A GOOD ENOUGH PARENT
A Book on Child-rearing
Bruno Bettelheim
New York: Knopf, 1987
416 pp., $18.95
What should I do when my child has a temper tantrum? Breaks a vase? Refuses to go to school? Hits his sister? Wants to play with guns? Lies? Steals? Although Bruno Bettelheim says he is not in the business of giving advice--in fact, mistrusts child-rearing advice on principle--he succeeds admirably in answering such questions, while at the same time fulfilling his promise to give readers something that will obviate the need for advice: namely an approach to child rearing, a way of handling these and the "millions of [other] problems" parents are likely to encounter every day in raising their children.
Bruno Bettelheim's knowledge of children and what they require to grow and prosper comes from a different source than that of Freud, whom Bettelheim admires. Freud treated no children directly (although he counseled the father of the famous Little Hans, who had a horse phobia), and his theories of child development came from reconstructions of the early life of adult neurotic patients. By contrast Bettelheim, now eighty-four, accumulated two generations of intensive child observation at the famous Chicago Orthogenic School. There, for decades he treated autistic and other severely emotionally disturbed children. Considering that his knowledge of children (like Freud's), while based on experience, comes from abnormal patients, what is it that makes Bettelheim so convincing when he talks about normal children? How could he have gleaned so much from his vicarious immersion in the lives of emotionally ill children? A long life spent validating or disproving psychological hypotheses, becoming a parent himself, being able (like Freud) to make use to his own childhood memories, and a rare courage and resilience that allowed him to acquire wisdom from even the most terrible adversity (e.g., captivity in a Nazi concentration camp) may partly account for his clinical brilliance. His latest book, A Good Enough Parent, is the culmination of a lifetime of experience and learning.
Bettelheim defines the goal of successful child rearing as the raising of a person with high self-esteem, inner security, a capacity for intimate relationships, and the ability to engage in satisfying work; someone "who may not necessarily become a success in the eyes of the world, but … who would be well pleased with the way he was raised, and … is satisfied with himself, despite the shortcomings to which all of us are prey."
The Goethe family dishes
The approach to child rearing that is most appropriate to securing these goals is for Bettelheim well exemplified in a story taken from Goethe's autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit. The incident that Bettelheim retells with almost as much relish as Goethe himself is one in which the four-year old Johann threw a set of his mother's dishes out of a second-story window of his house--to the delight and applause of some adult neighbors watching him from across the street. Of course, his family put a stop to this when they came home, but they did not punish him. This story became a family favorite, told and retold, and gave Goethe a flush of pleasure when he recalled it many years
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