Psychology Today Blogs - Brainstorm

Imperfect Love

Hara Estroff Marano — Fri, 16 May 2008 11:11:48 -0700

I've learned a lot about love by losing it. Most recently, my mother died, midway into her ninety-eighth year. She died with all her marbles and a sharper memory than most 40-year-olds. Fortunately for her, death came swiftly. One day in February she got the flu; the next day her tired little heart gave out. As a mother, she was, as my older brother once said to me and my twin sister, "a big zero." She really wasn't a mother at all. I have no warm fuzzy memories of her; no one does. She was, I came to see as an adult, totally estranged from herself and, quite possibly, chronically depressed. I doubt she ever had a heart-to-heart talk with anyone (even my father). She filled up her mind with trivia, which powered a bottomless, sometimes infuriating, stream of small talk. It was impossible to engage her at any other level. And yet, against even my own best guess, I am bereft. What I miss most of all are our near-daily conversations that were about... nothing, virtually nothing at all.

I never cried for my mother

I long ago gave up wanting a mother. I was about 10-I can remember exactly where I was when I had the epiphany-when it struck me that I was never going to get any real caring from my mother. It was my secret alone; after all, it was heretical to even imagine that the flesh-and-blood woman inhabiting our house in no way resembled that mythical figure called Mother warming every other house I knew. I was undaunted, perhaps because we three kids were very high-spirited, good company, and had many friends, but most of all because I knew I was adored by my best friend's parents, some relatives and family friends. At the same time, I was also learning to trust my own dangerous thoughts.

Becoming the mother I never had

Somewhere in our pre-teens, my sister and I shared the secret of motherlessness. We prayed that our mother would get a job and go to work so we wouldn't have to constantly confront the anomaly of an un-mother. And so for me, becoming a mother was scary-I had absolutely nothing to go on, no idea how to be a mother. And then one difficult day, when my firstborn was barely three months old and very sick, my mother gave me a spectacular gift; she confided what torture children put parents through. She assumed she was commiserating, but her ill-will was so striking it ripped open in me a huge reservoir of love and empathy for my son that became my instruction manual. I became the mother I never had.

A shrunken world

After my father died, about 18 years ago, I began calling my mother daily. She was scared. She had panic attacks. I felt sorry for her. I sometimes rushed out of the office and up to the suburbs to calm her. My husband and I often took her with us on hiking day trips. After hip replacement surgery at 86, her hiking days were over and her world got a lot smaller. Friends and acquaintances died, and it shrank even more. I endured long tedious summer weekends of conversational minutiae in beautiful settings just to give her a change of scenery.

Calculated calls

In the last few years, I took to calling her evenings after I left work, as I was walking to the subway or in a cab going home. Save your applause, please; my little filial act was carefully calculated. I knew the calls would be time-limited by my need to go underground or give a cab driver directions to my house. Sometime in the last year, my mother began ending the calls with "I love you." At first, it sounded tentative, like a question. It took her 97 years to utter those words. I couldn't say them back. I didn't make a big deal about it. I just let the opportunity slip.

Ashes to ashes...

And then she died. At a Jewish burial, even in snowy February, you pick up dirt with your bare hands and toss it on the lowered coffin. You literally grasp the finality of death. It shreds the hardest heart. The timelessness of this ancient ritual lifts some of the burden of sadness off an individual shoulders and merges it with all the losses that have ever been, and it connects you deeply with the endless cycle of life and death. But it is still plenty sad. I threw an extra handful of dirt, just to say a final, private good-bye. And then, I thought, that was it. After all, it had been decades since I'd lost my mother.

Mindless moments

But over the past few weeks, as my third book was published and there were tiny triumphs to be marked and little worries to be noted, I felt a sadness creep over me. I leave the office and I reach for my cell phone and then have to correct myself. It isn't just that old habits die hard. The minute fluctuations of experience-the mindless moments of daily life, psychologist John Gottman once called them, noting they were a powerful kind of relationship glue-those are the things I shared with my mother. They were things too small to warrant dialing my far-flung friends. They were all that connected my mother and me. And now that's gone.

Not the way we want it

Love-it doesn't always come the way we want it, or need it. I am grateful I got to take the little there was. It was all my mother could scrape together. I had no idea how much I'd miss it.

The Greatest Magic Trick Ever, Part II: The Great Selfini

Matthew Hutson — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:31:46 -0700

In a recent post I argued that free will is an illusion. Even if I convinced you, why does the illusion still work?

