You Will Know Me By My Scripts
“I won’t let you hit! [Smile] Let’s play with trucks instead!” has started to feel like gaslighting to me.
Liz Sarb
It’s a Wednesday evening. I’m home with my two children, 5 and 3, and we all are or have recently been sick. My husband is currently the sickest, laid up in bed with a 103 degree fever and no sign of recovering soon. It’s summer, so my 5-year-old is out of school, and there’s a stomach bug going around the 3-year-old’s daycare. We keep her home, favoring the devil we know (the 3-year-old) over the devil we don’t (potentially adding vomit to the mix of illnesses festering in our 2-bed, 1-bath apartment). Next week, we will be further isolated by smoke drifting down from Canadian wildfires, and my husband will still be sick, but we don’t know that yet. Three years ago, we weathered a pandemic with a toddler and a newborn. That, I know, and still feel in my bones.
So we’re inside, together. And we’ve been inside. We’ve been together. The girls’ temperaments are now finely tuned to conflict; each has learned the exact location of the other’s buttons and derives sick pleasure out of pressing them until everyone is screaming and we’ve descended into some outer circle of hell.
I begin cooking one of the “easy summer dinner options” I posted on the fridge during a more optimistic time and ask the girls to each pick one thing to put away in the destroyed living room. Because it is their destiny, they pick the same thing. And then they fight, and fight, and fight, until I can no longer tune it out or “play sportscaster, not referee!” or breathe my way through it. We’ve been together for too long.
I march over to them with a sense of purpose I haven’t felt in days. “WHAT. The FUCK—,” I say through gritted teeth, putting a special emphasis on the FUCK that I’ve been holding in for—weeks? years?, “—is HAPPENING. Work TOGETHER. FIGURE IT OUT.” My voice crescendos to this final and most essential point: “You are making me INSANE. I’m MISERABLE. I don’t want to DO THIS anymore!”
Both girls are crying, but I feel better. I’ve said my piece.
(The next morning, I will watch a profile of Ukrainian battlefield medics, marvel at my privileged life, and wonder WHAT. The FUCK. Is wrong with me.)
It’s an Instagram reel. The woman is in close-up, filtered, speaking soulfully into the camera:
Can we take a second to acknowledge that we are the FIRST parent generation to apologize to our kids? I mean, imagine if you were younger and your parents yelled at you, or they said something mean when they were upset, and they got themselves together and they came back and said, “I am so sorry that I yelled at you. That probably made you feel really SCARED. That probably made you feel really SAD. And I’m sorry, you don’t deserve that. I am going to work on not yelling when I have an upset feeling, and I love you. You didn’t do anything wrong, and I love you.” Imagine how different the world would be. And WE are doing it! We’re doing it! I am VERY proud of us.
Everything about this feels wrong to me, but it takes me a while to put my finger on why.
It’s a Wednesday evening. I am, I hate to say it, 12 years old. I’m running circles around our dinner table, talking in silly voices, off-gassing the stress of seventh grade while my parents attempt to discuss their day. All of a sudden: “STOP!!!!” my dad yells at full volume, his open hand slamming down on the table so hard it shakes. I stop. (I can now sympathize with his experience of extreme parental sensory overload.)
I run sniffling into the living room and slide my new Shania Twain single into the CD player. “You’re Still the One”—a song that still has a Xanax-like effect on me—plays on a loop while I lie on the floor and meditate on the injustice of my life.
My dad walks in. “I’m sorry for yelling, honey,” he says.
“That’s ok,” I say.
Shania plays on.
Gentle Parenting experts preach that the specific things that trigger us are echoes from our childhood, tracks worn into our nerve endings that we can’t help but follow. If—as a random example—your child refusing to wash her hands after going to the bathroom makes you feel a white-hot rage that sends you into a cage match with a slippery toddler, it’s not because you lived through a pandemic and now place a priority on disinfection. It is because you were punished for being defiant when you were young, and so you helplessly reenact that same pattern with your own defiant kid. “Reparenting” is the project of accepting and loving your child-self in ways your parents didn’t, so that you can respond to your child with kindness and respect, no matter their behavior. At its core, it is a lovely structure within which to parent. Children deserve our loving attention and respect, and all of our inner children could use more nurturing.
But in this Gentle world, every single choice takes on a totemic importance. When we condition our children to do everything for stickers, we shouldn’t be surprised that we have teens that will do anything for a like, reads one post in murderously cheerful blue and green.
I long for my childhood sticker book, with its glossy pages full of carefully placed puffy cats, glittery fruits, shiny stars. I don’t post on Instagram anymore because I’m worried I do it just for the likes. I do, obviously, still spend a lot of time consuming content on it. Thus, a small selection of the many Gentle Parenting tenets bored into my brain:
Telling your child “good job” or “you look great!” will condition her to crave outside approval.
Warning her to “be careful” will make her fearful.
Saying “that made me angry” will teach her that she can affect your emotions, which will lead to codependency.
Yelling is trauma.
Time outs are trauma (there are studies to prove it!).
On that last point: one widely-cited study, performed only on adults, found that the experience of being left out of a virtual game activated the same brain region that is linked to physical pain (but is also linked, for example, to the processing of all emotions). Extrapolated to the extreme, the lesson is that if you send your daughter to her room for five minutes because she literally cannot stop scratching her sister, you will scar her (emotionally, that is, as opposed to her sister, who will have real scars from all the scratching). You’re doing this to her because your parents did it to you, and therefore she is destined to do it to her children. We MUST break the cycle. We are ~*The Cycle-Breakers*~.
