Words&Dirt

“The concierge gave him another smile and slid the paper across the counter to him.  Sokolov accepted it with profuse thanks, walked out the door, climbed into a taxi, and took it to another Western business hotel half a mile up the road.  There, he availed himself of a free computer in the lobby, where he typed the spy’s English address into Google Maps.

This yielded a close-up view of an irregular street pattern, which told him nothing, so he zoomed out until he could see the whole island.  He checked the scale and verified his general impression that Gulangyu was no more than a couple of kilometers in breadth.  He tried to get a sense of its layout, its cardinal directions: basically, how to get to and from the ferry terminal even if he were lost.  Then he turned on the satellite imagery.  From this a few things were obvious.  First of all, its transportation system was much more finely meshed than was hinted by the street plan, which only depicted perhaps 10 percent of the roads and rights-of-way.  Or perhaps those were not roads but alleys and walkways, private footpaths among the buildings.  Second, the buildings were all roofed in tasteful earthtones, contrasting with the garish tile and sheet metal that tended to protect Xiamen’s buildings from the rain.  Third, there was a lot of greenery.  Fourth, the place names tended to be schools, academies, colleges, and the like; and the presence of large oval running tracks and so on suggested that they were rather nice schools.

To paraphrase Tolstoy, all rich places were alike, but each poor place was poor in its own way.  The slums of Lagos, Belfast, Port-au-Prince, and Los Angeles each would have presented a completely different and bewildering panoply of risks.  But just from looking at this map, Sokolov knew that he could go to Gulangyu and walk its streets and make his way in the place just as well as he could in a parky suburb of Toronto or London.”

––Reamde, by Neil Stephenson, pg. 383-4

“I am not trying to play Pollyanna.  American youth have serious problems, and many parental behaviors or choices exacerbate those problems.  Single-parent families are not simply ‘growth experiences’; latchkey children are often frightened and lonely; divorce is not merely a hiccup in anyone’s life; the difficulties of working parents are very real and fall with special severity on working mothers.  Despite the evidence that we can help our children rise above these difficulties, most parents who do not fit the ideal norm are painfully aware of the times when they fail to help.  Other parents may feel self-righteous because they have never even exposed their children to such risks.

But neither self-congratulation nor self-castigation is in order.  Both responses assume that parents have primary control over how their children turn out, when in fact there are many factors affecting children that have nothing to do with our own family choices, be they good or bad.  Research psychologist Arlene Skolnick comments that ‘the myth of the vulnerable child’ exaggerates both ‘the power of the parent and the passivity of the child.’  In fact, parents seldom have ‘make-or-break’ control over the child’s growth.

Parenting is both easier and harder than many researchers and self-styled family experts admit: easier because, as we will see, children are resilient enough to survive many of our mistakes, and even to benefit from them; harder because some forces affecting children are simply too complicated for parents to control.  Recent research demonstrates, for example, that neither one particular family type nor one particular classroom style guarantees school success.  It is the ‘fit’ between student background, classroom style, and particular teacher that counts: ‘Children from any type of home can be relatively advantaged in some classrooms and relatively disadvantaged in others.’

At home, children’s temperamental differences interact with parental idiosyncrasies in equally complex ways.  Research on siblings suggests that they are raised in completely different environments within the same family.  Parents relate differently to different children, children react differently to similar treatment, and when we throw in all the complications of sibling interactions as well, it is very difficult to isolate what parents did or did not do that deserves praise or blame.

People’s adjustment and achievement are also greatly affected by factors beyond the family’s direct control.  Class background severely limits the options of many parents and gives tremendous advantages to others.  Lower-class parents are especially ill-served by an overemphasis on parental responsibility for children’s outcomes, since research shows that the social dynamics of poverty and low status give them less influence over their children in relation to peer groups than parents in other classes.  Low-income parents must use what influence they do have to prepare their children for work that is likely to stifle initiative and produce a degrading combination of boredom and insecurity.  Blaming parents in this situation for failing to ‘broaden their child’s horizon’ is like calling people shortsighted because they cannot see through the mountains that surround them.”

––The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, by Stephanie Coontz, pg. 225-6