First, I have to admit I'm not the only one to frame the illusion of free will as a magic trick. In working on my feature about magical thinking, I used a paper titled "Everyday Magical Powers: The Role of Apparent Mental Causation in the Overestimation of Personal Influence" [pdf] co-authored by Daniel Wegner, who is also the author of the 2002 book The Illusion of Conscious Will. The paper brings together research on three related areas: apparent mental causation, the illusion of control, and the introspection illusion. People believe A causes B if A happened before B, A is consistent with B, and there's no other obvious cause of B. Further, A is especially salient if A is one of your own thoughts or intentions. And people like believing A controls B if they themselves happen to be A, because we're happier when we're in control of things. So the experimenters convinced subjects that the subjects used their own thoughts to place voodoo hexes on people or affect the outcome of the Super Bowl. (Where A = prayer and B = TD!) Just another day in the lab.

With Wegner dabbling in the area of magical thinking, I saw where he was going, and sure enough, he followed through (though I take no responsibility.) In the just-published book Are We Free?, Wegner contributed a chapter titled "Self is Magic" [pdf], in which he writes:

Our actions are an astonishing realm of events that bend to our desires when so much of the world does not. Perhaps this is why each person views self with awe--The Great Selfini amazes and delights! We are enchanted by the operation of our minds and bodies into believing that we are "uncaused causes," the origins of our own behavior.

Aha, The Great Selfini. He's so great that we're still fooled by his tricks even after peeking behind the curtain. Usually explanations are deadly to perceptions of magic. Experiments show they can even drain some of the power out of perceptions of evil (to understand is to forgive) and feelings of love (let me count the ways... is that all there are?) But free will is different.

"I'm a case in point," Wegner writes. "I've devoted years of my life to the study of conscious will... If the illusion could be dispelled by explanation, I should be some kind of robot by now..." One potential reason for its persistence is that we place more weight on consistency between cause and effect (say, between intention and pursuant action) than on the exclusivity of the potential cause (something else may have caused the action but screw that.) There's also great personal and social value in assuming responsibility for our behavior.

In another article in the April issue of PT ("Giving Up the Ghost") I ask what would happen if we gave up on the ghost in the machine. "Would society fall apart? Would we lose motivation, abandon morality, and dance like robots?" (Wegner makes the same joke in his chapter: "Yes it’s true, when I'm on the dance floor I may look a bit robotic to some..." Great minds, or low-hanging fruit?) I cover the recent study [pdf] by Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler showing that when people read an essay saying free will is an illusion they're more likely to cheat. But Wegner and I both temper our concern for the safety of society with the realization that the illusion is here to stay. For example, in my article I mention work by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols [pdf] on the emotional appeal of moral attribution. (Even in a deterministic universe, we want to hate the guy who torches his house and family to run off with the secretary.)

I don't mention the other reason I've been saying for years that belief in free will is necessary and unavoidable: Without it, we would go crazy. Try giving it up. I will decide not to believe in free will. Wait, how did I just decide that? Crap, how did I decide to ask that? Oh no, how did I just ask THAT? Etc. Short circuit, dance party over.

(But not for this guy:)

Read This Post for Good Luck. Seriously.

Matthew Hutson — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:50:57 -0700

The fact that you're reading this may say something about your superstition (or about your friends; see below.)

By viewing the picture on the right, you will receive good luck... but only if you send a link to this post to 20 people (or link to it from your own website.) Otherwise, bad things will happen. I'm so sorry to have ambushed you like this. I'm only passing along what was given to me. Actually, what I received was an email, with that image accompanied by the following information:

The President of Argentina received this picture and called it 'junk mail', 8 days later his son died. A man received this picture and immediately sent out copies...his surprise was winning the lottery. Alberto Martinez received this picture, gave it to his secretary to make copies but they forgot to distribute: she lost her job and he lost his family. This picture is miraculous and sacred, don't forget to forward this within 13 days to at least 20 people, ignoring the one who has mailed you. Do Not Forget to forward and you will receive a huge surprise!!

My friend appended the missive with "Don't want to tempt fate...sorry."

Judging by the "sorry," she knew she was doing something many people would find annoying but felt compelled to do it anyway. But should people really be upset at her? Any more than if she had sent out a random piece of spam that wasted 10 seconds of our lives? It's a weird situation, because if we are upset, we want to blame her, but we should really blame ourselves. She's not forcing my hand and making me spam 20 of my friends. Neither is she forcing me to stress out about NOT spamming 20 of my friends. If I were to be upset I should really be upset at my own silly superstitious suspicions.

