Parenting,
Acceptance and Tolerance-- 'difficult' children in Far from the Tree by Andrew Solomon
K.Nagarajan, Guest
Lecturer in English, Sethupathy Govt. Arts College.
A. Kumar, Guest
Lecturer in English, Sethupathy Govt. Arts College.
Parenting is no sport for
perfectionists. He analyses how parents raising "difficult" children,
and ends up as an affirmation of what it is to be human. Solomon’s startling proposition is that diversity is what unites
us all. He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome,
autism, schizophrenia, multiple severe disabilities, with children who are
prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are
transgender. While each of these characteristics is potentially isolating, the
experience of difference within families is universal. In Solomon’s telling,
these stories are everyone’s stories.
He brings out this book
of his desire to forgive his own parents, who, while they effortlessly accepted
his dyslexia as he was growing up – his mother campaigned for his rights in the
face of educational prejudice – flunked the same test when it came to his
sexuality. They didn't throw him out of the house, but neither did they
disguise their disappointment. Years later, he got to thinking about how parents
deal generally with children whose identities fall outside of their own – what
he calls the child's "horizontal" as opposed to "vertical"
identity – and the result is a fascinating examination of the
accommodation of difference.
Religion, race, language
and nationality are the customary verticals passed down from parent to child;
horizontal refers to traits in a child that are foreign to the parents, either
inherent, like a physical disability, or acquired, like criminality.
"Vertical identities are usually respected as identities," writes
Solomon. "Horizontal ones are often treated as flaws." Chapters
follow on families coping with autism, dwarfism, schizophrenia, Down's
syndrome, disability, deafness, child prodigy, transgender issues, criminality
and children born of rape, and the first lesson of Solomon's research was the
non-transferable sympathies of each group. Participants in the book who had
shown extraordinary humanity in their own difficult circumstances bridled at
the prospect of being lumped in with what they saw as less deserving special
interests.
Deaf people didn't want
to be compared to people with schizophrenia; some parents of schizophrenics
were creeped out by dwarfs. The prodigies and their families objected to being
in a book with the severely disabled. Some children of rape felt that their
emotional struggle was trivialized when they were compared to gay activists.
Solomon spoke to some 300
families in the course of researching the book, a rebuke to everything shoddy
and dashed off in the culture, and the density of his empirical evidence
decimates casual assumption. What unites most of his interviewees is a
political sense of injustice in the way they are perceived by the mainstream.
"Fixing is the illness model," writes Solomon. "Acceptance is
the identity model."
With delicacy, he weighs
the rights of various pressure groups to self-definition against the pragmatic
limits of their arguments. In almost all cases, he finds, it is a better time
to be different than it ever was. In the chapter on deafness, for example, he
tells heartbreaking stories of deaf children growing up 30 years ago being
denied any language, when their parents prevented them from learning sign,
thinking it unduly stigmatising. Now, deaf- and sign-culture is widely accepted
as valuable in its own right and deaf pride one of the most successful advocacy
movements around.
Autism, the subject of
Solomon's most interesting chapter because of the complex nature of the
condition, is trickier. He interviews animal behaviour expert Temple Grandin,
who is autistic, and has worked hard to explain what the condition is like from
within, she argues for "aspie and autistic" pride without denying its
drawbacks. "If you got rid of all the autism genetics," she says,
"you'd get rid of scientists, musicians, mathematicians and all you'd have
left is dried-up bureaucrats." Solomon notes that campaigners for autistic
pride suffer somewhat in their advocacy, since they are, by
definition, autistic, and lack the charm that campaigns of that nature
tend to run on.
It's a timely book; the
internet has changed the fortunes of many millennial children who might
otherwise have grown up feeling isolated, and, along with their parents, given
them communities. "I was determined not to be around folks who saw us
as tragic," one exasperated mother of a disabled child told Solomon.
"Unfortunately, that included my family, most professionals, and just
about everyone else I knew." But online, she had instant access to
others in her position.
