The Myth of Normal 141

more punitive attitudes in mothers, increased levels of support favorably diminished them. Contemporary science affirms ancient wisdom once more. Parental stress expresses itself in less overt ways, too, such as distraction and emotional absence. Many parents, though loving, are frequently preoccupied by genuine concerns about relationship issues or economic troubles or personal problems and, as a result, just aren’t as attentive or “present.” This affects development as surely as does parental rage or coldness. “Primate experiments show that infants can undergo severe separation reactions even though their mothers are visually, but not psychologically available,” reports the renowned researcher, psychologist, and theorist Allan Schore.[19] Dr. Schore calls such noncontact “proximate separation”—so close, but yet so far. It’s a dynamic that many children in our society experience, owing to the stresses parents habitually endure. The message the child gets is “You are not worthy of my attention. You must work to earn it.” Whether or not we explicitly recall such experiences, their imprints survive in our unconscious and in our nervous systems. Making matters more stressful is the alienation imposed by financial hardship. “The relentlessness of modern-day parenting has a powerful motivation: economic anxiety,” the New York Times reported in 2018. “For the first time, it’s as likely as not that American children will be less prosperous than their parents. For parents, giving children the best start in life has come to mean doing everything they can to ensure that their children can climb to a higher class, or at least not fall out of the one they were born into.”[20] The unintended impact of such fearful, status-driven child-rearing is that the child’s irreducible emotional needs fall secondary to the desperation of parents striving to ensure the academic and financial success of their offspring. Recently I was told, by a close eyewitness, of a middle-class mother yelling at her five-year-old son who balked at doing his homework: “You’re not thinking of your academic future!” the poor mom shouted at the preschooler. If only the youngster could have retorted, “Yeah? Well, you’re not thinking of my psycho-emotional future!” For some two-parent families of a certain social class, having both parents working may be a choice. “I love my kids! They are amazing,” writes Oster.