Or not. I'm programmed to be superstitious. (See my recent article on magical thinking.) People have evolved to do things that don't make much sense JUST IN CASE they work, as long as the cost of doing them (crossing our fingers, spamming our friends) is much smaller than the potential upside (avoiding death, receiving a huge surprise!!). So I can't be too angry at myself. And I'm allowed to be a little angry at my friend for selfishly putting a burden on 20 other people instead of bearing it herself. She's like a potentially infected zombie who breaks out of the quarantine zone to put a whole new population at risk.

Now, if you're mad at me, you've got good company in the Yankees fans who want the head of Gino Castignoli, the construction worker who buried a David Ortiz Red Sox jersey in the cement of the new Yankee Stadium, "forcing" other workers to jackhammer it out when he spread word of his deed. The Yankees even approached the DA about legal action against Castignoli, who retained his own attorney. Here's the thing. If he'd left a random shirt in there, no one would have cared: There's no compromise to the structural integrity of the building. He didn't force anyone to do any extra work, or to feel cursed for leaving the jersey in place. So can he actually be charged purely on the basis of other people's superstitions? Is there legal precedent?

In one sense, that's totally crazy. Separation of church and state, etc. But then, let's view it in the context of hate speech, which is illegal in many countries. If I call you a bad name, I'm not forcing you to be hurt. I'm not throwing sticks and stones. Speech is just arbitrary words that humans attach meaning to. But it's hard, or impossible, to avoid reacting negatively. In some ways, hate speech has all the power of a magical spell. Additionally, courts often use judicial alchemy to convert emotional damages into monetary settlements, and what is breaking the heart of an innocent (if misguided--GO SOX!) young Yankees fan if not emotionally damaging?

So hate me all you want. I've now hexed you AND wasted several minutes of your life. Just don't forget about poor Alberto Martinez and his secretary, and, for your own good, forward this post.

Death by Hovering

Hara Estroff Marano — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 07:50:13 -0700

Death by hovering is not how the coroner's report will list it. But the murder of a student at Indiana University-Purdue, the first act of violence in the 40-year history of the Fort Wayne campus, may well be the first documented case of death from helicopter parenting.

According to police reports, 22-year-old Liette Martinez was found stabbed to death in her dorm suite on April 18. The leading suspect, now in police custody, is Tina Loraine Morris, the mother of one of her two roommates. The mother had taken up residence—illegally—in the dorm for two weeks before the slaying. According to court documents, she was unhappy about something Miss Martinez had said to her daughter the night before and "confronted" her.

“I’m afraid this may be the ultimate and tragic result of hovering,” the VP of Student Affairs at another university wrote me, in bringing my attention to the report, which I had already seen, in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education.

Stories of helicopter parenting are rampant. A father books a hotel room on campus for a month while his son changes majors. A mother protests a student’s grade on a paper; it turns out that she wrote it. Parents and students exchange multiple cell phone calls each day, some initiated by students, at least as many initiated by their parents. Every little flicker of experience is reported. Students don’t get to sit with and manage their own emotions. And parents put themselves on the receiving end of a steady stream of unfiltered, undigested negative experience from their precious child.

“It raises questions about emancipation,” observes Richard Ling, a research scientist at the University of Michigan and a leading expert on cellphones. He believes that cellphones strengthen already existing ties to friends and family, but, because they limit interactions with outsiders, could narrow a user’s understanding of the world. They are forces of conservatism and deepen the status quo. Another scientist, Switzerland’s Hans Geser, calls them forces of “regressive social insulation.”

Whenever college administrators get together, tales of the latest outrage in helicopter parenting abound. But usually the reaction is little more than a roll of the eyeballs. Maybe it’s time to understand that there is a lot more that goes on in helicopter parenting and a real social transformation taking place here.

Let’s start with trust, that fragile interpersonal link that turns out to be the bedrock of a civil society. As I discuss in my just-published book, A Nation of Wimps, The High Cost of Invasive Parenting, constant monitoring of grown children’s experience undermines the belief in and what should be growing reliance on the competence of the young one. Trust entails expectation, a small leap of faith, a prediction about how someone will behave. And since it is future-oriented, it is predicated on optimism.