At the risk of sounding like a crusty old conservative who thinks the #MeToo movement has gone too far: when we operate outside of true trauma, we create traumas from the small things. We crave a wheel to grind us down, something we can point to and say: THAT’S why I can’t sleep, can’t control my temper, drink too much, feel purposeless.
Being human can’t be fixed, but trauma can be reparented.
The influencer’s face is smooth; her hair is neatly-but-messily pulled back. She wears a t-shirt and a fanny pack. A story highlight demonstrates what she keeps in the fanny pack and how she organizes it. Her bracelets spell out her childrens’ names; her baseball cap says MAMA. If she has flaws, she mentions them incessantly, making sure that YOU know that SHE knows that her postpartum bangs are sticking up (and then selling you the gel she uses to slick them back). She posts memes about yelling at her kids but never films herself yelling at her kids. She gives advice and recipes and links and the impression that she’s *not perfect* but does have things figured out just a little bit better than you. Her nanny is never on camera. Her husband is a doofus.
What really happens inside that beautifully designed home? I wonder to myself during a naptime self-soothing scrolling session. I try to imagine her shouting “JESUS CHRIST, WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?!” as her son willfully dumps a glass of organic almond milk on her pristine floor, but I can’t quite complete the picture.
I save the influencer’s most recent post—Don’t Tell Your Kiddo to “Be Careful”–Say These 20 Things Instead!—to my Kids folder. Later, at the park, I see a mom coaching her son who is perched atop a climbing structure—“Let’s think about where your foot could go next to help you get down!”—and know that she and I are members of the same cursed club.
Gentle Parenting influencers—obsessed with eyeballs and clicks—eat, sleep, and breathe the algorithm. And for every need of the content consumer, the algorithm has an answer. Linger too long on a reel about someone’s pet cockatiel and you will see nothing else for a week (It Happened to Me™). The algorithm does not have feelings. The algorithm simply responds and then fades into the background.
Gentle Parenting influencers also eat, sleep, and breathe their scripts. For example:
“What to say when your child hits you!” (I am being so serious when I say that it is not, “Stop hitting me!!”)
“What to say before a doctor visit.”
“What to say when your child won’t poop in the potty.”
“What to say when your child won’t put on their fucking shoes and get out the fucking door.”
For every glitch in a parent’s day there is a script. The scripts hold the secret to an emotionally healthy child and a well-regulated adult. They’re the parenting equivalent of “doctors HATE this one weird trick to lower your blood pressure” with a picture of a banana inexplicably balanced over a bowl of water.
I don’t need to tell you that the scripts don’t work. Or rather, that they don’t work for every child, in every situation. More specifically, the scripts turn us into algorithms, spitting out ones and zeros to solve an equation that has no solution. “I won’t let you hit! [Smile] Let’s play with trucks instead!” has started to feel like gaslighting to me. The three-year-old who chooses violence but is met with a chirpy robot recording must feel gaslit as well.
It does not need to be said that the burden of Gentle Parenting falls primarily on mothers. Since the dawn of the patriarchy, mothers have been tasked with being the most robotic (ref. Botox, the 1950’s) of the human race, despite being the closest thing you’ll see to a wild animal (ref. childbirth, lactation). Women are the Gentle ones, after all, so it is in our true nature to learn these methods and then teach them to our testosterone-filled partners who would rather grunt and smack than speak full sentences.
Even now, amidst the twenty-sixth wave of feminism, and in spite of—or maybe because of—all the Every body is a beach body!! and Trust your instincts, no doctor knows your baby like you do, Mama!! posts, the algorithm and the influencers who serve it can’t resist feeding these prepackaged scripts into our robotically-socialized, device-addled brains. My daughter loves running with sharp sticks, but my animal instinct to yell “Careful!!” has become awfully faint. Instead, I hear myself say “We use walking feet with sticks!” as she sprints off into the distance, stick in hand, too full of primal joy to decipher my robot code.
Men, on the other hand, are allowed to feel rage: witness a Business Man™ yelling Business into his phone at the coffee shop. Or a bro roiding out at the gym, screaming as he attempts to bench press 5,000 pounds or whatever. Or the (mostly) men who, impotent in the face of the forward progress of democracy and time, raged so hard that they accidentally-on-purpose attacked the Capitol.
Where should MY rage go? Who gets to witness it? When I was the primary caregiver during the pandemic, I had so much of it. And I was so tired. Of course I didn’t turn my rage toward my babies; if I had, I would be writing this from prison. Instead, it was temporarily soothed by the hundreds of Gentle Parenting posts the algorithm served me while I was holding a sleeping newborn slightly upright from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. Those are vulnerable hours, hours when reality is not present and problems seem solvable by anyone with a promise and a fee. As the pandemic stretched on and the scripts failed, my rage festered and burrowed deep inside of me, sure to emerge as some sort of novel cancer in (fingers crossed) 50 years.
But now, at certain key moments, I’ve given myself permission to vent morsels of rage at my children, guilt-free. (I cannot emphasize this enough: Never physically. Verbally. Rarely.) It’s instructive for all of us. They get to see an unfiltered version of their mother. I get to respond to my emotional needs without burying myself in layers of pseudo-psychology and relitigating my childhood. Sometimes the kids are simply fucking with the couch again, and they’re fucking with us. Fuck around and find out, right? That seems like a good lesson to learn.
Most often I do apologize, like my parents apologized to me. But sometimes I save the apology and instead let my kids sit in the truth that they can be naughty, and defiant, and that that can cause adults to yell. And I rest secure in the knowledge that we are living together in the messy human reality, and that they know their animal mother truly loves them.
