"Negative narcissist" parents

I have a friend who helps coach a local track club, which includes children from high-school age all the way down to eight year-olds. Many of the children have a good time, she says, but some are there only because their parents want to see them win. Often times, her job is counselor more than coach, consoling girls who are crying because their parents have yelled at them not to be wimps, or walking beside children whose fuel is less physical than a growing emotional hatred for the adults who force them to engage in this activity that they don't even like. These particular parents, she notes, have several things in common, like the fact that they tend to dress as if they are the ones competing, their loud declarations about their own athletic prowess, and their frequent disregard for their children, beyond yelling at them when they lag behind and clapping for them when they break the tape.

In a recent conversation with Harvard psychologist and author Howard Gardner, I asked him what advice he has for parents. Gardner, some of you may know, developed the concept of "multiple intelligences," the theory that instead of just the math, logic, and linguistic skills measured by traditional IQ tests, there are other intelligences, like musical, spatial, interpersonal, and so on. Gardner's theory has sparked considerable education debate and discussion for the past quarter century, and so I was curious what he might say about raising children.

Gardner told me we should avoid "positive and negative narcissism." Positive narcissism, he explained, is manifested in a drive to make our children excel at whatever we are (or were) good at. Negative narcissism results in driving them to succeed where we failed. Both, of course, originate in selfishness, and describe perfectly the parents who make my friend's coaching job so difficult.

Anyone involved in high-school athletics has seen parents (and coaches) like that, and they are a disgusting lot. It was only when recently reading Exodus, however, that I made a connection: "You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath..." Parents who drive their children to be what they imagine they once were, or to be what they themselves wanted to be, are fashioning idols. How fitting, in our narcissistic age, that a dominant idol is not one of fertility, or protection, or victory, but the self.

It's easy to judge these egregious examples, but then I began to think about my relationships with my own children. My wife and I joke about the coming blessed day, when all of them are able to read to themselves. Oh, the blissful rainy Saturdays, all of us sprawled about our living room in front of a fire, reading Dostoevsky and Goudge and Percy and Agee!

But what if one of them doesn't care to read Robert Penn Warren? What if he decides that "genuine" literature is boring next to Robert Ludlum or (horrors!) L. Ron Hubbard? What if he prefers Band of Brothers to The Persian Wars? Become a Better You to Fear and Trembling? Almost as bad, what if he doesn't care to read at all? What if his heart's desire is met by rebuilding engines, or (horrors, again!) slinging a ball at a hoop?

I suppose I have my own idols, my own sense of what I want my children to be, derived in many ways from what I imagine I am and could be. It's so much easier to smash someone else's idols, isn't it?

What I try to remember is that they are gifts, these children, given to us for a precious short time, and it is our job to train them up in the way they should go -- not the way we would go, or the way we imagine would lead to greatest applause for us as parents, or least anxiety (think, here of the parents and grandparents to missionaries in dangerous parts of the world). Train them up in the way they should go, which means casting down our idols.

Sometimes I believe it's a full-time occupation, this casting down of idols, for just as soon as I think I have my shelves cleared, I spy another one lurking in the dust and shadows. So, what idols do you need to cast off? Are you training your children in the way they should go? Keep pressing toward the goal.