Hovering is not trust. It is cynicism embodied. It is antithetical to the development of autonomy—excuse me, but isn't that still the goal of childrearing?. And it threatens the character and strength of the next generation.

It’s time for parents to back off and, at a minimum, let the kids settle their own roommate hassles.

The Greatest Magic Trick Ever, Part I

Matthew Hutson — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:40:26 -0700

There's one magic trick we are fooled by consistently, every day. It's so convincing that most people don't even believe it's a trick, and even those who do are STILL fooled by it. What is it?

It's the illusion of free will.

Yes, free will is an illusion. But wait, every time you consciously decide to lift your arm, it happens. And you can also choose not to lift your arm, and it doesn't happen. That's evidence of real control over your behavior, right? Well, not exactly. Evidence suggest that your brain makes these kinds of decisions without you ("you" being your consciousness), and then informs you of it later. You're just along for the ride, pretending that you're calling the shots.

The first startling evidence of this phenomenon came in the 1980s when Benjamin Libet asked people to press a button at a time of their choosing, and to note the exact moment they chose to press it. Meanwhile measurements of electrical activity in their brains indicated that their brains actually set their fingers in motion a full third to half a second before the subjects had any conscious awareness of what they were about to do. More recent fMRI work published last week in Nature Neuroscience shows that the brain makes up its mind whether to press a button with the left or right hand up to 7 seconds before you're aware of your decision. The machine knows what you're doing before you do.

(About 7 years ago I wrote a treatment for a movie screenplay that incorporated this concept. My Matrix-like fighting skills were based not on incredible reflexes but on anticipation. Through some fuzzy quantum entanglement scheme I could consciously read my adversaries' neural activity before they could and would, say, put my arm up to block a punch before it was even thrown. The movie was to be called Godspeed.)

If you think about it, the idea that your thoughts can lift your arm is just as crazy as telekinesis, the idea that your thoughts than lift that lamp over there. Oh, but your brain is physically connected to your arm through nerves. Sorry, that doesn't explain much. Neurons are made of matter too, so what translates the nonphysical mindstuff of your psyche to the physical substance of your neurons? How is such causality from one realm to another ultimately implemented? It's still mind over matter, pure magic.

In one sense, the idea that mind can causally influence matter is no crazier than the idea that matter gives rise to mind, and there is good evidence for the latter. That is, I am not denying the existence of consciousness--really, it's the only thing in the supposed universe for which I personally have any direct evidence at all--and of course doing stuff to the brain does stuff to the mind. But, while we can't fully exclude the possibility that mind affects matter--that, say, we have free will and can control our behavior with it--no research has ever provided even a shred of evidence to prove it.

In my next post I'll tell you why you still believe.

UPDATE: Here it is. I already know that you will click on it.

Is Psychology Today as bad as Maxim?

Matthew Hutson — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:12:39 -0700

Lad mag Maxim is more of a guilty pleasure than a go-to on what's what, but they still raised a kerfuffle recently when they ran a review of an album they couldn't possibly have listened to. And it's a perfect specimen of BS in journalism.

But wait, have I committed the same sin? In the current issue of Psychology Today I profile Teller, the silent half of magician duo Penn & Teller. He co-directed a production of Macbeth full of gags and gore, and I wrote that it was "humorous and horrifying"--without having seen it.

Ah, but I have three excuses.

First, French literature professor Pierre Bayard argues in his cute and thoughtful volume How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read that "criticism attains its ideal form when it no longer has any relation with a work" (p.175--yes, I read the book, mostly.) The idea is that criticism is an art in itself that should use a work merely as a launching point to go on to talk about oneself: "what is essential is to speak about ourselves and not about books, or to speak about ourselves by way of books." If we are fully pulled into the world of another artist, we lose touch with our own. Ok, it's a provocative sentiment but not fully convincing. Much of How to Talk is about using whatever scraps of knowledge about a book, its author, its genre, etc. from, say, listening to conversations about it, and creating your own version of that book in your head by filling in the blanks. Here, I pictured the Macbeth production after reading about it and asking Teller about it. For example, he told me, "We really are going for some genuine scares. Our Weird Sisters are going to be the most frightening that have ever trodden the board, and probably the funniest." "Humorous and horrifying" didn't seem off-base. Similarly, you might expect that the Black Crowes review in Maxim was pretty well-reasoned based purely on previous albums. "Boozy, competent"? Sure, I'll buy that. (Not literally.)

