The Kindergarchy

There has been a remarkable shift in childrearing from the 30’s and 40’s to the present. While Epstein was growing up, children had more freedom and correspondingly less animosity towards their parents and The System. In contrast, the current model of Kindergarchy smothers children with love and expectations.

Parenting has become an incredibly self-conscious enterprise. Child-rearing instructions, maintenance manuals really, are everywhere. Parents have become indentured servants of a sort, in league with therapists and experts, in order to carefully tend the delicate super-egos of their children. The craze of attentiveness hits a passionate note at schooling, where children must be educated as soon as it is physiologically possible. Yet these ultra-educated were not systematically improved. A small number stand out as those who had found a passion for the life of the mind.

The consequences of so many years of endless attention, is an over-realized sense of their significance. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement. One of the first things that people who really are significant seem to know is that, in the grander scheme, they are themselves really quite insignificant.

“My own hope is that the absurdity of current arrangements will in time be felt, and people will gradually realize the foolishness of continuing to lavish so much painstaking attention on their children. When that time comes children will be allowed to relax, no longer under the threat of suffocation by love from their parents, and grow up more on their own.”

Joseph Epstein “The Kindergarchy: Every Child a Dauphin” Weekly Standard June 9, 2008