I have a really exciting guest for us today.
Andrew Solomon is here.
And this is profoundly exciting for me because I don't think I've quoted someone so often in a long time, so much so that someone on my team said you quote Andrew Solomon a lot, we should probably have him on the pod to talk about what you quote so often.
So this is going to be a really important conversation about what it's like to parent, what it's like to have kids who are different from our unconscious often fantasies of who our kids will be and how we tolerate raising kids who might have different values, might have different interests, might have even different identities than what we imagined.
We'll be back right after this.
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Andrew, I am so excited to have you here because now in your presence, I can read aloud something I have read to countless parents starting way before I had an Instagram, this is something I would give so many parents my private practice and it's something I refer to often.
And then I was just thinking wait I should have the man, the myth, the legend here.
And so I'm just gonna read some of this and then we'll jump in.
There is no such thing as reproduction.
When two people decide to have a baby, they engage in an act of production and the widespread use of the word reproduction for this activity, with its implication that two people are but parading themselves together, is at best a euphemism to comfort prospective parents before they get in over their heads.
In the subconscious fantasies that make conception look so alluring, it is often ourselves that we would like to see live forever, not someone with a personality of his own." Ooh!
So, so good. So I'm just going to pass it to you.
I'm curious. Tell me a little bit, like when you wrote that, when you were thinking about this, in some ways, it's the encapsulation of so much that's in this book, but in some ways, it's the encapsulation of what makes parenting so hard. I did not reproduce, as you said, parenting is being forever cast into a relationship with a stranger.
So tell me a little bit more about that.
I think there is always the idea that what you should give to your children is what you wanted.
And so parents tend to compensate for whatever was a problem in their childhood, loving, engaged parents by trying to provide all of what they wish they had had.
But it turns out that their child is someone else and wishes for different things and that giving your child what you wish you had is not necessarily what your child needs.
Yeah. And so this business and it's a, it's kind of a surprise.
I mean, you're handed a newborn and you don't know who the person is and you have to start parenting that day.
It's not like you have six months to get to know them before it becomes official.
So you begin doing it and you're doing all of what you believe in while you're getting to know this child.
And you have to keep readjusting what you're doing as more knowledge comes in.
it's very hard not to be in a relationship with someone who's just steady and consistent and obvious, and whom you know well, and again with children there's so much of that idea of sort of you know a perfect childhood is X.
We almost all before we have kids have this idea of sort of I know what would make a perfect childhood.
But not only have times changed, but it's a different person and so the perfect childhood that I could dream of for myself and the perfect childhood that my children have been in pursuit of don't always coincide, as they themselves would point out if they were here on camera.
Yeah, and I think there's so many layers to this.
Cause if I think about like my own parenting journey with my three kids, I played a lot of sports growing up and I was like, aggressive scrappy soccer player, right?
I mean, I'm really small, that's the way it had to be, right?
But then I think about my kids and their sports and then being like yeah this sports not for me or you know what I don't really like soccer and by the way it's not like when I had kids I was like I need to have soccer playing children and it wasn't even that conscious but I think what was unconscious was some image where I'm on the sidelines, where I'm coaching their team where my daughter wants to practice soccer all the time the way I was so self -driven at soccer and she's the one who was always fighting for the ball and on the ground.
And I think I was surprised, and it was like, I'm a psychologist, I'm aware of feelings, but how much came up for me watching my kids, even, just when we're talking about youth sports, not be me in them.
They weren't just me in them.
And then when I get frustrated, it's like, wait a second.
Does this have anything to do with them?
Is this purely just something that's happening because I had some fantasy of kind of, again, this Becky is reproducing herself in the form of her daughter on the soccer field.
And I think even asking myself that question and being aware of what piece of my experience really is about that fantasy, it was painful, but very helpful in not being kind of as triggered or not saying things that at the end of the night I was like, oh, that felt really bad to say.
Well, I think if one is worked in the field of psychology, as we both have, you've learned to get a lot of perspective on other people.
And that's a very different skill from having a perspective on yourself and your own relationship to your children.
So it's easy to recognize other people's projections.
And I think also, as someone who tried to be a very conscious parent, it isn't that I had an agenda and thought they have to be like this, and I'm going to feel like my ego is destroyed if they don't achieve in this particular way.
It was just assumptions I made of sort of, I think this is kind of fun.
So you will too. And some of the time those turned out to be true.
There are lots of things that we all actually do have in common and that we all do like, and I guess partly that's genetics and partly it's experience, and partly it's just the result of shared affection, but there are other areas where they really don't want to do the things that I really wanted to do.
