The Wisdom of the Skinned Knee
It’s an old and durable lesson about parenting: sometimes when your child gets hurt, the best way to help is to laugh it off, using comedy or surprise or nonchalance, rather than to immediately act worried and concerned. Very often, a minor hurt will be quickly forgotten if the parent acts like it’s not a big deal, modeling resilience and the virtues of moving on and, importantly, of distraction. These are exceptionally important tools for being a human being who experiences pain - knowing when and how not to feel it. For their part, parents seem to absorb the wisdom of this approach over time, leading to the classic scenario of a skinned knee on a first child resulting in parent panic and over-the-top comforting, while a skinned knee on a third child has the parents laughing and pointing their kids towards a shiny object. Because they’ve observed that the overwrought concern in the former instance actually causes more distress than the chill of the latter. This is all true of actual physical bumps and scrapes among young children - I’ve seen parents prevent tears with distraction and smiles many times - but of course I also mean this in a broader sense of all manner of painful moments at any age.
The challenge is knowing when a harm is sufficient that outsized emotional reactions are appropriate because this is, of course, a technique and philosophy that has clear limits. Sometimes kids get hurt badly enough that they need a lot of direct and emotional consoling; sometimes they get hurt badly enough that they need actual medical attention. And you can certainly argue that, in decades past, the average parent erred too far in the other direction. Certainly many people have been legitimately scarred by the seeming indifference of their parents. There’s a measured approach to knowing how much sympathy and concern to show someone when they’re hurt and then there’s neglect, which are very different things. We live in a culture that’s the product of the endless pendulum swings of children growing up to be parents and raising their own kids in defiance of how they were raised themselves. This is probably inevitable. But, as I and many others have said, we seem to have moved to a distant extreme with this issue, as explicitly politicized arguments and the intemperate rhetoric of therapeutic culture have established a clear elite attitude: the appropriate time for a parent to minimize dwelling on a harm and to instead model moving on quickly, with a hurt child, is never.
The past half-century or so has seen a correction, which over time has become an overcorrection, to the point that showering children with worry and concern over every harm, and going to absurd lengths to prevent them from experiencing hardship or defeat, has become something like the default approach to parenting among the educated and affluent. Inevitably, a counternarrative arose, with critics insisting that all of this overprotective helicopter parenting and constant pandering to the immediate emotional whims of children actually hurts those children and society. Because everything is broken and stupid, in the 21st century this has boiled itself down to a simplistic and unhelpful “snowflakes” discourse, with both sides happier to prosecute their part of the culture war than to ask what’s really better for kids and for our culture.
Which is what this is really all about, what’s actually helpful to children, and this is what prompts my deepest frustration. There is something about this that relates to our obligations to others, yes, and there are times for “tough love.” But the wisdom of the skinned knee has nothing to do with tough love; the point is not to force kids to be tough, but to best minimize the harm to the child. A parent laughing when a kid falls on their face, so that the kid laughs and quickly moves on, isn’t tough love. It’s not some lesson in being stoic. It’s meant precisely to make that moment as brief and inconsequential as it can be, and parents for generations have learn that technique precisely out of a concern for their kid. Sometimes, a kid’s really hurt and you have to rush over and console them and soothe them and rock them until they’re finished crying. But a sometimes that behavior merely prolongs the pain, makes the hurt a bigger deal than it has to be. And this is what gets to me: the argument for not overdoing every moment of temporary pain and setback in a young person’s life stems first and foremost from the best interests of the child. I asked this in a broader sense about helicopter parenting before - why do so many parents practice a suffocating version of parenting when the harms of that behavior are so obvious for their child? Why has the wisdom in a skinned knee never occurred to the people who believe that they’d do anything at all for their parents? Because it seems like the one thing they’re unwilling to do for their kids is to chill out and do less.
