What’s the worst kind of parent?
Maybe it’s the kind I’ll call “ticking time-bomb pee wee football coach”. You know this guy: He makes his kids call him “sir”. He thinks children have gotten soft since they stopped fighting wars of colonial conquest. When his son gets hurt, he douses him with iodine and yells at him like James Corden at a bistro. His kids’ chore list would overburden a Russian serf, but he feels it’s important for his kids to learn valuable skills like how to remove a mountaintop with dynamite and how to apply a tourniquet to a blast wound.
On the other hand, maybe the worst parent is the kind I’ll call “manic pixie nightmare Montessori mom”. Her children — Candy Cane and Dinosaur — were allowed to name themselves. She coos every time her kids do something adorable, like farting on an airplane or playing with matches at a gas station. She has a lenient attitude towards substance abuse, figuring that, look: Kids simply will soak a tampon in ketamine and put it in their rectum, so it’s better that they do it at home.
I’ve been thinking about parenting a lot because I’ve been a dad for two whole weeks. I’m wondering what kind of shitty parent I’ll be. Will I be too much like Football Dad, or skew more towards Montessori Mom? These archetypes — which, yes, I gendered, because they tend to correlate with gender — seem to represent opposite extremes of bad parenting. I think we can learn something from them. I think that digging into what, exactly, is going on with these cartoonishly-awful parents sheds some light on where certain bad political attitudes come from.
Consider Football Dad. He fetishizes strength and has no empathy. He either can’t remember what it was like to be a kid, or he does remember and is subjecting his kids to some weird reverse-generational cosmic payback. The result is a parenting style that’s somewhere between Navy Seal training and pledge week at a soon-to-be-banned frat house.
The extreme form of this mindset has a name: authoritarianism. In the ‘50s, when the world was looking back at World War II and wondering “what the fuck was that about?”, a book called The Authoritarian Personality was all the rage. It created a list of authoritarian traits, which you can read here, though it’s worth noting: These days, the book is seen less as hard science and more as an interesting meditation on authoritarianism. My takeaway from the book is this: Authoritarians really, really like strength. I mean REALLY. They like strength the way Elon Musk likes attention. Every fiber of their being is devoted to promoting, projecting, and otherwise worshipping strength.
Strength, of course, can be a positive trait. When human survival mostly involved killing wooly mammoths and fighting off the large birds that would try to carry away your young, strength was paramount. And strength is still important, even if it now takes the form of working a hard job or navigating insurance forms without losing your mind. You don’t want Mom and Dad to melt into a puddle of slop at the first sign of adversity. Ten thousand years after we turned the tide against those goddamned birds, strength continues to be a positive trait.
But over-emphasizing strength is a flaw. Football Dad’s response to any and every problem is: “Toughen up!” Is Junior being bullied? He should fight back. Trouble blending into a new school? Grow a thicker skin. He owes 300 large to the Yakuza? If you let the Japanese mafia boss you around now, they’ll boss you around your whole life. The responsibility always lies with the kid; any adversity he faces is seen as evidence of a lack of strength.
This same mindset is visible in right-wing politics. Lost your job? It’s not the government’s responsibility to bail you out. Homeless? Same deal. Sexually assaulted? Well, what were you wearing? Hardships are assumed to be the result of personal failings, especially lack of strength.1 Trying to get empathy from the hard right is like trying to get lobster thermidor at a Jiffy Lube: It’s simply not going to fucking happen.
My point is that the same traits that make Football Dad a lousy parent make him a source of shitty political beliefs. One trait isn’t downstream from the other; they come from the same origin point. Football Dad’s lack of empathy and fetishization of strength manifest themselves in his parenting, politics, and probably all sorts of other behaviors — he probably makes waffles WITH AUTHORITY!!! The Authoritarian Personality was right: This way of seeing the world is seriously fucked up (not a direct quote).
But what about Montessori Mom? Her parenting style is also one that most people find deeply flawed (they should — I invented her specifically to be awful!). She’s basically the mirror opposite of Football Dad: She is all empathy, to a fault. Her kids’ needs aren’t just considered; they carry roughly the weight of a papal edict. Maybe because she doesn’t want to be the bad guy, or maybe because she doesn't understand that kids need guidance, she simply can’t tell her kids “no”. She lets herself to be guilted into giving her kids whatever they want
Empathy, like strength, is a positive trait (duh). It's the understanding that — hang on — there are other people on this planet, and they have needs, too. If strength protected us from outside threats, empathy made it possible for us to live with each other. But, once again, lauding a single trait above all others leads to problems. To my knowledge, social science hasn't given a name to the Montessori Mom personality type, probably because mushy woo woo types don't start world wars. But I think it's worth considering how a fixation on empathy can be harmful.