The most contentious of
these advocacy groups are the "neurodiversity" campaigners, also
known as Mad Pride, who argue for the rights of those with serious mental
illnesses to reduce, and in some cases reject, their medication. Here, Solomon
presents page after page of interviews with those tormented by psychosis, most
of whom became ill in their 20s, compounding a sense in their parents of having
"lost" them. Contrary to other categories in the book, it is hard to
see schizophrenia as anything other than a theft of identity, and Solomon
quotes E Fuller Torrey, the psychiatrist and researcher into the illness:
"Freedom to be insane is an illusory freedom."
Consistent across all categories is the
extraordinary tenacity of parents' love for their children. (This is not the
same as straightforward acceptance.) There are moments of casual heartbreak.
The father of Maisie, a severely mentally disabled child in New York, takes her
to Central Park and reflects on the fact that, in his position, no one
ever thinks to come over "and suggest that their child could play with
your child". If it hadn't been for Maisie, he adds, he would have been one
of them.There are reminders that, however hard they try, parents can't always
protect their children from bigotry, most starkly in the case of Lateisha Green,
a transgender woman from Syracuse, New York, shot dead at a party with the
words: "We don't want faggots here."
And there are surprises. It's a virtue of
the book that it ranges across the socioeconomic scale, and Solomon finds that
those parents with high socioeconomic status "tend towards perfectionism,
and have a harder time living with perceived defects" in
their children than those struggling at the lower end.
The most fascinating and painful interviews
are with those parents who forfeit the good opinion of their peers by
not doing what is "expected" of them: a woman
from Oxford who, after a terrible period
of indecision, gives her mentally and physically disabled child
up for adoption; the mother of two severely autistic children, who, when her
husband asks, "Would you marry me again?", replies, "Yeah, but
not with the kids." She adds, "Do I love my kids? Yes. Will I do
everything for them? Yes." But, "I wouldn't do it again. I think
anybody who tells you they would is lying."
The most powerful interview of the book is
with Tom and Sue Klebold, parents of Dylan, one of the two teenagers who
carried out the Columbine massacre,
and who killed themselves after the shooting. The Klebolds have been vilified
on the assumption that they must, surely, have contributed to their son's
mental state but there is, Solomon writes, no evidence for it. Of everyone he
interviewed, he felt the greatest connection with them. "It would have
been better for the world if Dylan had never been born," says Sue of her
son. "But I believe it would not have been better for me."
Solomon is never sentimental and, with a
cool eye, he acknowledges that "aggrandising the nobility of woe is a
coping strategy". Nonetheless, time and again in the book, a positive
outlook is shown to be helpful. "A study that looked at children with
various complications at birth found, simply, 'the children of mothers who had
tried harder to find meaning had a better development outcome'."
The mother of a child lost to gang culture would not give up her idea of
him as basically good. "In the end, his mother had believed him into
becoming who he had sometimes pretended to be."
All parenting
turns on a crucial question: to what extent parents should accept their
children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become
their best selves. Drawing on forty thousand pages of interview transcripts
with more than three hundred families, Solomon mines the eloquence of ordinary
people facing extreme challenges. Whether considering prenatal screening
for genetic disorders, cochlear implants for the deaf, or gender reassignment
surgery for transgender people, Solomon narrates a universal struggle toward
compassion and innumerable triumphs of love. Many families grow closer through
caring for a challenging child; most discover supportive communities of others
similarly affected; some are inspired to become advocates and activists, celebrating
the very conditions they once feared. Woven into their courageous and affirming
stories is Solomon’s journey to accepting his own identity, which culminated in
his midlife decision, influenced by this research, to become a parent.
Elegantly
reported by a spectacularly original thinker, Far from the
Tree explores themes of generosity, acceptance, and tolerance—all rooted
in the insight that love can transcend every prejudice. This crucial and
revelatory book expands our definition of what it is to be human.
Works Cited:
Solomon,
Andrew. Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and Search for Identity. Scribner, Reprint edition (October 1, 2013).
