The Two Worst Things That Can Happen to a Child

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Gardenis now considered a children’s story, but the work originally appeared as a serial for adult readers. The story has much to say about motherhood and fatherhood. While Hodgson Burnett’s Christian Science background and quasi-nature worship can be heavy-handed, her depiction of nourishing human relationships and the rediscovery of child-like wonder have much to offer us in our time.

The mother figure for all the characters in the novel, Mrs. Sowerby, appears only briefly but her influence is felt through her children, Martha and Dickon, who help the orphaned child Mary discover her capacity for love and joy. After her development was stunted by neglect and tragedy, Mary Lennox arrives at Misselthwaite Manor an irascible and unlikeable child. Through the influence of Mrs. Sowerby, Mary begins to nurture a hidden garden, an image for her spiritual life and the discipline she had been denied.

At Once Spoiled and Neglected

One of Mrs. Sowerby’s observations comes through her daughter Martha, who recalls, “Mother says as th’ two worst things as can happen to a child is never to have his own way—or always to have it. She doesn’t know which is th’ worst.” Mary and her cousin Colin are two children who have been at turns spoiled and ignored, and they bear distortions of their personalities and defects in their character as a result of these dual misfortunes.

In our time, as in every time, these same temptations exist: to give into children’s whims in ways that distort their will and to subordinate the developmentally appropriate needs of a child for the convenience of adults. It can be tempting to think that only “bad” parents fall prey to these vices, but sometimes the most seemingly well-intentioned parents can cause avoidable harm. By looking at some of the ways these dangers to children manifest around us, we can have greater clarity for the way forward with the children in our lives.

Anything But “Gentle”

“Gentle parenting” is a term that encompasses a wide range of parenting philosophies that emphasize respect for the child and the affirmation of the full depth and breadth of emotional experience. The fact that we operate in terms of “parenting philosophies” suggests how artificial and unmoored from tradition we have become. Instead of simply raising children in a time-tested manner that was good enough for most people, we are now expected to reinvent the wheel and consciously follow tenets for mothering or fathering.

Gentle parenting has much to recommend it: acknowledging and cultivating the authentic freedom of the child, emotional regulation in parents, teaching by example. All these are excellent. But in practice, so-called gentle parenting can lead to misery: adults narrating every emotional storm of an overtired toddler, unable to intervene in a meaningful and constructive way. The premises of gentle parenting can also lose all proportion. Incredibly, some parents will sit patiently as a muscular three-year-old punches and slaps them because they believe strongly that restraining her would be “moving her body” in a way that she doesn’t want.

In a perfect world, your reasoned and calm response would cultivate a relationship of mutual respect and growing understanding in which the child feels secure enough to mature. This happens to be a fallen world, and some of the children raised by “gentle” methods appear about as happy and well-adjusted as Colin Craven. The many strategies associated with gentle parenting can be helpful, but ultimately reason—and not the emotional disturbances of young children—must be the guiding principle.

Becoming Literate Without Stories

While our culture of childrearing has become fixated on validating emotional experience and prioritizing the “needs” of the child, we have neglected arguably the greatest need of all. In a world devoid of a sense of eternity, children at ever younger ages are being institutionalized. “School” now begins in infancy with childcare centers run by efficiency experts and early literacy coaches. Suddenly, children as young as three are expected to start memorizing lists of “sight words” and must endlessly rehearse the writing of their own name. When not being run through the paces of a modern education, children are plugged into an i-Pad or television so that even their free-time cannot fall into self-directed revery.

As the worksheets accumulate and the hours outside evaporate, children are being denied the experience of eternity. It is in moments of extended boredom and nothing much that children fall into their real work. Sorting, stacking, listening, imagining: in all the timeless activities of childhood, kids come to know the experience of eternity when the clock slips away and hours seem but minutes.

Perhaps childhood is not meant to be a prequel of the treadmill of adult occupations or an endless vacation of overstimulating activity. Childhood can be a quiet time of cultivation in which children become acquainted with the reason for living, a time when the most exciting event of the week is weeding the garden and waiting to see when the bulbs shoot forth from the moist earth. Instead of obsessively drilling the principles of phonics, we should be giving children stories that make reading worthwhile. And there is empirical evidence for this: In a culture that graduates people from college who never read another book, we seem to be frontloading literacy the wrong way.

Stifling gentleness and literacy without stories worth telling are but the newest models for the two worst things that can happen to a child. Instead of directing childhood, sometimes we can learn much by simply watching children grow.