I don’t think my dad remembers this, but he once told me that no matter when he approaches the final page of a book—whether during a lazy weekend afternoon, while riding the LIRR or wherever—he will always stop short of reading it, thinking that the last page should be reserved for a quiet nighttime read in bed, right before going to sleep. I can't quite recall the logic behind the habit, but it has become a rule of sorts that I love. Always literary-prone, maybe I like the idea that a book deserves a proper ending that gives the author's final words their due, or maybe I just like feeling connected to my father through something so small and invisible.
It's a tiny habit that's been passed from one generation to the next. Despite having absolutely no evidence that reserving the final page of a novel for bedtime actually does anything for character building—or anything at all—this is a habit that I really want to pass on to my children. It's one of the inherited rules that both directly and indirectly shape my parenting, including learning about the Torah portion of the week and teaching it to the kids every Friday, taking a body shower every night even when you have no intention to shampoo your hair (it resets your mood, I promise), and never showing up at someone's home empty-handed.
Then there are rules I'm less sure I consciously chose. August has a way of exposing them. As summer camps end and backpacks fill with endless school supplies, I'm back to renegotiating bedtimes, lunch orders and after-school.
Back to school is a back-to-basics period that also turns out to be a good time to reinspect everything. Having grown up in Italy in the 1990s and early 2000s and now raising four children in the United States, I have the slightly strange advantage of seeing some of those rules more clearly. I know which values came bundled with childhood in Italy, and I have become increasingly aware of the ones American culture asks me to pass on to my own kids.
Research suggests the difference is less about whether parents care than about what care is supposed to look like. American mothers report more direct social and teaching activity with young children, and U.S. families fit a broader pattern of “intensive parenting,” with parents spending more one-on-one time with children than in France or Spain. Italian families, by contrast, tend to place more weight on children’s obligations to the family and fold family life more naturally into a wider social world.
Put crudely, the American rule book asks parents to do an enormous amount of parenting. The Italian world I grew up in, by contrast, put more emphasis on teaching a child how to exist within a family and a larger social world. It's not just about doing in Europe but about being (which is odd considering the identity politics that have taken over the U.S. in recent years).
Extract — continue reading at the source.
