Ready to Make Your Life Interesting
On other mothers and anxious parenting at the dawn of the 21st century
I am often struck by how much children’s books, or books about children, are also books about parents, or parenting — the parents we want to be, the parents we fear we will become.
I have been working on a piece of fiction. It is ostensibly a middle-grade novel, with a 10-year-old protagonist, but my book is as much about parenting as it is about childhood. And I felt the same thing upon reading Neil Gaiman’s “Coraline,” the children’s novella published in 2002 that later became a stop-motion animated film.
Not only is “Coraline” a book about parents, and parenting, but it is also a book about worrying, about anxiety, about uncertainty. What is skittering about the house at night? What lies behind the locked door, down the dark passageway? Where have Coraline’s parents gone? What does the other mother want? What is beyond the white mist, and how will Coraline get back to her true parents?
It is a cautionary tale, but less so to children than to adults. Unlike the protagonists of earlier fairy tales, Coraline is not the one who has done something wrong. Not really. Well, to be fair, she did open the door, even after the mice said she shouldn’t. So perhaps some of the blame lies at her feet after all.
But it is her parents, really, who have transgressed. Their sin is not evil, but indifference, busyness, distraction. Because after all, if only they hadn’t been so busy, so distracted, so indifferent, she never would have opened the door in the first place.
Kindly but absent-minded
Reviews of “Coraline” at the time of its publication didn’t want to be too hard on the parents, but they are not sympathetic characters. Kirkus called them “loving, but really too busy to play with her.” Writing for The Guardian, Philip Pullman sees them as “kindly but absent-minded and preoccupied with their work.”
They are not bad people, then; they are maybe just bad parents. The mother microwaves sad meals like fish fingers; the dad experiments with what Coraline scathingly calls “recipes” — things like chicken stuffed with prunes, or homemade pizza with lumps of pineapple on it. They leave her alone to go to the shops, and never come back. Neither shows any interest in their own child’s wants or needs. And that, to my eye, is what truly makes “Coraline” a horror story for its time — especially for adults.
“Adults completely love it and they tell me it gave them nightmares,” Gaiman told IndieBound upon the book’s release. “They found it really scary and disturbing, and they're not sure it's a good book for kids, but they loved it.”
I cringed when I read the lines about Coraline’s parents indifferently turning back toward their computer screens, or telling Coraline to “draw something” or “go play.” How many times have I done the same to my own 10-year-old child? We read these lines with horror, as the setup to calamity, in part because of our convictions that tell us a good parent would not let their child venture out into the mist, explore the meadow with the deep well in it, or wander into a parallel world of sinister dimensions.
“The three subconvictions … given by most parents I know for why raising children is harder today, are that the world is so much more competitive today, so much more unsafe today, and so much more confusing today than it was when we were growing up,” writes child and family therapist Dr. David Anderegg in his 2003 book “Worried All the Time: Overparenting in an Age of Anxiety and How To Stop It.”
In its own way, “Coraline” ticks all three boxes of early-21st-century parenting fears. We see Coraline wander into an unsafe and confusing world when her parents quite literally turn their backs. And what she finds there is competition — an other mother, someone who is vying for the job of being Coraline’s parent, tempting her with the most delicious chicken she has ever tasted and, more critically, her full and rapt attention. The other mother stands and waits and watches while Coraline goes outside to play.
Of course, the other mother is evil, and Coraline knows it. But she is less certain about her real parents. When the other mother shows her a vision of them, happy to be rid of her, Coraline says she doesn’t believe it’s real, but “she was not as certain as she sounded. There was a tiny doubt inside her, like a maggot in an apple core.” It was not so hard after all for Coraline to believe that her real mother might smile happily and exclaim, “How nice it is, not to have Coraline anymore.”
Writing about day care, Dr. David Anderegg notes that a surface worry for parents is whether the substitute caregiver will be mean or cruel to their child, or to ignore it. But, he writes, beneath that is a darker fear: “What if the substitute caregiver is too good? What if my baby or child actually likes the substitute caregiver better than she likes me?”
The other mother tries to be too good. She tries to get Coraline to like her better than Coraline’s own parents. That’s the whole point. And it is painfully simple to out-parent the real parents. How little attention the other mother has to pay to Coraline to eclipse the combined efforts of her own real mother and father!
Pigs raising ponies
Coraline is an only child; as such, she is in step with the times. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, the average family size around the turn of the 21st century was about 2.4 people. As Anderegg noted, “the vast majority of American children are now living with either no siblings or one sibling.” Writing for The Guardian in 2002, social affairs editor John Carvel quotes Anne Weyman, chief executive of the Family Planning Association, as saying: "Women are choosing to have fewer children, have them later in life, or remain child-free ... Family life is different to the way it was in the past and the work-life balance is key."
