Introduction

A Pedagogy Composed by Children

I will never forget a moment during a lunch I had with my old friend and colleague Mary
Catherine Bateson, a wise, straight-talking woman, an anthropologist whose blend of
empiricism and wisdom has always made me see things differently. I had an agenda when I
invited her to have hot soup with me on a winter day in Cambridge several years ago. My
daughter Tolani—who had jumped into a precocious and volatile adolescence at eleven— was
then fifteen, and I was feeling weak and exhausted by the four years of accumulated conflicts at
home. Asking Tolani to clean up the dishes after dinner—a chore that was copiously and
colorfully spelled out on the family job chart for the week—might elicit an escalation of anger,
beginning with excuses that she had no time because piles of homework awaited her, moving
on to declarations that I was being unfair and unreasonable, ending in raging accusations that
her younger brother Martin had always been my favor-ite child, her exit from the kitchen—
dishes undone—punctuated by outrageous yelling and door slamming. Some battles were
protracted, like the long-running struggle over her first tattoo—you had to have parental
permission if you were under eighteen, and my fourteen-year-old daughter wanted to have a
dolphin carved on her left upper arm—a chronic debate that would simmer for weeks of
solicitous, then urgent, pleading and suddenly erupt into a full-blown press of accusations,
claiming that I was infantilizing her, theatrically quoting passages from My Body, My Self.
For the most part, her outrageous behavior was targeted at me and limited to the home front.
Out in the world, she carried herself with poise and patience, maturity and aplomb.
As I lunched with my friend, I was also feeling particularly despondent about the years
stretching out in front of us that were sure to bring more treachery—a treachery made all the
more penetrating because of its tender and loving lining. I thought that Bate-son, the cultural
anthropologist, might help me see something productive—maybe even redemptive—in our
mother-daughter struggles; and I thought that, as a mother of a daughter a dozen years older
than mine, she might have some survival skills up her sleeve. Perhaps I was even hoping to be
rescued. While my soup got cold in front of me, I spun out my war stories and then waited for
her sympathy and support. Bateson listened attentively, never interrupting the rush of emotion
that I could not seem to contain or temper. Then she said something surprising. “Your daughter
is living on another planet, and she has a lot to teach you about it.
. . . Listen to her.” Her spare, didactic comment at first felt facile and unsympathetic. She did
not elaborate, did not respond to my hunger for her advice. For weeks, I brooded about her take
on my troubles, and finally realized that she was saying something powerful and fundamental:
that these intergenerational conversations— even the hardest ones—are opportunities for
parental growth and insight, and that our children are indeed our teachers, particularly because
they are living in a world so different from the one in which
we grew up. They are becoming people different from any that we have ever known.
A couple of years later after a huge blow-up with my daughter
about something that neither of us could even remember or name afterwards—at one of those
moments when Bateson’s generous perspective had long since worn off—I called a close
friend and told him that I was “at the end of my rope.” I had no more energy, no more fight in
me. I wanted to throw in the towel and admit de-feat. His response: “You are nowhere near the
end of your rope.” And, of course, he was right. Just as Bateson was helping me see that my
daughter was teaching me about the world, so too my friend was helping me acknowledge that
our sometimes-tortured mother-daughter relationship was offering me the chance to know
myself in new ways, that I was developing new capacities, stretching my emotional reserve and
repertoire, becoming more patient and forgiving. I was learning a new kind of composure and
restraint. I began to understand how important it was to be selective about the timing, and spare
in the wording, of my reactions; how I could convey simple respect by really listening before
jumping in with my side of the argument; how I might look below the surface ten-sions to try
and figure out the real message underneath. And I now recognize that these same qualities of
discipline and perspective— which were wrested from the wreckage of our mother-daughter
struggles—became useful in helping me navigate the rocky terrain of many difficult encounters
beyond the boundaries of our home.