And there areas to take from what you just said in which I was extremely self motivated and they aren't.
I remember one of them saying to me at one point, you're such a school person.
I'm just not that much of a school person.
And I thought, is that because you're not really a school person?
Or is that because you're making a point of how different from me you can be?
Or is that because you're at the wrong school and over time I've tried to understand what that really means and what that really meant.
And it's been a process to think, you know, I tend to say, well, I mean, I just worry that things aren't gonna work out for you unless dah, dah, dah.
And then I have to think, right, there are many people whose lives work out in completely different ways.
On the other hand, there are places where I can say your life is not going to work out unless dah, dah, dah.
So it's trying to distinguish it.
It's because it's not a sort of, if you had a total stranger who was completely different, you can sort of adapt to that.
It's the fact that your children, they are exactly like you and they're totally different and you frequently can't tell which is which. I think that's right.
Just, I'm just gonna say something that sounds so simple, but it's okay that my kid is different from me.
Those words are so simple.
There's nothing sophisticated about that sentence, but I think it is something we wrestle with and it's in some ways, a surprise.
I think that's so much of what that back paragraph gets at. it's a surprise and at first almost an injury.
Oh, my kid is different from me.
My family all likes to go skiing and my kid doesn't like skiing.
My family all has taken academics seriously and my kid is into something different and sees success in a different way.
And how much do I need to impose my point of view?
And how much if I do that too much does my kid just rebel further?
And I just think these are questions without answers exactly.
But these are the questions.
Right huge questions and they can become very oppressive often through a lack of imagination So I think for example and I've written about it.
I'm gay I feel like my parents had an image of what a good happy life was like that didn't fit into it It wasn't that they hated gay people or that they were anti gay people It wasn't that they were horrible to me and rejecting about it It was just that they didn't really think it would be possible for me to be happy as who I was And it took a long time for me to convince them otherwise, and I felt like the negotiation back and forth was so complicated.
And now I'll look at my own children and they'll say, well, dad, you're really into that, but I'm not.
And I'll think, well, am I, is this an instance where I should say Yeah, but if you learned a little more about it, I'll bet you would love it.
You know, it's really fascinating.
You're really gonna go for this.
Or is it like that thing of being gay where I should just say, okay, you have your own way to be happy?
don't have to be happy my way.
Tell me about your way to be happy and let me figure out how to accept it and be a part of it." Again if it were an extreme it would be easy.
It's the balance that I can't just totally let go and I can't totally dictate.
But when do you let go and when do you kind of dictate and when do you persuade and when do you acknowledge.
It's all so hard to find the the right middle path.
And of course it's different.
I mean I have two kids.
It's different for the two kids.
It's different for every kid.
It's different for every parent.
So you can't just come up with a formula and write it down and say here's how you do it and give it to everyone.
But it is this dance.
Sometimes I think the best it gets with any complicated topic is a dance.
This is a complicated topic.
How do I raise my kids in a way that I have certain values that feel important, how do I impart those, and then how do I make space for the idea that they're gonna have their own values and be different for me, and what of my discomfort is because I'm right and what of my discomfort is just because it's so different and I'm uncomfortable?
I just think for parents listening, nobody has this figured out.
Like, I don't, I don't have this figured out.
You don't have this completely figured out that just being willing to think about it and being willing, I have found in my own parenting journey to just ask myself, like, how much of this is my own stuff and how much of this is my assumption, right?
And if I could just make a little space for exactly what you said, maybe my kid's different way of doing something or a being, they could be happy with.
I'm not responsible for getting them out of X because Y is the only way to be happy.
It just, I think takes the heat down a notch. But the other thing is to make them comfortable enough so that if what's going to make them happy is Y they can communicate that to you so that you can see it as opposed to having them think, ''Gee, I'll bet they really want me to be X', and sort of trying to act it out for a long time when it isn't who they really, pretending that they're interested in, you know, order music or something, if they're not pretending that they're really into sports when they aren't.
I mean, I think we probably agree being kind and decent and generous and open.
They're all these things where it isn't subject to negotiation, that that's a better way to be than being mean and selfish and horrendous in various other ways.
And so in this book, and then I'm so curious about your, the area you're kind of working in now, you could talk about these concepts of vertical identity and horizontal identity.
Can you explain that?
Because I it's such a, in some ways simple but also like beautifully complex framework to help us understand what might be going on between us and our kids.
So for the book, Far From the Tree, what I did was to try to write about kids who are profoundly different from their parents in some way or another.