And now that’s where we live culturally, with a dogged belief that the best way to overcome pain is to always, always respond to it maximally, to freak out over it as a matter of policy, for adults to inculcate in children the assumption that all harms are best treated as threatening and permanently scarring. It seems like a profound mistake to me. Not because I think we need to be hard on our kids in some abstract sense, although sometimes I do, but because the parents who minimize the pain of a minor harm by laughing it off and pulling the kid’s attention somewhere else know what they’re doing, and to me that approach often looks like a profoundly humane kind of magic.
The underlying ideology of this piece about the Inside Out movies and child psychology is, honestly, about as directly opposed to my basic philosophical beliefs that I can imagine. It’s a nakedly celebratory piece about the rise of therapeutic maximalism. Leveraging a series of overrated and facile children’s movies, the essay insists that we should all live like busy little emotional actuaries, wrangling the inchoate and bestial elements of our deepest selves into a spreadsheet that we can calmly manipulate at our leisure. With the usual subtle bullying that attends this sort of thing, this petite bourgeois hijacking of psychiatric medicine, writer Melena Ryzik describes how many educational and psychiatric professionals have offloaded the work of addressing our inherently dark and defiantly irrational emotional lives onto a consumer product marketed by the Disney conglomerate. We live like this now, with this insistent demand that social progress requires the colonization of the entirety of the human project by therapy culture; we stumble around emotionally under the assumption that a healthy life must entail living within this bizarre and New Agey quasi-medical place, all the time. Because Instagram tells us to. There is no qualification or limitation or critique in the piece. The Times will showcase an argument asserting that water is wet but still insist on a “to be sure” paragraph, but apparently the professional-managerial approach to emotional health is sacrosanct. Please see my recent point on how ideology really works.
I could dissect the whole thing, but I’ll spare you. I just want to pull out this one quote. Says a woman who works at a junior high school, “Almost every day there’s a student who’s struggling or having a panic attack.” So, quick question here: why are so many junior high school students having panic attacks? And why is the reader so clearly meant to nod along to that little aside as if it’s how the world has always been? Will I be jailed for my crimes if I suggest that usually kids don’t have panic attacks, they have tantrums?
You know the litany by now. Efforts to destigmatize mental illnesses have gone so far as to normalize them, which is something very different; it’s common to observe this normalization becoming out-and-out celebration, the relentless romanticization of insanity that leaves complete strangers feeling empowered to tell me that my psychotic disorder is my “superpower.” Helicopter parents, ever eager to generate excuses for their increasingly aggressive and self-interested behavior, wrestle social concerns about disability into yet-more fodder for their ambition; the rhetoric of disability activism helps them insist that justice demands that their precious little progeny be given everything they’ve ever wanted. A giant cadre of online profiteers has every financial incentive to convince gullible people that there is no difficulty or disappointment in human life that is not a reflection of psychiatric pathology. Their audiences are desperate for definition, are unwilling to run the risk of simply being themselves, and so look to buy a diagnosis - and thus a self - off the shelf. And all of this is backstopped, especially with kids, with the threat of lawsuit. Which public school teacher today feels remotely empowered to say that not all of a kid’s problems are medical issues? And how many parents have the integrity to say, sometimes when my kid acts bad or performs poorly, it’s their own fault?
Lurking in the back is the wisdom of a skinned knee: that human beings don’t, actually, always heal best by fixating endless on their pains; that reacting to a child getting hurt with as much emotion and panic isn’t, actually, always the the best thing for that child; that even our literal mental illness and developmental disorders are not, actually, always best treated by draping them with more and more therapeutic vocabulary and self-help dross. Sometimes, you get hurt bad and you need the people around you to notice and react and really take that seriously, to help you stop the world long enough so that you can heal the way you need to. Sometimes, what’s best is to put it behind you and move on as quickly as you can. That’s not the same as saying that people just need to be tough and gut things out, though sometimes people do need to be tough and gut things out. It’s a reflection of the fact that we are complex emotional beings who operate on an animal level as well as a rational one, and the clinical terms and self-help techniques of modern therapy are not always the right tools to address the many ways we hurt. The question is whether any other approach, especially the approach based on resilience and moving on, can survive in a world where therapy has become the privileged idiom of the people who run the world.