Competence over Compassion

Putting Children's Needs First

I’m an 18th-centurist by training and a mother by trade. One of the features of 18th-century literature and discourse that tends to attract a lot of attention - and indeed, that was contentious even in its own times - is the emphasis often placed on the virtue of compassion. As a first-time mother to a now toddler, I have come to the conclusion that when it comes to children, ‘compassion’ is not a virtue at all.

Let me explain. Although the concept of compassion of course existed before the 18th century, it meant something rather different. When Julian of Norwich writes of Christ’s compassion for humanity in her 14th-century Revelations of Divine Love, she simply means that Christ suffers in our suffering, and wishes to take that suffering upon Himself. But by the late 1700s, a lot of writers and intellectuals (Adam Smith perhaps the best known of them) had placed a greater importance on what we could call the ‘spectacle’ of compassion; that is, fellow-feeling and moral sense were to be proved by showing strong emotions at the suffering of others, making a ‘spectacle’ of oneself so-to-speak. Now, not everyone agreed with this moral framework, but it has proved attractive enough to survive into the 21st century.

One of the areas of life where I see this spectacle-of-compassion model of morality at its strongest and most corrosive is parenthood. Since becoming a mother for the first time around a year and a half ago, I have experienced immense pressure to ‘fuss’ over my baby boy, to publicly display how much I adore him, to be in hysterics if he so much as bumps his head slightly (he’s a toddler now so that happens around a dozen times a day), to constantly say how wonderful it is to be his mother. All of those things are true, by the way. I do adore him, I do get terribly worried whenever he’s unwell, and I do think that being his mother is the single most important task in my life. But there’s the catch: I think of motherhood as my duty of service, not as a magical fairly-land of self-fulfillment, and that is where, by contemporary expectations, I fall short. We are now so used to thinking of children as accessories to some vague project of self-improvement (just think about how many people you’ve heard in your life say that a child ‘completed’ them), that we place a disproportionate degree of importance to the way we ‘feel’ about parenthood. We want to be seen to be adoring parents, to be ‘feeling’ parents, to be compassionate. We strew social media with pictures of our children and captions about how ‘blessed’ we are to be parents.

Unfortunately, not only does that place an insurmountable amount of pressure on parents to feel and show love for their children (if you haven’t had a child, trust me, the only thing you feel at the 2am newborn feedings is exhaustion), it also does precious little good for the children themselves. Children need competence, not compassion. A newborn has zero opinions about whether you ‘feel’ love towards him or not, but they do care if you’re able to identify and fulfil their needs. I learnt this the hard way. When my son was very small, he went through the usual phase of unexplained evening fussiness for a few weeks. He’d cry hysterically, refusing milk, and we had no idea why. Inevitably, I would end up crying as well, and my husband was left to find a solution to calm the both of us down. It was only once I slowly learnt to distance myself from my compassionate response and actually attend to my son’s needs that it got easier, and we were able to figure out ways to calm him down.

But if the 18th century is the poison, it is also the antidote. In her famous (and infamous) Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft argues that

To be a good mother, a woman must have sense, and that independence of mind which few women possess who are taught to depend entirely on their husbands. Meek wives are, in general, foolish mothers.

Wollstonecraft is not disparaging natural parental affection, by the way. But she is arguing that ‘affection’ alone simply isn’t enough. And she finds another 18th century figure, my beloved Jane Austen, in full agreement. Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility is an acute critique of the model of ‘sensibility’ that, while spectacular, is completely ineffective. Marianne Dashwood, while well-intentioned and good-principled, is so focused on the outward show of compassion that she fails to devise any strategies that could be of practical help to her mother and sisters in a time of need. Her own mother, Mrs. Dashwood - though it is clear that she loves her children very much - is incapable of offering any real help, because she is also stuck in this compassion paradigm of morality.

So, let me say it one more time: strong feelings about one’s children are natural and good. But, they are not the be-all and end-all of parenthood, and they are not what children most need from us. Children need us to be stronger than them, to put our feelings second, and their needs first. Compassion is not enough. We need resilience and competence, too.