The Art of Parenting

What does it mean to practise an art? Erich Fromm states that there are two aspects: the mastery of the theory, and the mastery of the practice. I would add that ultimately the mastery of both theory and practice involves the mystery of forgetting, or what the Italian writer Castiglione called Sprezzatura — translated in the sixteenth century as ‘noble nonchalance’ — that ability to achieve something with apparent ease. This state is beyond theory, beyond trying.

Living today requires great skilfulness. In calling parenting an art rather than a science, we are recognising that the essential unresolved challenges are calling for imagination even more than knowledge. We just have to consider whether the stunning increases we see in factual knowledge are delivering any real improvements in the quality of living. Certainly aspects of the quality — and quantity — of life have improved. But are we living well? When I reflect on the issues people are struggling with, they are nearly all to do with family and other relationships. And here, knowledge is not enough.

Although on any particular day some twenty million Aussies get on quite well with one another, what we witness via the media provokes an increasing anxiety about the state of society and our relationships. It looks as though the human personality is falling apart — as though our faculties are being frayed and separated. In traditional society, however, human beings were still integrated, not so much through conscious effort as through the ordered tightly-woven fabric of social ‘norms’ — those common threads of religion, culture and habit. What we call customs.

It isn’t so comfortable today in this regard. With personal independence we have gained some differences: for instance, a high degree of individualism, often demanded as of right where once it was a privilege. Our claims of rights now seem disproportionate to any sense of obligation.

One solution is often heard on talk-back radio — the restoration of traditional values and social obligations. In this scenario, everyone presumably would adhere to the values of the person stating the case. The opposite view is a post-modern relativism that looks for answers applicable to the given situation only, understanding the truth of everyone’s truth, and the need therefore to negotiate only provisional solutions.

The proponents of both these views are often characterised by the same projections of frayed personal faculties — tendencies towards a cold intellectual detachment, or else sentimentality and emotionalism, or perhaps wilful and exuberant outbursts of anger, even violence. One outcome of this splitting of the personality is fundamentalism.

While through science we are developing a prodigious talent to analyse things, to take things apart, I think the challenge of ‘getting it together’, to find a holistic relationship with things, is an artistic concern. And the principal faculty for any artistic creativity is imagination.