I.
The issue of how to best cope with the responsibility of having kids used to be labeled childrearing or puericulture. The shift to parenting is an interesting development. It de-centers the child and expectations on the child’s pace and schedule of development and re-centers on the adult’s development. In vulgata-deleuzeana this could be called his becoming-parent, but the this process-nature is more than adequately captured (if through a sly shift — a chroma shift) by the verb itself, “parenting”.
Like anything else, this has shades; rubatos and apoggiaturas; versions, subversions; epideictic and apodictic forms. There are radical forms where the child’s wild flowering is taken to be absolute and not to be mucked with; this extreme approach is held back by l’uomo qualunque‘s notions of adulthood (and the continued expectation that anything and everything you do as a parent is a tectonic shock towards your children’s eventual “topography”). But there’s more than a seed of the radical view in what’s presented to me, in my direct experience as a father, as mainstream parenting philosophy.
The emergence of preschool from very early ages — at least in professional and upper middle classes — has its own effect on our conceptions of parenting. On the one hand, preschool handles a whole bunch of tasks related to pressing kids into shape; parents should be thankful enough, but (excepting the kind of pathological neglect that I know exists, but have never seen up close) they’re really placated only by the fact that these encounters with pure authority take place in the best of environments: surrounded by a handful of kids his age and interspersed with communal games such as making art; listening to music; chasing ants to find their anthills.
On the other, the communal aspect of preschool presses into parents a view of the child process that can be quite unlike the one presented by the grandfolks. What, at our preschool we were quite literally told the parents that we, the adults, not the children, should be the center of home life. To that end, they educate parents on how to best deal, for example, with toddler tantrums — yet they never go as far as saying “play with your kids too”. That, we had to figure out improvisationally.
Luckily enough, kids readily take the role of chief architects of their own development: at their mercy, they may allow us to read as they play on their own and, likewise at their discretion, come to us for affection as the need arises. (Have you tried to give a child more affection than it wants?) How silly the idea, current mores tell us, is “childrearing” — when being a parent is a mere matter of standing your ground and trusting your gut (we give the kids a fixed “screen time” window because… I don’t know, it seems best).
The outstanding issue no one is really prepared to fully manage is secure attachment. Roughly speaking, one promotes secure attachment by letting them go and holding them when they come back needing to be mommied or daddied. Yet the worst-kept secret about parenthood is that it can be difficult being in a consistent good mood while taking care of children day after day (even moreso on weekends and holidays). This is the crux of the parent-centered message of Tom Hodgkinson’s The Idle Parent (which may be the esoteric secret behind the preschool’s “adult-centered home” philosophy): if you’re not glad to help your kids when they need it, you’re overdoing it. Hodgkinson’s glorious formula: bad parents are the best parents. Best to send your kids to school in their PJs (they will complain when they become self-conscious about this) than to freak out about managing clothes. Best to take your kids to run errands or random goings-out than to keep trying to produce a child-centered world (e.g. with nannies) outside preschool. Life is a freaking adventure and we the parents are freaking scared as we slide towards middle age — kids are having freaking fun; only childish things have the potential to bore them.
II.
I want to hijack this widespread — yet inordinately specific and counter to the best intuitions I had before becoming a father — view of parenting to bury “quability theory” as such. To be perfectly honest: while the notion of quability has always been key to the off-kilter, far-from-rigorous approach we’ve taken to theory, “quability theory” is no pons asinorum: the very use of “theory” in this expression doesn’t consist. Early talk of “quables” is particularly embarassing — a Platonistic backdoor — but outgrowing that (more or less pari passu with eschewing the need for face-value intelligibility) has only made the problem more indirect. Whatever is amenable to being made consistent (casual talk of “quability conditions”) is vague and a little unnecessary to the context; whatever is a proper attempt to push through never takes off. Not everything written in this latter mode is bad: take the discussion on Capullo de Jerez (a minor figure in flamenco jerezano). But these few good instances all leech off lived experiences while handwaving a promise of a genericizing move.
The failure to make good on our IOUs may be symptomatic of much worse. This idea that lived experience can be genericized could be a fumbled defense mechanism (a hypostasized backdoor, so to speak) that envinces a fundamental interdiction — the is/ought firewall. In other words: there’s an apparent inability to effect a genericizing move across “quability flamenco” and “quability parenting”; this inability points to* an unsurmountable deadlock, a knot that can’t be untied, a door that can’t be unlocked, a sea that can’t be swum. It’s possible the asemic horizon is utterly inconsistent with lived experiences because they can’t be meaningfully stripped of meaning; because genericization is always a piling-on, a “semic fattening”.
III.
Contrary to “semic fattening”, the promise of genericization was always to build up to something that could be swapped for fiber-thin generality. But the paradox in “quability parenting” — whether or not in radical Hodgkinsonian form — seems to be always that the (ethically true) avoidance of overparenting creates more work (however more meaningful) than just embracing overparenting and puffing in exhaustion. Funny how the chips fall down: the embrace of overparenting is the true avoidance — not only of the libertango existential freedom of being held accountable for however you manage to fuck the kids up, but more importantly of the parallel libertango freedom of adulthood as such.
Compared with older systems like “Dr. Spock platonism”, quability parenting (and note this a catchphrase rather than a theoretical invention, as it refers to the dominant form in my social circle and the social circles of my children) is indeed a genericizing rather than generalizing move, but in the same motion that it strips away rigid notions (such that the child is now not a defective copy of the Platonic ideal, but a whirlwind emergent force of its own), it “thickens” the parental role. Again, we say parenting and not childrearing now because all the work lies in making yourself a body without organs parent.
Of course, an optimistic take on this might be that societal trends towards quability parenting may be symptomatic of a deeper tectonic shift. After all: the adult-centered approach has its narcissistic attractions, yet (excepting sociopathic disengagement) these have their own dialectical development: the fact that kids grow on their own displaces the narcissist from his rightful place as the hero of his own story. Instead, the practical injunction that kids should live within the general architecture of the adult’s world, combined with the incessant stream of demands by the child, forces the issue of consensus. This is not to say that parenting leads to General Axiology, but the move away from childrearing may be an early rumble of something else.
* Jan 2025 note: “points to” here may be better expressed as “is germinated by”. This raises the novel (albeit quite possibly irrelevant) issue of “negative germinations” (a deadlock into an inability). But this alone is rudderless; the refutation of the deadlock (the untying of knots and so on) says nothing on this own about the power to genericize. “True theorems have corollaries” — the “inability” here implies a disengagement, an abandonment, an informal refutation, even.
asemic horizon 