Parents
Reading Bryan Caplan on parenting made me think about how neatly my own life fits with what he says. For the most part my behavior looks pretty much like what you'd expect if you were an alien breeding humans the same way we breed dogs: take the stubborn and confrontational aspects of my (Italian) maternal grandfather's line, the introverted shrewdness of my maternal (Anglo-Saxon) grandmother's, the stodgy but agreeable sense of duty that seems to come from my paternal grandfather's (Scottish) lineage, and the lack of cognitive control and incorrigible devil-may-care streak on my paternal grandmother's (Norman-French) side, jumble them all up and you've got a pretty decent approximation to my personality.
Moreover, I say this having had essentially no parents from the age of 17: that's when my mother died, and my dad's perpetual aloofness continued mostly unbroken. Even before that, I was always fairly independent -- my mother was a regular presence in my life and we got along about as well as any typical mother-son pair would, but she always was vaguely concerned about how I'd spend most of my free time in my room, playing with lego or reading. My only complaint about her was the same as the one Caplan claims children are most likely to have: she leaned slightly to the side of over-parenting and her stress in turn stressed me out.
It would be easy to interpret the facts Caplan raises to suggest that kids will turn out pretty much the same even without parents as long as their basic needs are taken care of, but experience suggests there's something missing from the equation here: I would submit that simply having someone to fill the mother- and father-shaped holes in someone's life is a basic psychological need. Ethological experiments show that when those holes aren't filled the usual way, animals will latch onto the first thing that comes along that vaguely resembles it. It's unlikely that humans are so different in this regard that the same principle doesn't influence our own behavior.
For someone who has such strong, erm, issues with authority figures, I have an oddly incongruous tendency to seek male figures I can look up to. Several months ago I found myself thinking about how Dave reminded me of what my dad might be like if he hadn't lived his life with such listless timidity, and then the penny dropped: that's exactly why, above and beyond being a good educator, I felt so drawn to the guy. That draw was the obverse of the repulsion I felt from my father. I realized almost immediately that, in retrospect, the same theory could have been used to predict which profs I felt a desire to impress and which I didn't. The decisive test case was Paul: an excellent prof who knew his shit and was both confident and highly approachable, yet I spoke to him personally a grand total of three times in four months -- mostly about administrative matters. The catch was that he looks and acts like he isn't much older than I am, and hence didn't trigger the "dad" schema.
This came as a very annoying shock. At first it just felt embarrassing and pathetic, but becoming aware of it and understanding the reason behind it seems to have partially "broken the spell" all by itself. Having absolved that patch of my brain, I'm freer to interact with older, more competent men without it being warped by vestigial childhood instincts that never got much of a chance to be expressed in a normal way. It also makes me wonder whether the same mechanism channeled in less wholesome directions is a significant contributor to attraction to powerful men even in the face of abusive behavior, both in youth and adulthood.
It also makes me more glad that my mother was actually present to meaningfully fill that role in my life: god only knows how it might have fucked up my relationships with women otherwise. But still, not having her around anymore had left me with a residual problem: not having someone to keep me on my best behavior tended to result in "letting myself go" in a bad way, and there are a lot of really simple things that I've had to learn (or rediscover) on my own in a slower, more fumbling way than I otherwise might have. How to cook, not to debase cusswords by using them too casually, how to deal with women, keeping my hygienic standards high, spending my money as smartly as possible, figuring out my own feelings, even basic etiquette (so that I can at least disregard it intentionally rather than accidentally), etc.
George Gilder writes in Naked Nomads that "single men are not in general very good at life" and that "the key to the singles failure is the profound biological dependence of men on women -- deeper than any feminist or male chauvinist understands." Gilder is often facile and over the top, but this has a ring of truth to it. I'm simultaneously proud of how much I've improved over the last couple of years and annoyed that, here as in many other things, I'm playing catchup without the aid of a coach. pleasedtoeatyou has had to deal firsthand with some of the consequences of this, and while my behavior can sometimes be infuriatingly unresponsive to negative reinforcement, I have had at least a few useful lessons hammered into my head with her assistance, for which I'm grateful.
All of this is, much to my dismay, writ much larger in my younger sister's life. Our father is no help at all, and while my aunt Carol and I do what we can neither of us is really the ideal person for the job -- me for obvious reasons and her for never having been a parent. After some abortive attempts at playing a bigger role in her life, I've had to resign myself to the fact that she'll learn, or won't, when she's ready and any attempt to willfully hasten such things on my part will be met with the same resistance I would have given it at her age. All I can do is what I'm good at (or aspire to be good at, anyway): sharing what little I know, and planting suggestive seeds intended to bring out the best in her.