Let me cite an example from my EPA days. EPA cleans up sites that are polluted with contaminants — lead, asbestos, etc. The money for these cleanups often comes from taxpayers, because the pollution was often done by a company that went broke decades ago, and digging up the CEO and rifling through his pockets rarely turns up enough cash to fund a cleanup.
So, you — an EPA stooge — find yourself in East Anthraxville describing a cleanup plan to the townsfolk. The cleanup costs $1 million and will remove 95 percent of the contamination. EPA will also put up “DO NOT EAT THIS DIRT” signs to protect people from whatever contamination remains (I’m over-simplifying but you get the idea). The response from the townsfolk is almost always the same: “We don’t want 95 percent of the contamination cleaned up — we want 100 percent of the contamination cleaned up!”
These conversations can get emotional. Remember: This is a community where dangerous contaminants have been found. People are scared. The local media may be running an eight-part series called “Poison Apocalypse: How Literally Everything You Do is Killing You”. There may be heartbreaking stories of local kids who came down with serious diseases, and you’ll honestly never know whether the contamination was to blame. The parents almost always think that it was, and you can’t really blame them (partly because they might be right). Unless you’re a monster, you absolutely do empathize with the townsfolk. But how does that feeling influence your actions?
It’s extremely tempting in that context to be the People’s Hero. You want to stand up and say: “This will not stand. No East Anthraxville child will ever be harmed by this pollution again. I don’t care what it costs — we will scrub every atom in this town to keep your children safe!” That’s the kind of crap I would write now that I’m a screenwriter, and it would probably play pretty well.
But guess what: The next day, you’ll be in West Anthraxville, and they have a pollution problem, too. And so does North Anthraxville and South Anthraxville. And you won’t be able to do four 95 percent cleanups at $1 million each, because you committed to a $4 million 99.6 percent cleanup in East Anthraxville. You were the People’s Hero, but you forgot that there are other people in the world who didn’t happen to be standing in front of you. Your empathy skewed your perspective. And as a result, you basically told sick kids in three towns to suck it — not very empathetic, after all.
I think this kind of “can’t see the forest for the trees” misguided empathy happens all the time. It was behind calls to keep schools locked down even after the threat from Covid was greatly reduced and the costs of school closures were becoming known. It’s implicit in the worldview that thinks no factory should ever close, no job should ever be displaced by technology, no matter what. It’s the fault line in every YIMBY/NIMBY fight. The presence of a highly visible sympathetic person can trump the interests of people who are simply less visible.
Some issues have become the Empathy Olympics, in which people compete for the title of Most Compassionate Person in the Universe. The progressive dialogue around homelessness largely elides the possibility that any homeless person might bear some responsibility for their situation. It’s the mirror image of hard-right conservatism: Responsibility always lies with society, never with the individual. Besides being infantilizing, this displaces honest discussion that might lead to solutions.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Montessori Mom’s approach to parenting and politics is ultimately all about her. It’s about how other people see her — she always wants to be good, never wants to be the bad guy. That remains true even when a broader worldview might bring the issue of what’s “good” and “bad” into question. Her flaw as both a parent and a political actor is the failure to realize that simply doing whatever constitutes “being nice” might not always be the right thing to do.
I’m a new parent. The amount I don’t know could sink an oil tanker; earlier this week, I had to google “is it babies or dogs who can’t have chocolate?” (It turns out it’s both.) I claim no expertise or even basic aptitude. But even at this early stage, I know that the optimal parenting strategy lies somewhere between Football Dad and Montessori Mom. It’s important that I have empathy for my son, but it doesn’t follow that I should therefore fight every battle for him or give him whatever he wants. Sometimes, I’ll have to be the bad guy; I will have to say “no”.
This is probably blindingly obvious to most parents. Football Dad and Montessori Mom are — thankfully — archetypes made up to represent extremes. And though I’ll probably never be as bad as either caricature, I will surely veer too far in one direction or the other sometimes. Plus, I’ll probably invent new, currently unknown ways to be awful — I am the Thomas Edison of being a dickhole! But I’m already realizing that my thinking about parenting serves double-duty for my thinking about politics, because a person's approach is often one in the same.
Some people might be uncomfortable with the implication that people in a society are like children, with the government being the parents, so let me unpack that analogy. The relationship between a government and its citizens is like the relationship between a parent and child in that one side has all the power. The parent/government has to decide when and how to exercise that power. So, yes, we — all of us, the citizens of a society — are the “children” in this analogy, but we shouldn’t see that as an insult. In fact, in a democracy, all of us are both the “parent” and the “child” at the same time.
Shitty Parenting = Shitty Politics
The left is blind to its own authoritarianism. It thinks that if it is done under the guise of empathy it cannot be authoritarianism. The archetype for the modern left is not Montessori Mom. It is Nurse Ratched.
It also has no problem with strength, as long as it is in women and not men.
Congratulations Jeff and welcome to parenthood.
People who worry about being bad parents are actually the best parents. It's the ones who think they are doing everything right that are the shittiest parents.