So I read about kids who were deaf with hearing parents, kids who had autism with schizophrenia, kids who were prodigies, whose parents are also overwhelmed, kids who were criminals whose parents were law -abiding citizens, trans kids, which was a very exotic topic in 2012, though perhaps not today.
And I was trying to look at, how do parents deal with having children who are so different from them?
And what I said is that there are the identities that get passed down generation to generation.
So, you know, your ethnicity is usually passed down, your religion often you'll sort of pass along to your kids.
There are all kinds of things that you'll pass on to the next generation.
Equally there are all kinds of things that are things that are true about your kids and not true about you, and that they therefore learn from a peer group.
So I said the things that are passed down generation to generation, I call them vertical identities, and the things that have to be learned from peers are horizontal identities.
And when I wrote the book I was looking as I say at these extreme circumstances, you know, you're a hearing parent, your child is gonna function largely in sign language, do you learn sign language?
How do you put your child in a signing environment?
How do you remain attached?
All of those questions that come up.
As I've gone on with life, I've come to realize we are all dealing with the fact that our children are in some ways related to us and have our vertical identities and in some ways are wildly different.
And so in a way the book is a guide, how do you look at these extremes and then apply it.
I mean, I hope it's useful, I believe it is to people whose children are extremely different.
Yes. But it's useful even if your child doesn't have a sort of nameable extreme difference like deafness or autism or criminality or any of those things, your child has differences and you are trying to figure out how do you negotiate them and how do you make your child feel comfortable in the world.
I mean, there's so much here.
So, at first, you know, when I think about horizontal and vertical identities, and I, you know, I read your whole book years ago.
Yes. Each case is – there's stuff that's more extreme here that will happen for some families' life, but some families' lives.
But there are so many of these everyday moments, right, where for example, even – I'm an outgoing person, I have a lot of friends.
I'm making And then I have a kid who's always clinging to me at a birthday party.
That is going to register in my body as a parent very differently than if I am also kind of a maybe a hesitant parent and I have that kid.
By the way, if I'm a hesitant parent and I'm kind of always looking around thinking like, what's everyone gonna think of me?
And I wanna get it right.
And then I have a kid who's very brash and kind of out there, that gap, The gaps we have with our kids, they really matter in terms of our ability to show up in the grounded way that's going to feel good for all of us.
Because when we're not paying attention so much of our big response, you're embarrassing me.
Go join the birthday party.
Actually has less to do with my kid clinging to me and more of the story I'm making up in my head.
And probably how distant that feels from how I go about the world day to day.
right? Or if I am very reticent and I have this kid who's kind of very brash, or you know, I it's so funny because I was talking to my friend once at a soccer game where I was saying oh, kind of my kid was a little bit one picking the flowers and her kid was the one like slide tackling and we were having very different experiences.
We were both kind of triggered by the moment where I was looking at her kid being like what an amazing soccer player and she was looking at her kid being like, Oh my goodness, everyone's gonna think you're getting all these fouls and you're so rude to people.
And again, the stories we tell ourselves has so, in some ways, a little to do with what we see in reality, and so much to do with how we are, how we were brought up.
And again, this kind of fantasy of how our kid would be just exactly like us.
Right, yes, and I think there's this question, again, of trying to think forward for a kid in which you think well look, if you don't start off now mixing with these other kids at this birthday party, then you're gonna end up not having friends, you're gonna be one of those lonely people who have been on the cover of every magazine we can find at the moment, you're gonna sort of live a miserable sad life, you're gonna be buried in electronics, it goes on and on and on because there's all that projection forward and you think no, in order to be, you have to sort of be sociable and mix with people.
In the first place, the kid who's clinging to you a birthday party might turn out to be quite sociable in 10 years, while the other one may actually become quite withdrawn.
And just to put a name to it, I call what you just described kind of this fast forward error.
We do as parents, where instead of looking at my three year old clinging to me, I'm looking at my three year old, but with all the anxiety of like 30 years ahead where I see my 33 year old, not having friends and I blame myself for not intervening differently when they were three.
Right. And so then I'm responding today based on kind of 30 years as opposed to, okay, wait, my three -year -old is little, there's a lot of sensory stimulation if I know my kid, I know that they tend to be a little slow to warm up, right?
Because I've kind of lost touch with the kid today and fast forwarded.
And I find myself just being able to say, Becky like, am I doing the fast forward thing?
Like, oh, I'm doing it, helps me come a little bit back to this moment and instead of act out of fear, That's what we're acting out of.
Act out of what's just really happening in front of me.
Like from this book, from your experience as a parent, from all the families you've talked to, what have you seen?