From a safe distance of a decade and a half, as I reflected on these love wars with my
daughter—their fury and their drama, their up-in-your-face attitude—I wondered how those
moments propelled me as a learner. I wondered how I was occasionally able to get some
distance on the volatile encounters, how I was able to find enough restraint to resist the tit for
tat that would typically escalate into pitched battle. How do we as parents have those rare
moments of revelation and epiphany? This process of stepping back comes with shifting our
role from teacher to learner. It comes with changing the dynamic from adversarial to
empathetic, placing ourselves in our teenagers’ shoes. It requires breathing deeply—literally
and meta-phorically—allowing us the space to listen—a kind of listening that does not assume
we already know what our child is about to say, that does not offer up the scripted response but,
rather, a kind of listening that attends to the text and the subtext of what is being said. In that
moment of listening, empathy, restraint, and stepping back, we begin to take on the role of
learner, and we begin to come to terms with the lessons our children are teaching us about
them-selves and their emerging identity, and about the world that they are inhabiting, the planet
that is their perch.
Growing Each Other Up examines the developmental changes in parents that grow out
of growing our children, the things our children teach us as we raise them. Most of the
developmental literature has, of course, focused on the trajectories of child growth, charting the
cognitive, emotional, and social learning that takes place during infancy, early childhood,
puberty, and adolescence; revealing the nonlinear path of progression and regression that marks
each developmental hurdle; exploring the ways in which parents and caregivers can support and
nurture developmental milestones along the way. And this literature has primarily seen parents
as the teachers and shapers, guiding and supporting their children’s learning and reinforcing the
skills, rituals, and values that they believe are important to the child’s survival and success in
the world. The learning is seen as flowing in one direction, the knowledge passing from the
parent to the child. But all of us know that this is a skewed view, one that—in its preoccupation
with early development and in its view of parents as the consummate teachers and cultural re-
inforcers—misses the two-sidedness and adaptive dynamic between parents and their children.
It is a static view that is blind to the ways in which parenting requires lifelong learning, a
pedagogy that is often composed by their children.
We see the role that children play as their parents’ teachers most pointedly in the
historical and social science literatures that document the lives and acculturation of newly
arrived immigrants or in literary accounts that show the adaptive capacities and rapid learning
of the youngsters who must forge and lead the way in the new frontier, dragging their hapless
and resistant parents and grandparents behind them. It is the children who first learn the
language and must become the translators of words, idioms, and culture; it is the children who
make change at the grocery store, ask for directions, and negotiate with the landlords when the
rent is late.
In his classic history text, The Uprooted, Oscar Handlin writes about the experiences of
European Immigrants who came to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. He focuses on immigration as an experience of interruption, separation, and
alienation. The European peasants who made the journey to America had a difficult life,
characterized by abrupt separation from the traditions and values of the home country. In
adjusting to the American environment, parents relied on the second generation, their children,
to be intermediaries, children who from the start, writes Handlin, were “more immediately
implicated” than their parents. The children stood at the borderline of the old and the new, and
they presented a dilemma to their parents, who yearned for them to retain the culture of their
home country and yet knew that to have a better life in the new country, they would have to
renounce the old. Beyond the cultural dilemma was a real-life reversal, where parents had to
rely on their children for knowledge on how to navigate their alien and difficult environment.
Handlin observes that immigrant parents had to accept their role as learners, even as they
resented the reversal of the order of things that contributed to their feeling of bewilderment and
loss—even as it improved their grasp on the new world.
Although Handlin’s book, first published in 1951, was specifically about European
immigrants at the turn of the century, more recent accounts, both fictional and nonfictional, of
immigrant families arriving from all over the world, chronicle the ways in which the children
become their parents’ primary teachers, taking on the role of linguistic and cultural translators.
These diverse immigrant narratives portray a common theme: the ways in which the asymmetry
of knowledge is turned upside down as children race ahead of their parents and parents become
reluctant followers, very much dependent upon their offspring but troubled by the ways in
which their parental authority feels diminished and their cultural traditions feel threatened.
These generational and cultural strains become sites of learning, a role reversal between parents
and children that make visible and powerful Bateson’s admonition to me.
But even in nonimmigrant narratives, where parents and children are not making huge
geographical and cultural shifts, we see that learning is a two-way street and that children are
often the teachers and shapers of their parents. Even though I learned to ride a bike when I was
seven on winding, gravel country roads in up-state New York, it wasn’t until my son Martin
and I took to the city streets in Boston that I really mastered the skills of the road. I learned
from my six-year-old how to lean into the curves in order to not lose speed or momentum and,
as we made our way along the banks of the Charles River, how to balance and steer with no
hands on the handlebars. And it was from Martin that I learned everything I know about
computers. Over the years, he has sat next to me in front of the screen, patiently guiding my
learning, refusing to help when he knew if he waited long enough I would figure it out on my
own, relishing his role as teacher, taking on the mantle of restraint and maturity. It was only
after Martin’s insistent teaching that I finally gave up writing my books longhand—my tools, a
sharpened number two pencil and yellow lined paper—and moved, first cautiously and then
enthusiastically, to using the computer.