Second--and here's where Maxim and I start to diverge--my description was not in a magazine's reviews section. As sociologist Harry Collins told me, "BS is when you get a difference in people's expectations of what the appropriate warrant is for making a claim." Most people would agree that to achieve warrant to give an album some number of stars one must listen to it; the Maxim editors had a different idea. On the other hard, few readers would feel betrayed to learn that I had not based my two words on the viewing of the actual play.

Finally, and most importantly, I actually did see the production. After writing those words I made sure to go see it in New Jersey with enough time to revise them before they hit the newsstands. And no, there was no reason to stop the presses.

Sports: Checking Not Whacking

Lybi Ma — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:20:48 -0700

It's lacrosse season. My teenage son is certainly gung ho about it, schlepping his equipment to and from the field by foot and never missing practice. I tell myself that exercise and fresh air are essential to a growing boy.

But have you ever suffered through a game? I'm really not a wimp, but this is nothing short of badass hockey. Each player carries a stick with a small net at the end, and the ball is passed from net to net. (I hope no lacrosse enthusiasts ever read this because I still do not know the rules and I still do not know the difference between passing and feeding.)

Now here's why I have to cover my eyes for most of the game: players freely whack each other with their sticks. I asked my son why he's allowed to thump an opponent so freely?

"We're checking," he says.

"Checking what?" I asked.

His expression recorded something akin to: Mom, you are so retarded.

Apparently, checking looks a lot like whacking, but players are allowed to do so in the attempt to thwart a pass and so on. That's fine. It's nice to know that this type of violent action is all above board.

So when I read that sports injuries among children have increased eight-fold in the past decade, no doubt a lot was happening on the playing field besides "checking." In fact, kids are showing up in emergency rooms with injuries more often seen in adult athletes.

According to one recent study, knee injuries among children are increasing in frightening numbers. And the bones of an adolescent athlete are so immature that a knee injury can alter a child's growth plates and lead to permanent damage.

And what about the fact that concussive injuries total some 2 million a year among children. Is it all worth it? Some parents will stand by their pint-sized athletes at ever younger ages. Why? That coveted athletic resume is a great ticket to the nation's top colleges.

PT editor at large Hara Estroff Marano has a lot to say on this topic. Her new book, A Nation of Wimps, The High Cost of Invasive Parenting lays it all out there.

Anyway, I won't try to discourage my child from playing. But I wasn't at all disappointed that he didn't make the elite team. Besides, some of those kids look like they can eat a shoulder of beef in one sitting, and I like my kid's knees the way they are...intact.

Welcome to a Nation of Wimps

Hara Estroff Marano — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:30:53 -0700

Today is a much-anticipated day. Not just for every American taxpayer, including me, for whom the annual bill is due. April 15 has long been on my calendar for an entirely different reason: it marks the date of publication of my newest book, A Nation of Wimps, The High Cost of Invasive Parenting, which was stimulated by an article I wrote for Psychology Today. The book examines the culture of overparenting that now prevails among the middle class and above, and it looks deeply at its causes. But I wrote the book because I'm especially concerned about the consequences, which have major implications for all of us.

Way out of balance

Parents, like lovers, must always negotiate a fine line between nurturing and controlling. But in the past decade, they've stepped way over the line into controlling. They find a million ways to justify it: They're worried about their kids' success, or their safety. We love our kids. We want them to succeed in life. We know that the world has changed on our watch. None of us knows what the world is going to look like in 10 years. We're worried that our kids somehow will be left behind, that they won't achieve our standard of living.

Tots as trophies

So we push them to achieve. In school. On the soccer field. We schedule their days. We try to cram everything in that might give them a shot at a brand-name education, because we think that's the best guarantee of success. We take away free play and recess. We create a hothouse and we hover over them. We clear the path for them and clean up in their wake. If they leave a book or a paper at home, we run it over to school for them. If a kid gets a grade that disappoints, we don't ask, what do you think you need to do as well as you want? We call the school to get the grade changed. We write their essays. And from their achievements we take our meaning and our status, subverting their developmental needs to our own psychological needs. Sometimes it's because our own adult relationships are less than satisfying.