How, when you see your kid different from you, whether it's an identity that's very, very different or it is kind of a, they don't like skiing and we like skiing as a family, what have you seen in families who feel like navigate that well where kids maybe do end up feeling at home in themselves are taking pride in the ways they're different from their parents.
Any patterns you've seen there?
I mean, the most basic parent is reinforcing your kid's confidence, which you do by making sure your kid feels loved.
Remember that the things that make your kid feel loved may not be the same as the things that would have made you feel loved.
I mean, some of them are going to be the same, you know, availability is obviously incredibly important.
Um, listening is I think almost always incredibly important, but there's also just that sense of sort of saying, wow, you're really interested in, you know, this strange thing that I actually find a kind of repugnant, but I will try to learn about it because it, you know, I don't really feel like playing Minecraft is of much interest to me, but I'll try to understand what Minecraft is and why you're so into it, because if it means that much to you, then it means something to me.
You know, going back to the first chapter of your book, I think this other thing that really struck me is you said, though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad how different our children are from us.
And this idea of confidence and pride and identity and differences, I think it is true, when we're adults, we look at our parents and we think, oh, I'm living in a city I grew up on a farm, and you know, where I grew up on a city and now I choose to live in a farm, like we feel really proud of the life decisions we make that are different because to some degree, we say this came from me.
This is me. If I chose to live in a city after growing up on a farm, if I chose to live on a farm after growing up in a city, either way, I'm saying I made that decision.
It's kind of like, I can locate myself.
I know who I am. Right.
And I do think as adults, so much of our confidence doesn't come from doing things the exact same way as our parent.
Our confidence actually comes from these horizontal moments.
And, if I think about it that way for my kid, and I think, okay, my whole family likes skiing, one of my kids hates skiing.
Wait, maybe this isn't an area that he's going to miss out on.
Maybe I don't have to bring him into the fold, maybe even him figuring out how to go on a ski vacation while not liking skiing, cause I'm not changing my whole vacation plan for him either, but maybe there's somewhere in which his difference.
it isn't going to be something I look back on as a parent and think, oh, I did everything wrong.
I didn't bring him in like the rest of us.
This actually is like a seed of his confidence.
Him being different from us is going to be how he feels proud of himself and how he really says, oh, this is who I am.
Then again, my mindset can shift from, oh, I'm doing something wrong or something's wrong with my kid, to, oh, this could be a high impact experience.
Right, where another dad was actually just telling me I was a big baseball player.
I always thought my son would be this big baseball player.
He wants to do the play.
Right, and I think in that moment, again, you almost feel like, did I do something wrong as a dad, because baseball was so good for me.
And oh, wait, maybe my son being in the play is going to be his source of confidence.
Maybe he's going to look back years from now and say, it was actually my doing the play in high school where I really started to find my voice.
and, and then I think it's a little easier as a parent to, to kind of intervene in a way to support your kids kind of exploration rather than feeling like, oh my goodness, I have to kind of bring them back to be a good parent in this moment.
I have a sort of fantasy of someday having this little party at which we're all the same age, my kids, my parents, and me.
And we see how we would all relate to one another because I think we would probably in fact all get along really well.
But it's so difficult to imagine.
I mean, my parents, even my age, which is now 61 and quite advanced, but to sort of, they always just were older.
I can't imagine them as my contemporaries and I can't imagine it with my kids either.
And I think that if I could, especially not as little kids, but as sort of adults of some kind, we'd all be able to, oh, you're kidding, that's what you think?
I've always thought that too, that we discover all of these points of commonality.
It's the fact that we're in such different situations.
That we have this authority over the kids, that we're sort of helping them to figure out who they are while they're rebelling against us some of the time to figure out who they are and clinging to us some of the time to figure out who they are.
It can be a very, very difficult to figure out in addition to the ways they're different fundamentally, the ways they're different just because we're at different stages of life.
And though I have a reasonably I have a lot of memories of my childhood.
But do I really remember what it was like to be 16 or to be six?
And I guess one of the things I just really want parents to know is that surprise, or even a sense of loss, which, you know, can feel like, Oh, my goodness, my kid isn't like me.
Oh, my goodness, my kid is not going to be an athlete.
Or Oh, my kid doesn't have the same obsession with only getting a 98, 99, or 100 on tests that I did.
I actually think that it's important to normalize the very real upset, sad feelings we have. That's okay.
Say, Oh, my kid is not a carbon copy of me.
My kid is not an even better version of me.
My kid is not all my best qualities and none of my worst qualities.
Turns out My kid is their own person.
OK, I'm going to have to reconcile that.
