosscutting, their observation is that in the “problem space,” there are multiple and overlapping problems and concerns which result in the people involved bringing to the conversation “different perspective[s]” and “different ways of knowing.”
And their use of relentless to define wicked problems emphasizes their conclusion that while many wicked problems are urgent, “…the problem is not going to be solved once and for all despite all the best intentions and resources directed at the problem…”
Parenting is Relentless
In an article published in December of 2018 in the New York Times, Claire Cain Miller published an article titled “The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting.” She begins her article, “Parenthood in the United States has become much more demanding that it used to be.” The primary reason? The pressure upon the parents to raise their children in ways to help them be successful in an increasingly complex and uncertain world never stops. “Social scientists,” she writes, “say that the relentlessness of modern parenting has a powerful motivation: economic anxiety.” For the first time, she concludes, it is as likely as not that American children will be less prosperous than their parents.
Earlier we described the attempts of five adults sitting in a room to do their best to be helpful to the youngest one present. The problem they were grappling met the conditions of being wicked: It was unstructured, crosscutting, and relentless. It had had troubled them all for years, and yet kept coming back. No matter what they decided to do, it would be a continue to be a presence in their lives.
Important Defining Characteristics
Beyond being unstructured, crosscutting and relentless, there are five additional characteristics of wicked problems that can help us understand why parenting is a wicked problem.
I. There is no immediate or ultimate way to approach a wicked problem.
1968, sociologist Alice Rossi examined this life-changing experience of having a child in a paper titled titled “Transition to Parenthood.” When it comes to becoming parents, she noted, there is no equivalent to courtship, which helps one get ready to enter into marriage, or job training, which is common when people begin a new job, or basic training, the six-month training period before becoming a soldier. The baby simply appears, “fragile and mysterious” and “totally dependent.” and is handed off to young people who are not ready for the responsibility. There is no single approach to guide them, but instead, an infinite number of choices parents can make when it comes to raising their children.
II. Any proposed solution for a wicked problem is not true or false but can only be bad, good, or best.
Looking back on the experience, few parents would claim that they were ready for it. When they were finally given full responsibility for the new baby, they may have had a set of rudimentary ideas of how to go about being adequate if not good parents. Now it was up to them to discover what would be “best.”
III. Every wicked problem is unique.
When a second baby arrives, all parents discover that he or she is very different from the first. Much of what they learned with the first baby no longer seems to apply. All babies are unique in that they bring with them their own characteristics and temperaments, and must be treated differently. And it is not only that the baby is unique, but the circumstances in the newly-expanded family are also unique.
IV. Wicked problems are never static. “… parenting …is [one of several] moving targets” that do not respond to the same techniques or approaches.
As children grow from infancy to childhood, everything changes. What finally seems to be effective when the child reaches 6 months, no longer is helpful by the time the child has had its first birthday.
V. For wicked problems, there are no stopping rules. As a result, no one can claim that a wicked problem has been solved, fixed or finished.
As most are aware the term “empty nest” has nothing to do with birds, but is reserved for parents who send their last child out into the world, either to work, to college, to the military, or to marriage. Associated with the idea of “empty nest” is that the parents have met their obligations to their children and are finally free to move on with their lives.
It rarely turns out this way. Recent economic downturns have sent many children back to live with their parents in order to make ends meet. And even if there is an “empty nest,” most parents quickly learn that there is still a “nest.” Biology and culture conspire together to keep alive the fact that parents are parents to their children, and that their children are still their children for all of their lives.
Not Ready/Never Ready
Although becoming a parent is not a surprise for most – they have had nine months or so to get used to the idea – finally “being” a parent is one of the most sudden and dramatic changes human beings can experience, especially with a first child.
In the beginning of the chapter, we quoted a new mother’s observation about her experience with her new baby: “no one can truly prepare you.” The key word here is “truly.” Many young people have been baby sitters, or older sisters or brothers who have taken care of younger siblings. But the realization that “now we’re the ones who are really responsible,” comes only after a new baby has arrived and serves to increase the realization that “we’re not ready for this.” As Alice Rossi observed in her 1968 article, for new parents there is no on-the-job training program or “boot camp” experience. And few couples have live-in grandmothers who could be helpful. What is required of them is to get into the middle of it all and do the best that they can.
For parents, there is yet another surprise in store, one that slowly dawns on them during the 30 or 40 years after their children leave home to make their way in the world. And it is a surprise for which they are, once again, unprepared. Their children, now grown with children of their own, are still children themselves, not in age but in how they define themselves with respect to their parents and vice versa. The parent-child bonds remain in place, and though many expectations have changed, the basic structure of parent-child remains in place.
Eventually, many experience a dramatic and at times painful reversals of roles. Now it is the grown children who must adopt the role of being parents to their parents, and it is the parents, increasingly infirm and dependent, who must become the children. This transition is often stormy and difficult – no 85 year-old has been known to give up driving a car willingly – and one for which no one involved is hardly ever prepared.
“Something Wicked This Way Comes”
In 2012, Atul Gawande, a prominent surgeon at Harvard, published an article in the New Yorker titled “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” Borrowing the term from the greeting the three witches on the heath extended to MacBeth, Gawande wrote that the “wicked problems” that are coming are “messy, ill-defined, more complex that we can fully grasp, and open to multiple interpretations based on one’s point of view…No soltution to a wicked problem is ever permanent or fully satisfying.”
The phrase, “something wicked this way comes,” is a useful one to describe what is about to happen to a couple awaiting the arrival of a child. It is important to recognize, however, that it is not the child who is wicked, but the process of raising the child. While the child is the cause of the “double, double, toil and trouble” that is about take over the home, it is the relentless experience of being a parent – one that is never finished or fully satisfying – that is wicked.
“What The Hell Did We Do?“
“We would be vastly better off,” wrote Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University, in This Will Make You Smarter, “if we understood what wicked problems are and learned to distinguish between them and regular (or “tame”) problems.” Understanding what wicked problem are and what makes them wicked will not solve them, but it will get us started in a constructive direction in grappling with them. And equally important, especially for parents, it will help answer the question of the new mother we quoted earlier: “What the hell did we do?”