My Tricky Parents
I’d like to add something to the ongoing conversation about shame and social stigma. As Ross tells it, stigmatizing behavior is useful as a deterrent. “Having your mother kick you out of the house if you get pregnant out of wedlock probably isn’t going to improve your life chances,” he writes, “but the fear that your mother might kick you out stands a good chance of deterring you from making a bad decision in the first place.”
He goes on:
… humans being what they are, social stigmas are usually effective precisely because they create suffering, and exclusion, and cautionary tales…. Many lives really were improved as American society became more tolerant of unwed motherhood – just as many lives were improved when divorce became easier to obtain, and bad marriages easier to walk away from, and so on.
But many other lives were not. And so the battle between social conservatism and social liberalism at the moment isn’t a battle between competing utopias, but a battle over which tragic choice is worse: The choice to stigmatize, which can damage and even ruin lives, or the choice to destigmatize, which can damage and ruin countless lives as well. It’s a hard enough call that I can safely say I would have sided with the social liberals in a different time and place. But we’ve come a long way down their road, and I think we know enough about the consequences to say that there would be real gains to human welfare available – for downscale Americans, especially, but not only for them – if we were to go some distance in a more conservative direction.
I’m afraid there’s no getting around that tension, or even knowing when the right balance is struck, but pondering this topic always makes me think of my parents, whose intuitive ability to get the best of both worlds never ceases to amaze me. As a high school student, for example, I stayed sober, though most of my friends were drinking, not so much because I feared being ticketed by police, or grounded, but because the idea of disappointing my parents horrified me. I don’t even think they ever told me not to drink alcohol. Merely imagining that they’d be called down to the police station to fetch me proved incentive enough, and my first beer, a Coors Light sipped in a dorm room at UC Berkeley when I visited as a prospective student, owed much to my perception that they wouldn’t be nearly as disappointed were I caught drinking at a college visit.
Or to address teen pregnancy, I am certain that were I to have impregnated a girlfriend during my freshman year of college, my parents would’ve been superlatively loving and supportive. I’d surely have been guilt ridden about all the help they were offering and the sacrifices they were making due to my mistake. I’d have certainly felt ashamed to tell them, “Mom, dad, there’s a classmate of mine you’ve never met, she lives in my dorm, and we’re having a baby together.” But I doubt my parents would’ve punished me, or shamed me, and I cannot remember them ever stigmatizing anyone for giving birth at a young age out of wedlock (though obviously a societal stigma did some of their work for them, and I grew up going to a Catholic high school where pregnancies were rare, hushed up when they happened, and decidedly phenomenon occurring outside my circle of friends). Nevertheless, I easily enough dismissed all sorts of societal conventions, and rebelled against being confirmed a Catholic — it’s always been the values imbued by my parents that mattered most.
Summing up, my parents somehow managed to get all the benefits of shame, without ever having to threaten any actual suffering or exclusion (beyond the awful way I’d feel were I to disappoint them by behaving badly). How did they do that?! Will I be able to manage the same trick when I have kids? I’m certainly going to try.
I worry a lot more about my daughter not completely apprehending the physics of automobile travel than not feeling sufficiently ashamed to abstain from premarital sex.
At any rate, most children are remarkably eager to please, even more so than dogs. I’m sure Ross’s and your future children will have no trouble sussing out your expectations and hopes; and having made that determination, will have little trouble behaving as you expect/hope they will.
Of course some mistakes are inevitable. Life can take a new direction in an instant.
— Tony Comstock · Feb 19, 12:00 AM · #
I’m struck by the perhaps unexpected parallels one can draw between your experience of being raised and the gift of the Holy Spirit which is fear of the Lord. Aquinas made the distinction between servile fear and fear of disappointing the Lord. The former is like the dog, the latter is like the human. Your parents seem to have done a great job to evoke the fear of disappointment, which arises from love.
— SB · Feb 19, 12:23 AM · #
I have no shame.
— W.H. Auden · Feb 19, 01:29 AM · #
Is there any evidence that Ross isn’t just making facts up to fit? Does shame really act as a deterrent to teenage pregnancy? I’m led to understand we have a lower rate of teen pregnancy now than we did in the 50’s, when surely there was substantially more shame involved. (And much less birth control.) My understanding from Freshman Psych is that there’s no such thing as negative reinforcement; negative consequences for behaviors with immediate positive rewards (like sex) lead only to increasingly byzantine efforts to avoid the consequences with little to no reduction in the behavior.
Certainly my parents made every effort to shame me for my poor math grades – a consequence of poor instruction, certainly, but also of incredibly poor motivation on my part – and despite occurring for years, no amount of shame ever caused me to improve my math grades. It did, however, prompt me to master the use of Photoshop to alter my report cards before I brought them home.
If you want to keep your daughter from getting pregnant, teach her how to use birth control. That’s been proven effective in every study. Shame? Shame has a 6,000 year old record of failure.
— Chet · Feb 19, 03:41 AM · #
Congratulations to your parents. Even though I share Ross’s goals, I’m no fan of shame. I like to think socio-eco-fiscal incentives are more effective and more compatible with a liberal society than shame (and of course, how do you decree shame?).
My experience with my parents vis-à-vis unexpected pregnancies was both similar and different. Similar in the sense that I always could count on their love and support. Different in the sense that they knew that I would be having sex early, and so my mother told me basically three things, equal in importance: 1- use condoms, fercryinoutloud; 2- if you get a girl pregnant, DON’T marry her; 3- if you get a girl pregnant, we will support you and the child.
I also had a profound belief that, even though I always kept safe, I knew that if I got a girl pregnant, even as a teenager, even as a jobless, penniless student, it would be a good thing. My Christian faith makes it basically impossible for me to believe that the conception of a child is not a profoundly joyous and positive event, and that there isn’t always a way to make it work (feel free to label me a hypocrite for touting my faith and having premarital sex. I know I’m a sinner.). I sincerely believe that if my crazy high school girlfriend had gotten pregnant, I would have been instantly overjoyed, despite all the “bad” consequences. So I was never all that worried in a meaningful sense.
By the way, this is the reason why I’m left cold whenever Ross or someone of his ilk writes that when a guy gets a girl pregnant he should “do right by her”, i.e. marry her. Geting married for the wrong reasons is trying to use two wrongs to make a right. Doing right by a girl you get pregnant is to support the child and, eventually, her, and raise the child with as much love and dedication as you have. And by the way, I know women who “forgot” to take the pill and got pregnant FOR THE EXPRESS PURPOSE of getting her guy to marry her.
As far as drinking, well, I’m French. ;) Seriously though, I think this is a major superiority of latin/Catholic cultures: alcohol is considered a part of life, something that you learn and do reasonably. Of course every society has problems with alcoholism, but our countries don’t have the hordes-stumbling-drunk-out-of-the-pub problem of Britain or the college drinking problems of the US that come with a repressive view of alcohol. I began drinking (wine) at age 13, which I’m sure would horrify many well-meaning American parents, but I’ve never been so drunk that I forgot what I’d done the night before, or threw up everywhere, etc., the things that seem to be a badge of pride for many young American males (and, even more worryingly, an increasing number of British females).
— PEG · Feb 19, 10:30 AM · #
Aren’t you all proving Ta-Nehisi’s point? Kids feel shame when they disappoint people they respect (e.g. their parents), not abstract societal norms. So stigmatizing behaviors in the abstract doesn’t work. It’s how parents behave that matters, not what norms they espouse.
— mealworm · Feb 19, 06:19 PM · #