We do not know what Coraline’s parents do for a living, since the story is told through the eyes of a child. They do things in their offices — staring at computer screens or, in the case of her father, reading gardening catalogs and pretending to be working.
And we do not know if they came from large families, but statistically, it is likely that they did. Anderegg notes that the parents of the early 2000s were like “a bunch of pigs raising our own little ponies” — a vivid metaphor illustrating the differences between having been raised in a large family and parenting an only child, or a pair of siblings. “It is absurd to try to use our knowledge of being a child in a large family to raise a child now,” he warns.
Anderegg notes that a hallmark of parenting in the early 21st century is vigilance — the constant state of parental watching and listening that begins when a child is an infant. And, particularly without another child coming into the family to give a sort of second shot at parenting as a whole, this vigilance becomes hard to turn off.
“Worrying is, for many people, the secular form of praying,” he writes. “Instead of doing your part for your child, when you are apart, by asking God to protect him or her, you do the protection yourself, by worrying.”
Coraline’s parents are not worried — and in this story, that is precisely the problem. None of the adults around Coraline, in fact, are vigilant at all, and so she wanders into unspeakable danger. And one could imagine that Coraline’s loneliness, her alone-ness, could be in part because the other kids in her new neighborhood are, perhaps, not encouraged to go exploring vacant lots and empty upstairs flats.
“Parents whose kids come home after school and mess around outside, in the woods or fields, or in the backyard, feel extremely defensive about these choices because they are now unusual,” Anderegg notes. Not Coraline’s parents, of course, but perhaps that is the point. Perhaps they should feel some kind of way about shooing her away to explore on her own.
Gaiman has famously said that writing “Coraline” took him over a decade, beginning in 1990 or ’91. He has also noted that his publisher told him, back in the early ’90s, that his idea was unpublishable, but that “the landscape has changed in the last decade.”
Gaiman was referring to the publishing landscape, but I wonder also if the parenting landscape had not changed, too. I wonder if the delicious horror of what happens to a child who is ignored felt a more gripping tale to those who read it years later, than it had in the early ’90s.
The hand at the window
Coraline sighed. “You really don’t understand, do you?” she said. “I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn’t mean anything. What then?”
Coraline’s story has a happy ending, of course, because it is a story for children. She outsmarts the other mother, saves her parents and puts everything back right. Her parents “never seemed to remember anything about their time” in the strange other world that lay beyond the locked door.
Even if Coraline’s parents did not learn anything from the two days they spent away from the real world, I still read this story as a warning to anxious parents. Don’t turn your back, it suggests. The other mother is waiting to lure your child away. The hand is still tapping at the window. But I think the story carries a different warning too. I think it tells us that we must not worry too much, lest we become like the other mother, and build our worlds completely around our children, desperate at the heart and fuzzy at the edges.
“Being raised by worried parents gives children a sense of real power over adults,” warns David Anderegg at the close of his 2002 book. “Children can start to feel like they can make or break a parent’s day, week, or year. … It is just too much. It is too much power to have.”
This is precisely the power Coraline has over the other mother, and it is terrible. It is too much. Coraline knows that being given everything she could ever want is actually a nightmare, not a dream.
Anderegg suggests that we actually should be like Coraline’s parents; that we should be less curious, more willing to engage in what he calls “benign neglect,” and what I think of as “being thoroughly unbothered and thoroughly in the other room.” And Gaiman’s story can also remind us that our children are, in fact, capable of great acts of cunning, bravery and kindness. But so often, our fear remains. What if.
So we walk the tightrope between hovering and neglect; between the parents coming into Anderegg’s therapy office in tears because another child didn’t laugh at their kid’s joke, and Coraline’s kindly, absent-minded caregivers.
Deep down, I know who my child’s other mother would be. I can well imagine the things she would offer my child that I don’t. But I hope, like Coraline, my daughter will realize that it wouldn’t really be fun if she just got everything she ever wanted, “just like that.” I hope she knows that whatever’s here, on this side of the door, is real, and worth it.
I really enjoyed this. I was a big proponent of benign neglect myself, partly because of my own upbringing and partly because I'm quite lazy and not very anxious! But also, in middle class British circles at least, there's a cachet in benign neglect (or there was 15 years ago, it may be different now with the horrors to be found in an unbounded internet) - a sort of performance of insouciance that only works if you actually have a lot of privilege and your kids already have a massive head start in material terms. For example, it was regarded as pretty embarrassing to strive over homework or hire private tutors, which is fine when you come from the sort of family where all the parents and grandparents have a university education and your house is full of books, and statistically your child is already likely to be somewhere near the top of the class before anyone's picked up a pencil.
This was a real goodie, I have to read coraline now!