On Letting Children Grow

Child Development, Parental Anxiety, and the Curse of Creativity

Children Playing in the Countryside by Evert Pieters

Let me begin with a mundane anecdote, as I like to do, which recently led me to ponder much more serious questions. The other day I was at the park with my son. He is almost one and a half, and has recently developed a will of his own, which includes having very strong and unpredictable opinions on the food offered to him, standing by the front door shouting when he wants to be taken outside, and refusing help from myself and my husband. So, of course, he was not too pleased when he climbed up a little mound at the playground and realised he didn’t know how to climb down. A look of frustration came upon his face; his eyebrows furrowed, his upper lip stiffened; he emitted a loud toddler grunt of anger. As I offered him my hand to help him get down, I could trace the line of his thoughts from his changing facial expressions: ‘Do I accept help? I want to do this by myself. But I’m scared of falling; I don’t want to get hurt. If only I could have something to grab for support without having to accept help from my mum!’. His sense of danger won the day, and he finally took my hand, only for just long enough to get back on the ground. Needless to say, the next time he climbed the mound, just a few minutes later, he figured out how to get back down by himself, and didn’t so much as look to me for assistance.

After I came home, I kept thinking about what this little incident showed me about the nature of parenthood, and motherhood in particular. While I was pregnant with my son, back in 2021, my husband and I read a book by late British pediatrician and child psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott called The Child, the Family, and the Outside World. One of the points that got stuck in my head from this book - which I would thoroughly recommend to new parents - is that, for Winnicott, an ‘ordinary devoted mother’ is simply a mother who responds to her child’s needs whenever they occur. There doesn’t have to be anything extraordinary about motherhood, though of course it is an extraordinarily demanding responsibility. While it’s natural for mothers to be apprehensive about not doing a ‘good’ job of parenthood, Winnicott argues, childrearing is actually not about making your children learn new skills, but about providing a safe environment in which they learn and experience what they were always designed to learn and experience. In simpler terms, you can’t ‘make’ a child grow, you only ‘let’ them grow by providing physical and emotional shelter while the growing happens. In my case, nothing I could have done or said to my toddler could have led him to learn how to climb down a mound by himself at the playground: all he needed was a parent to be physically present to catch him in case he fell; he needed to figure out the rest by himself.

The logic of Winnicott’s argument is even more striking when applied to smaller infants, as opposed to toddlers. As I was playing with my son at the park - and as I write these words now - I was simultaneously growing another life, the life of my baby daughter, who is due to be born this November. Inside the safety of the womb, my daughter is developing physically and mentally at an astonishing pace, without the need for me to actively ‘do’ anything other than eat, rest, and take prenatal vitamins. That is why Winnicott refers to the mother’s role during gestation and during the famous ‘fourth trimester’, that is, when a child is a newborn, as that of a host looking after a ‘lodger’. He addresses mothers directly and bluntly, saying as follows:

I want to make just one thing clear. It is this. Your baby does not depend on you for growth and development. Each baby is a going concern. In each baby is a vital spark, and this urge towards life and growth and development is a part of the baby, something the child is born with and which is carried forward in a way that we do not have to understand.

Now, Winnicott is not talking about abdicating parental responsibility. Of course not. What he is talking about, is the necessary realisation that a substantial part of parenting consists in nurturing, not making or shaping. You may pass down values and morals to your children, but you can’t force them to learn to talk, laugh, or feed themselves. You can encourage those skills, sure, but they decide when and how to practice them. You just sit back and watch it all happen.

But how does this affect our thinking about the nature of parenting more broadly? I believe very firmly, and will continue to argue, that one of the greatest problems in contemporary western societies is that our perception of the role of parents has become deeply warped. We talk and think about parents as having the ‘right’ to have or not have children. We discard children if they are conceived at a difficult time or in difficult circumstances, and many of us don’t as much as bat an eyelid if a couple - or even a single woman - decide to go through IVF or surrogacy to have children well into their forties and even fifties. Because we think of children as something ‘made’, and we, the parents, as the ‘makers’, we arrogate to ourselves the right to life and death.

And this, unfortunately, does not only hurt children, though it hurts them the most. It hurts us, too. It hurts us because the flip side of seeing children as a right is that we also think of them as incapable of developing without our constant interference, which places an enormous burden on the parents to do everything perfectly, to buy the ‘best’ and most expensive and latest baby gadgets all the time, and to control every second of the child’s life. This is simply not achievable by anyone human. Nor should it be. I do not need to tell you what happens to parents who try to mould their children into their own pre-existing vision of what they should be. I’m sure you’ve heard enough stories about possessive parents and resentful children to know that it simply doesn’t work. This is why, even as a profoundly creative person, I’ve come to dislike thinking of childbearing or childcare as a creative act. Creativity, when it comes to motherhood, is a curse. It presents the illusion that we can shape, control, and direct in ways that simply ought not to be attempted. As mothers we love, sacrifice, and protect, but we do not create. As Winnicott brilliantly puts it,

Some of you have created works of art. You have done drawings and paintings, or you have moulded out of clay, or you have knitted jumpers or made dresses. When you did these things, what turned up was made by you. Babies are different. The baby grows, and you are the mother providing a suitable environment.

We would do well to heed Winnicott’s words. It may be overwhelming and even frustrating to realise that so much about our children’s development is not up to us, but there is also consolation and relief to be found in that realisation. It means that even the most unremarkable and unprepared individuals, which is most of us, can do a pretty good job at parenting if we just provide shelter, food, and emotional support to our children. Our children, in fact, could not care less if we are remarkable or accomplished. They just want us to present in case, as happened with my son, they need to hold our hand for a while as they learn to do things on their own.