The Myth of Normal 134

care much less about them than you. Those other people will punish them . . . Don’t allow that to happen. Better to let your little monsters know what is desirable and what is not.”[3] To achieve this goal, Peterson recommends gestural and physical intimidation. “Socialization” may be a kinder approach than treating kids as inanimate putty, yet it still centers something other than their needs: namely, the dictates of the society for which the parents act as the well-meaning but unwitting agents. To see what else might be possible, it is instructive to look at cultures more time-tested and Nature-informed than our own. Such cultures needed no “parenting experts” because the wisdom was passed down generationally, whether by instruction or simple emulation. Contrast Dr. Spock’s counsel with what an elderly Cree woman once told me: “In our clan, children weren’t even allowed to touch the ground until they were two years old. They were in our arms all the time.” Or compare Peterson’s tips for managing “little monsters” with the anthropologist Ashley Montagu’s description of traditional parenting practices among Netsilik Inuit in Canada’s Northwest Territories: “The Netsilik mother, even though she lives under the most difficult of conditions, is an unruffled personality who bestows warmth and loving care upon her children. She never chides her infant or interferes with it in any way, except to respond to its need.”[4] Somehow, it seems, these children managed to grow into productive and yes, socialized, members of their communities—even without Dr. Peterson’s stern admonishments. It turns out that our innate parenting instinct is perfectly calibrated to ensure the provision of the thing many “experts” would have us ignore: the child’s developmental needs. And here’s a plot twist: we are not talking only about children’s needs. In a real sense, we cannot even speak about the infant’s needs without considering those of the mother. “There is no such thing as a baby,” the British pediatrician D. W. Winnicott once said, explaining, “If you show me a baby, you certainly show me someone else who is caring for the baby . . . One sees a ‘nursing couple’ . . . The unit is not the individual, the unit is the individual-environment set-up.”[5] Or, in Ashley Montagu’s words, “When a baby is born, a mother is born. There is considerable evidence that at this