And really reconciling that, I think, involves a lot of saying to yourself, this is different than what I imagined.
This isn't what I expected.
OK. This is hard for me, because I do wish I had a son who played baseball.
You can't take away those feelings.
And then I think that widening of the aperture, of noticing what they're interested, and just allowing yourself to be curious.
In some ways, our kids do help us be a better version of ourselves, but we can learn a lot.
I don't know anything about marine biology.
Like maybe I start to look into that, or this dad had said, I guess I'm gonna be the best stage dad.
I'm just gonna be the best stage dad.
I know how to be a good baseball dad, I don't know that much about being a good stage dad, but we're living in a time where you can learn, I can learn about that.
You can learn about it, and I mean, I have to say, if someone had said to me 20 years ago, how would you like to get to know a lot about England's football leagues.
I would've said I have other things that are doing because it's my son's interest and because of the Marine, because of these interests that they have, I become interested in those things too.
And I think a visual, I think about a lot with a kid at any age is, we do live on these different like planets if we think about that.
And I think, again, a lot of our fantasies are gonna have a kid and they're just gonna kind of be on our planet with us all the time and it's gonna be perfectly aligned.
Turns out they're kind of on their own planet.
And then I think when we see them on their own planet, we have this initial urge of like just come to my planet, come back to my planet.
Like, what are you doing?
You're being difficult.
When you were saying reciprocity, I often think as parents, we have to be the first bridge builder.
I have to build a bridge for my planet, to my kids by being interested, by learning, but then the benefit of that is now there's a bridge and they're usually like a little more willing to walk back over and visit they're not going to stay there and we don't really want them to stay on our planet forever but but if we build that bridge first which your examples were such good ones minecraft like tell me about this maybe i watch my kid play for 10 minutes and ask questions oh what does this mean what are what are those points what is this world oh you're into marine biology look I'm never going to
know everything you know but is there a starter You know, I mean, it's such a gift. I'm thinking as a kid to be interested in something that you know isn't kind of germane to your family, and then people look at you like you're interested in something important enough that they want to be interested in it too.
It makes you feel real, right?
It makes you feel confident, worthy inside, and then of course it's like any other relationship.
Now when my dad says, hey, I found this book really interesting.
Of course, a kid's gonna be a little more likely to say, tell me about it, right?
I mean, I'm interested in your bridge metaphor, which I think is a fantastic one.
I've been doing a lot of research in Brazil and there's a psychoanalyst there who I spent some time with and her son had just gone off to study in the US and she said to me, parents are the docks and children are the boats that come and go from them.
And I love that as an idea of sort of there is a return and there is a going away and your job is to stay steady and in the place where you are and their job is to go and figure out all of these other things that are elsewhere but know that you're there to come back to.
You know, it's funny that makes me think visually about something I really hone in on with parents around the teen years because I think when our kids are younger in that way their boats don't go that far from the dock.
Right? Or sometimes they're in the dock and you're like, can I get a little space here?
Can you go out to the waters and they don't really want to?
But when I think about the teenagers, especially, I do think that kids are explorers.
They are supposed to visit new lands.
You don't learn about new things if you haven't visited.
And so they have to go out, they have to go try the thing and they have to go spend time with the friends.
But I think there's a huge difference between being a nomad and being an explorer.
and the whole difference is whether you have a home base, whether you have a dock.
And I think so many times we take our kids' words too literally, I hate you.
And we're like, fine, I'm going to go to bed and never talk to you.
Our kids aren't really saying, I hate you.
They're saying, I'm trying to figure myself out as a 16 year old.
And then if you are kind of a 16 year old without a dock and you're just kind of exploring it, then you can get kind of far away from what's good for you.
And so we do have to kind of realize our kids need to explore they're not going to get the language right they're not always going to get the tone right they're there for the first time trying to really take their boat away but even if they won't say it they do need they do need to dock back up yeah yes and I was aware I mean my father died three years ago and I was 58 at the time I was aware of how much he had been in a doc and how the disappearance of that doc, even though he was 94 at the time, was a real shift in my life.
And I love being the doc for my children.
I find it deeply rewarding.
It's been a shift to think, okay, I'm the doc, but I'm dockless as it were.
But to be like, I, by now I'm rooted enough in who I am so that I don't feel like a nomad.
Well, look, I can't wait to talk to you again.
I know you're working on something else that we'll explore together, But thank you.
Thank you for this, this work that I know was years ago, but I really do think has really profoundly helped not obviously just families whose kids...
Thank you to this episode's partners, Sitter City and Great Wolf Lodge.