Crisis on the campus

But once they leave the protective cocoon of home for college, kids are breaking down psychologically in record numbers. Depression, anxiety disorders, panic attacks. Eating disorders, which are really disorders of perfectionism. Self-mutilation. This isn't hypothetical. Six years ago I broke the story of the "crisis on the campus." How colleges were reeling from the number of kids who were developing serious psychological problems. In 2004 I found that things had only gotten worse. More kids suffering, more severe problems. And it's worse now. I began asking why. The answer was an article in Psychology Today called A Nation of Wimps. It hit a nerve. The article wound up being the starting point of the book.

Anxiety unleashed

The question we need to ponder is, why is it that those who mean only the best for their kids wind up bringing out the worst in them? I think anxiety has accompanied parenting from the very beginning. The difference is, now parents feel free to transmit their anxieties to their kids. Of course, parents are not exclusively to blame for overinvolvement in children's lives. Schools have ushered them right through the front door, asking them to oversee basic activities like homework that kids should be managing on their own.

An absence of coping skills

But parental scrutiny combined with parental anxiety only creates fragility in the kids. Hyperinvolvement is always counterproductive. To double the whammy, the kids have never been allowed to develop coping skills, because all the lumps and bumps are being taken out of life for them. They never have had to figure their own way through any little challenges of life. They hit a minor impediment and they feel overwhelmed. They have never had to learn to solve problems. And because their parents hover and clear the path and take over tasks, they figure "there must really be something wrong with me."

Kids too compliant

Our kids have been on this track from infancy with no known way to get off, and so not only are they psychologically fragile, they grow up overly compliant. Debate and dissent are not even part of their classrooms. They can't tolerate uncertainty, despite the uncertain world that we live in. They don't want to take risks and they don't know how to problem-solve. How do you sustain an economy without risk-taking innovators? How do you have a democracy without a tolerance for lively debate?

So it's time to back off and give kids a chance to develop their own passions and display their own competencies. We need to let them play and to mess up. And we have to stop acting like everything will matter on their permanent life resume. I could have filled the book with eyeball-rolling anecdotes of the ways parents are keeping their kids from learning how to function-like the couple who bought a roll of bubble wrap and lined their hotel room with it to protect their toddler daughter. But instead, I decided to devote a chapter to all the things that parents can do to help their kids without sacrificing anyone's sanity. I'm hoping the book starts a national conversation about how we're raising our kids. We're overdue.

If you wish to buy the book, you can click right here on the title A Nation of Wimps, The High Cost of Invasive Parenting.

Being and Nothingness

Jay Dixit — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:15:26 -0700

There are two kinds of vacations: the kind where you’re trying to actually do something—explore a foreign country, see the sights, climb the mountain, learn to scuba dive/ski/blow glass, and the kind where you do nothing at all—you lie out on a beach, read the paper by the pool, or simply slowly decompose in front of the TV. In the movie Office Space, when asked what he would do if he had a million dollars, the antihero replies, “Nothing. I would relax, I would sit on my ass all day… I would do nothing.”

When I was a freelancer, and I spent my days alone at home typing on my computer, and the only deadlines I had were the ones I volunteered for, the idea of a passive vegetative vacation seemed utterly pointless. I longed to do things, active things, to have adventures and rack up new experiences. I had on my side psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who finds that although most people spend their leisure time doing “unstructured activities,” they are more likely to achieve that state of blissful engagement he terms “flow” when they’re working on a task with a clear goal.

I still tend in that direction—in 2006 I went to Mexico twice, to California three times, to Hong Kong, and to Thailand, and in 2007, I went to India, where I visited my family and went on a tiger safari, and learned to scuba dive in the Turks and Caicos Islands. But now that I spend my days working in an office, with a snarling three-train commute bookending my days, I’m much more sympathetic to people who think the point of a vacation is to pass out on a beach. I tend to work late and spending most evenings at parties or events. I wouldn’t have it any other way—I love my job and I love the social life I could only have in New York City. But I very rarely have a moment where I’m doing nothing, and after a stressful close, the thought of just vegging out in front of the TV holds a delirious appeal.

On tiger safari in Kanha National Park, the setting for Kipling's The Jungle Book

And indeed, when my vacations take me home to my family in Canada rather than to some exotic foreign locale, I find myself doing just that. Nothing gives me a greater sense of being free and unburdened than staying up into the wee hours of the morning watching old movies on TV. That’s it—that’s my fantasy. And that’s exactly what I do when I’m home. My mom kisses me goodnight and eventually my brother turns in too, and then it’s just me happily biodegrading on the couch. My mind is turning to slime and it never felt so good.

