A Critique of Pure Parental Instinct. With apologies to Kant.

A younger Erin inspired me to teach her to parrot: “My defiance is frustrating to my parents.” This older Erin inspires me to teach her to repeat a conciliatory paragraph:

I love you daddy. I love you mommy. I’m sorry that I didn’t listen when you told me to {X}. I’m sorry that instead of listening to you and trusting that you have the best interests and safety of me and my baby brother in mind, I {ran away, jumped off the table, tried to touch the oven, stole Adrian’s pacifier, kept hitting hitting hitting hitting, threw my cup, said “no no no NO NOOOO!”}. I understand that next time I should obey instantly because you are wiser and really really ridiculously good-looking. Thank you for caring about my well-being.

It will never happen.. Instead of being able to impart wisdom and understanding to this hurricane of a toddler I just do my best not to take what she does as some kind of personal attack. I don’t want to be angry at her contrariness; I want to be equanimous in the face of her impertinence.*I want to absorb it, gently repeat the accepted way to behave, and hope she slowly improves.

I look at her sometimes and I forget that in addition to raising a child, a soulful, willful, beautiful child, that I am also training an intricate neural network. But I don’t even understand neural networks. How am I supposed to figure out the right combination of inputs, repetitions, conjunctions, and corrections that will result in happiness and possibly go-luckiness? When I address Erin’s soul, and correct her will, I operate on an empathic level; I feel emotions and I relay emotions and those emotions guard, guide and govern hers. When I address the neural network that is Erin, on a different level, I can tell I become clinical, and a little robotic: I repeat, repeat, repeat with no awareness of how annoyed I should feel given what Erin has been doing.

The boring solution is to say “Find a balance! Find the Mean! Things will work out! Trust your instincts!” But the world is much more complicated than it was when our parental instincts evolved. Do I really think that instinctive reactions to complicated cultural and technological changes have had any impact on reproductive success? Do I think that they’ve had enough of an impact to actually select for those instincts that will be relevant for making decisions in the face of the modern world? No. I really don’t. I don’t think the cultural and technological differences between the modern world and the pre-historic world are just differences of degree; I don’t think we face obstacles and challenges and inputs of the same kinds as we did before. I think our instincts about holding or not holding a baby, tasting or not tasting a plant, and running away from or challenging each other work just fine, on average. But I don’t think we can claim any reliable instincts at all when faced with questions like “Is gay marriage good? Is television bad? Should we ban Huckleberry Finn from school libraries?”

Our instincts are seductive, and powerful, because that is how they are supposed to be: they are supposed to convince us of a course of action without deliberation, because we might not have time, in a pre-historic world, for deliberation about a matter that might cost us reproductive success. But it is that very seductive power that makes examining the appropriateness of our instincts to modern life so necessary. If our instincts are fundamentally ill-suited to helping us make decisions in the modern world then we have to guard against relying on them for help where they can only hinder and confuse.

My instincts as a parent are going to be very reliable when it comes to correcting dangerous behaviour, actions that might impact the reproductive future of my child. They are going to be much less reliable when it comes to correcting social behaviour whose norms have developed at a much more rapid rate than evolutionary changes can pace. Even less reliable, I think, will they be when it comes to developing the right kind of person to live in modern society.

This is not to say that I don’t have expertise as a citizen of the world and its culture. And this expertise can, will, and should guide my decisions about how to raise my children. But expertise, unlike instinct, is non-biological; it is learned and its quality varies according to personal history. It is also less appropriate to generalize based on personal expertise than instinct, because while our instincts might be shared, to a very large degree, our personal histories will not be shared to the same degree.**

So what do I do? I seem to lack either (a) appropriate or (b) reliable tools for raising my daughter in the world in which we find ourselves. No matter how many parenting books there are out there they will be inadequate to our needs because none can do for us in the areas of culture and technology what our own instincts do for us in the areas of safety and reproduction.

One solution is just to minimize cultural and technological exposure, attempting to recapture the kind of life that can be guided more by instinct than expertise. But we’re running out of places on the planet the Internet can’t reach, and where cultural heterogeneity hasn’t impacted the community. Barring a cultural revolution that sees a return to domestic simplicity, it seems unlikely that I will ever be in a position to take this option. And who wants to? Variety is the spice of life and the Internet is awesome.

Another solution, which is no solution at all, is to wait for biology to catch up with culture and technology, to wait for a society in which reproductive success is impacted by cultural and technological decisions to such an extent that people actually evolve instincts about those areas. This is not a solution for two reasons: First, I can’t wait that long to figure out how to raise my children. And second, there’s a bit of Zeno’s Paradox at work there: if we wait for biology to catch culture up, by the time that has happened won’t culture and technology have already advanced beyond biology again? The arrow never will hit the tortoise. And in this case the arrow is not faster than the tortoise, but much, much slower. That’s even more reason to doubt that this will be the solution we arrive at.

I really don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know where my guidance should come from. Reason, instinct, and expertise are all unreliable in their own ways. While some people worry about their children getting sick, or kidnapped, or not getting into the right schools, I worry about the tools that are available to me for helping with all of those worries.

It’s a meta-worry. I’m a meta-worrier. It’s why I look so calm about other things. Because on the inside I’m wondering if I even have the resources to worry appropriately.

*This phrase is lifted from the online dictionary entry on “equanimous” because I looked it up to see if it meant what I thought it meant and found that phrase just lying there.

**Exceptions are made appropriately where the expertise is based on a personal history so rich and varied that the person is rightly called an ‘expert’ in a more significant way than most of us can be considered. Their expertise in areas of cultural or technological significance will probably be more reliable than anyone else’s instincts in those areas.