Smotherly Love

It would seem the most natural and welcome thing in the world for a mother to express compassion for her children. 

Compassion is, in fact, one of the first attributes that come to mind when I picture the ideal mother (the second is a pretty 1950s wasp-waisted dress and a frilly apron, but, alas, that is beside the point here). This wonder-mother exudes clouds of compassion, along with good humor, clear-eyed judgment, and tenderness. During her children’s little trials, she soothes their distress, enters into their unhappiness, and gently shows them a way out. She helps an angry son tame his churned-up emotions. She fortifies with sympathy and advice a daughter who feels persecuted at school. And she does it all without ever demanding emotional recompense, or shrieking, “You kids are driving me crazy!” when their neediness overwhelms her.

Well, that is a lovely creature I’ve drawn for you. On my very best days (and perhaps on yours — here I include fathers, though minus the fetching attire) — I am like her. Those are the days in which by some effortless process I am animated by compassion without ever straying toward its ugly mutations of coddling, enabling, and undermining. For like aspirin and toothpaste, swallowing too much compassion can make a child sick.

When a man shows compassion to, say, an unhappy work colleague, there is very little chance that he’s going to alter the other fellow’s personality. That is not true with children. When a custodial adult expresses compassion toward a child, he or she is drawing a kind of emotional roadmap that the younger party may continue to follow long after any particular exchange is over. So if, to continue the metaphor, the adult draws ornate suspension bridges over puny waterways that could easily be spanned with a plank, it will not be surprising if the child learns to overdramatize when he gets his feet wet.

Consider two possible bridges, each over the same dead bird. Let’s say it’s a flattened baby robin. Mother and child are meandering along the sidewalk, and they come across the tiny carcass: “Look! It’s dead!” the child cries, bending down to see.

“Oh, no, that’s so sad!” the suspension-bridge builder may exclaim, crouching beside the child to validate what she takes as his sorrow. “Aw, the poor little thing! That makes me feel sad. It must make you feel really sad, too, right? It’s okay to cry, honey — death is a part of life, but it still makes us sad. All things die, even baby birds, and it’s okay to mourn them. In fact, why don’t we give him a funeral?” Lesson: Death is sad and mawkish grief is always in order.

The plank-layer, meanwhile, sees the dead robin and perhaps pats the child sympathetically. “Gee, that’s too bad. It’s a shame when little creatures die,” she says, and moves on. Lesson: Death is sad; let’s keep walking.

This kind of compassion management is asked of parents a hundred times a day, because children’s emotional lives are so unbelievably volatile. They feel little things deeply. A girl weeps when her brother treads by accident on the leg of her teddy bear. A boy dances with rage because he can’t make his paper airplane fly — or because his sister just snatched it out of the air. Siblings bicker in the back of the car because one child’s elbow is on another child’s armrest, then both of them feel bitterly wronged when their non-wonder-mother loudly tells them from the driver’s seat, “Fine, then neither of you can use the armrest.”

In any of the emotional plunges a child experiences, parents are called upon to react — to draw that hasty map or throw up a quick bridge. Our 1950s dream girl calibrates her responses perfectly. She laughs at comic scenes like an armrest tussle, thus signaling to her children that it’s not a big deal, and saves her sincerity for when it really counts. But even she, I daresay (and I should know, since I made her up), is aware of a constant tension between the maternal impulse to soothe and the cold knowledge that too much compassion will feed weakness and narcissism in her children.

Let me stipulate that I’m not talking about anyone under the age of two. Very young children have no idea that anyone else has feelings; they are nature’s narcissists, and in my opinion we can cosset them extravagantly without ill effect. But not long after the second birthday a mother’s reaction, or hyper-compassionate over­reaction, can begin observably to affect a child’s character.

In no time, a sweet boy can begin to spoil, to believe with increasing petulance that he suffers more than others, that his feelings and needs merit more notice than those of anyone else. Expressing compassion loses its restorative powers with this child; instead, it can corrode his sense of reality and justice, turning a young recipient of this virtue into one incapable of feeling it for others.

Mothers are natural advocates for their children, and rightly so. But showing the way to overcome anguish also entails a diminution of the anguish, which is a fancy way of saying, “It’s only a little cut. See? It’s stopped bleeding.”

That’s fine for Mrs. Hourglass-Figure, but many mothers falter on this. So precious is their darling, so sharply do they feel his injuries, that they lose their own senses of propriety and proportion and end up raising little monsters. I knew a woman who insisted on sending her son into school each day with a peanut butter sandwich, even though an allergic child in his class risked fatal anaphylactic shock. “My child needs protein,” she told me indignantly, gesturing to her boy, who was in the room with us. “Peanut butter is the only protein he likes. If that kid is so allergic, his parents shouldn’t be sending him to school.”

You will not be surprised to learn that hers was a sulky and solipsistic boy. To return to the idea of emotional cartography, that mother’s excessive compassion for her child’s situation — his finicky appetite — had the effect of showing him that he could scrawl a superhighway across everyone else’s picturesque village. This will do him a disservice in life, of course; imagine marrying a fellow like that! Which is why sometimes a mother’s best way of showing compassion for her child is to hide it.