Should we treat babies more like adults? Ariel Levy explores a parenting philosophy that she equates to “a kind of weirdly loving libertarianism.”
In the nineteen-thirties in Budapest, a young mother struggled. “I was amazed at how difficult it was to be a parent. I was angry,” Magda Gerber wrote later. “I thought I was the only one who didn’t know what to do with babies and somehow in my education someone had forgotten to tell me.” Then, one day, she watched in astonishment as a pediatrician treated her four-year-old daughter. The doctor, a Viennese Jew named Emmi Pikler, did something unheard of: she listened to her patient.
Her mother and father looked on in concern. “You can tell I’m a hoverer,” the mom said, to general sympathy. Many of the adults were struggling against the urge to parent like helicopters or, worse, bulldozers . Lansbury and Gerber urge people instead to be a “stable base” that children leave and return to—an idea that many modern parents find intensely difficult to apply.“Usually, if they can get there, they can get down from there,” Lansbury told him.
In the back yard, a mom told Lansbury that her two-year-old throws tantrums every time he’s told no, bonking his head against the floor. Lansbury looked at the tiny culprit. “Sometimes you go down on the ground because you don’t like it when someone says no?” she asked. Turning to his mother, she suggested putting a blanket under his head, so he wouldn’t hurt himself. “He’s got a right to object,” she continued.
“The rise of parenting is a lot like what happened to food,” the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik writes. People used to raise kids the way they made kugel or meatballs: in accordance with the traditions of their culture, picking and choosing from the slight variations they observed among their cousins, grandmothers, aunts, and uncles. “What was once a matter of experience has become a matter of expertise,” Gopnik continues.
Lansbury’s style is inclusive; her podcast’s tagline is “We can do this.” But, as much as we crave expert guidance, many of us still resent any intimation that what we’re doing with our kids is wrong. “Janet is the Martha Stewart of the millennials—she’s ubiquitous, I can’t get away from her,” Tori Barnes, a thirty-four-year-old mother of three in a Denver suburb, told me. “When I was in middle school, my mom loved Martha—watched her on the Home Garden Network all the time, read all her books.
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