I do this too whenever I go to another city and stay in a hotel. I’m mesmerized by the TV. I go to my friends’ weddings in other cities and offer to give toasts, but I always show up bleary-eyed because I’ve stayed up late the previous night watching HBO.

Maybe it’s because it symbolizes an easier existence. I’m a striver, and if I have a free moment alone in my ordinary life in New York, I try to spend it productively, doing work, reading a book that will improve me, or catching up on my correspondence. Maybe it’s because it brings me back to those weekends during high school, having sleepovers with my friends, ordering pizza, staying up watching reruns of the old Star Trek.

That’s my fantasy—to give up ambition. I imagine with envy the people who work from 9 to 5, who, when they’re done working, they’re done—no staying up late writing a journal. There are only sixpacks and Monday Night Football, or bottles of port and French movies. Forget moving to a country house, if I ever bow out of the rat race, all I’ll need is a couch, a TV, and a Netflix account.

No Single Solution?

Hara Estroff Marano — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:18:54 -0700

Last night I got a phone call from one of my two sons. "Today I got a phone call with information that was both great news and bad," he said. I could hear him wanting to air a dilemma with me. I'm close to both of my boys and their wives, and they both have very young children. My Los Angeles son called to tell me what turns out to be every young parent's dream. He and his wife had just been offered a very coveted slot in his company's highly reputable and very convenient childcare program.

The dilemma

Quality childcare-it's what every parents wants for a child and it's in such short supply, especially in the nation's major cities. We are very sensitized to the issue here in New York City, where machinations by an executive to win a coveted slot in a highly rated preschool nearly brought down Citigroup a few years ago. But now, on another coast, there was a full-time opening for my son's son. An occasion for rejoicing, right? Well, not so fast. The offer, it turns out, came just about a year too soon, long before my son and his wife expected the wait list to ever inch down to them. Their baby is one very adorable creature (I'm admittedly prejudiced), but he's not quite five months old, and he's still exclusively breast-feeding. What's more, my daughter in law is not quite ready to jump back into her work full-time. She was planning on a more gradual re-entry with time to rebuild the client base she deliberately tapered during pregnancy.

Agonizing choices

What an agonizing decision they had to make! Turn down the opening now and probably not get another offer for several years, if at all. Take the offer despite being psychologically and practically unprepared, in order to have access to a proven, quality preschool program. I wondered how many other young parents around the country faced the same difficult choices-that is, if they were as lucky as my kids were. High-quality childcare programs are not exactly a dime a dozen. Most families have to settle for whatever they can get, and then they typically have to endure the constant stress of a patchwork quilt of arrangements on days when a child has the sniffles, or Mommy does. This, of course, for our most precious natural resource-our children, our future.

My role

This was one telephone conversation where I didn't say very much. I listened, mostly. I listened to my son air the pros and cons of putting his son in daycare now or turning down the offer. He was still reeling from the surprise of receiving the offer months, if not years, before he thought he'd be lucky enough to get it. He still hadn't talked it out completely with his wife, although, of course, they had already talked about it some. There was much more for them to say to each other. I listened because I didn't have any specific wisdom to impart, at least not yet. And I don't know whether anyone does. (If you do, please share it with me!)

One true way?

I don't know that there is any one course of action in this situation that is right for all families all the time. A lot, I know, depends not only on the parents' preparedness but their sense of the strength of their attachment to their baby and the baby's security in his attachment to his mommy and daddy. This much I do know: Much of his future-his basic sense of security in the world, the ease with which he will feel free to explore his environment and to take in information, his sense that the world is a benign place, his expectation that he can have an effect in the world-will rest on that. In other words, much of his future psychological health.

A Strong Foundation

As therapists, you probably deal with the fallout of this fact all the time: The quality of what comes first has a lasting impact. A strong foundation of attachment between parent and child is irreplaceable. It doesn't determine everything, but it certainly has a powerful influence. No question about it, a strong bond is definitely in place. But it isn't finished yet. So what's the right choice? Some parents can spend all day with their children and never form a strong attachment bond. For other parents, early months of the kind of intense closeness of breast-feeding create a psychological as well as physiological synchrony that will be impossible to undo. There are many other variables of parent background and infant temperament that factor into the attachment process, of course. But its importance can't be disputed. How it will play out in this situation I can't yet say. I'm hoping my son and daughter in law want to continue the conversation; at best, I can be the sounding board against which they can hear themselves think their own way to a solution.

Feel free to chime in with your thoughts below.