Santiago Gerchunoff: "Parents have invaded the school grounds"

Among the thousands of parenting books and manuals currently filling bookstores, we come across the brief essay In the Age of Child-Things:Ensayos contra la crianza como emprendimiento, by Santiago Gerchunoff (Buenos Aires, 1977), where the philosopher, writer, and university and high school teacher dissects modern parenting and how it has become professionalized to the point that children have turned into an object to be improved. The book is a collection of short essays he wrote some time ago while raising his daughters, who are now 13 and 19 years old, readapted with a common thread: the concept of child-things.What are thing children?

— Summarize this idea of child-rearing as a passive object –which we believe is ours– and not as a subject. There are experts who know how it works, we can add things to it and take things away from it, as if the child were a Meccano set that we have to assemble with a pre-existing manual that works if the pieces are placed in a certain way.

Just when children come without a manual.

— Studying the theory and then applying it does not work; the path is made by walking, and you learn to play the flute by playing it, and parenting is where practice reaches its maximum degree. When one is raising their children, one learns while doing it.

But we are at a moment when more parenting books are being published.

— It is very symptomatic of what I talk about and criticize in the book, and I include myself in it. The current way of parenting includes all of us fathers and mothers; we cannot escape it. And it has to do with something positive, which is that we love our children and want to do it well. We think of having children so much as a project, it is such a voluntary action that the field is then fertilized for them to sell us manuals and courses to do it better. Everything is permeated by the market, but to this is added the loneliness in which we raise children today: where is my tribe? Today, couples and single-parent families raise children very much alone without having any idea and without the support of grandparents, cousins, or aunts and uncles. Before, people didn't know how to raise children either, but now loneliness is added to it, and we are the perfect prey for manuals.

You speak of the child as a project and of parenting as entrepreneurship. What are the symptoms?

— In the past, children were had while we lived our lives and did a thousand other things, and now they are projects that we choose consciously and that are, in the crudest sense, on the list of projects we embark on alongside doing a PhD, buying a car, taking a trip to India... and having a child. Now we reserve a part of life for raising children, whereas before, attention was more divided and, therefore, children were freer. And once a child is a project in this individualistic and liberal logic, we want to develop them into their best version, and we pour ourselves into this task. And a child is something very different from an object.

In one of the essays you talk about the participation of families in school and you say that they should participate less.

— Parents have invaded the school grounds and what is curious is that school was born as the opposite, as a space where the family is not involved, where there are no hierarchies or ideologies that we can inherit from home. The idea of public school is that it is a space that frees them from family particularities. It is the embryo of the future public space. And this eagerness to participate, this demand from the school for families to get involved and participate, is a new submission of the children. In general, today children have practically no blind spots where parents cannot see what they are doing and can exercise their autonomy. There is such a level of control that the entire space of the child is invaded by the presence of fathers and mothers.

Does it translate into a loss of pedagogical authority for teachers?

— Yes, today the authority of teaching professionals is questioned because we parents have interfered. There is the idea that education could be organized by parents. And the idea of school is the opposite, recognizing that there are other authorities, school is about going out into the world and growing up. Parents' WhatsApp groups are instruments of surveillance where all the gossip circulates, children no longer even have their own spaces for gossip.

How did we get here?

— The reasons are very deep and it is the last stage of the individualism that has completely invaded our lives, including parenting. People make a hole in their life to have a child, for a project that truly fulfills them, and if you have it that way you believe that you must dedicate yourself completely to the child. The era of the child as a commodity is also very much affected by this. You see it in birthday parties. Before they were an opportunity for children to be entertained and now they are invaded by parents and whoever does not go to the party seems to be a bad father or a bad mother. It seems that you have to invest all the time you have in the upbringing and surveillance of the child.

We all want autonomous children, but we have them hyper-monitored and geolocated.

— In the book, I make a politically incorrect eulogy of playing hooky, of not going to school. This is now impossible because as a teacher, when I take attendance and mark an absence, the father or mother's phone rings and they know about it. I am not encouraging them to play hooky; what I mean is that with this control, there is no space for transgressions. And now children have moved their transgression to the mobile phone or the tablet, where we can control them less, although they cannot even talk to their friends there without surveillance. The lack of space without the gaze of parents that children have today is a serious problem. And here technology has found a gap; I see it in young parents today, who have all kinds of technological gadgets to monitor the child's optimal state, as if it were an object, a Tamagotchi baby.

How should parenting be? What can we do about it?

— I refrain from giving instructions. Parenting is trapped in this fantasy of hyper-control. What I miss from before is a little more unconsciousness and spontaneity and less attention. We must accept uncertainty more; we cannot control how our children will turn out. But I repeat, all these problems are the result of good intentions and love.

You also provide a critique of certain children's literature.

— There is an invasion of educational and edifying content in children's literature. Parents or educators who ask for books to work on jealousy, fear, grief..., as if books were tools to insert an emotion. It seems that all fiction books are educational manuals that must serve some purpose, and that is how you kill the taste for reading. Before, reading was a way of escape and now it has been left alongside homework; and how is a child supposed to be interested if it is just one more thing they are forced to do?