 But the more important teaching he did was not skill based; it was not about learning the
computer’s programs, icons, and buttons; it was not about explaining the mysteries of “the
cloud,” hovering and unseen all around us. Martin was intentional in modeling an attitude, a
way of relating to the machine that was gentle, playful, and unafraid. He tried to lessen my
anxieties, get me to lighten up. “What is the worst thing that could happen, Mom?” he would
ask rhetorically as he tried to calm the nervousness fogging my mind and fumbling my fingers.
So that now that he is thirty-two and rarely around, I can still hear his reassuring, insistent voice
telling me that I need to pause, slow down, breathe, and quietly scan the screen for clues. And I
can feel his lessons undergirding the way in which I am now able to move past my initial
resistance and fears as I approach other things mystifying or intimidating, like design-ing a
website, taking a hip-hop dance class, or driving solo across country.
My daughter, Tolani, has also been my teacher (even during the tug-of-war years). I have, for
example, looked to her for lessons on skin care, bath salts, and makeup. It wasn’t until she—at
six-teen—introduced me to our neighborhood nail salon that I had ever treated myself to a
manicure or a pedicure. I neither saw the need for it nor felt that I deserved it. At thirteen, when
she made Mother’s Day brunch for my mother, my sister, and me—three generations around
the groaning board—we realized her culinary skills had outdistanced all of us. After finishing
the four-course meal, we grown-up ladies got our notebooks out to record the recipe for a
divine pumpkin/spinach soup that she served up, the green and orange liquids magically
maintaining their delicate separateness when she poured it in our bowls. My mother asked in
admiration, “Where did you learn to cook like this?” and her granddaughter answered, without
skipping a beat, “Nana, I’m an artist. This is just like painting.”
And speaking of her art, over the years, Tolani has drawn, painted, and sculpted me,
creating portraits that have given me insight into how she sees me and who I am becoming. On
my fiftieth birthday, she did a large watercolor of me—she called it The Essence of Mama. I
was stripped of all of my jewelry and combs, a filmy apricot scarf draped around my bare
shoulders; my hair, pulled back in a bun, was black on one side and silver on the other. I gazed
at the image that did not look like me but seemed to capture my essence and my future. I could
see the “me” I was becoming, anticipating a nakedness and vulnerability that I was still
covering up, an unadorned strength that awaited me.
It is not only true that our children may teach us something about ourselves and the
world we inhabit, they also often become our mentors and cheerleaders, urging us to take on the
next developmental chapters of our lives, applauding our efforts that risk change, supporting
our new adventures. Growing Each Other Up examines the ways in which the development and
learning of parents are shaped in part by their children, focusing on how those lessons are
incorporated into the ways that parents view themselves and their world. I see this work as a
challenge and counterpoint to so much of the developmental literature that has centered on the
transfer of knowledge, skills, and attitudes from parent to child, documenting the asymmetry of
authority and the flow of information from the old to the young, seeing parents as the
primary—most important—agents of socialization, the first and last teachers. Instead, I want to
document the lessons that parents learn—voluntarily and involuntarily, with intention and
serendipity, often through resistance and struggle—from their offspring. I am intrigued by the
ways in which these lessons are embedded in evolving relationships and responsive to a rapidly
transforming society and world.
As I listened to parents weave their narratives, I played many roles. I was the curious
ethnographer, gathering the detailed data, carefully observing the action, asking the impertinent
questions, and suspending judgment. I was the portraitist listening for the story, its text and
subtext, relishing the poetic moments, documenting the good, wrapped in a relationship of
respect and trust. I was the witness, standing by their sides, watching their backs, and hearing
their testimonies. I was also the mother of young adult children of my own, feeling deeply
identified and gently implicated, joined in solidarity, resonating with their pain and their joy,
their hopes and their regrets. And I was the spider woman, weaving the individual narratives
into a larger portrait of learning, tracking the lessons that flow from the young to the old,
teaching parents some-thing about themselves and the world that they inhabit—the world that
will one day be inherited by their children.