(You can listen to this newsletter as an audio recording, right here. It’s just shy of 14 mins long)
Hello friends,
How are you all this week?
Yesterday I was reminded about my writing on the adult gaze, and I thought I would write some more about it. I did a little search and actually, there isn’t that much out there about this.
I write about it subjectively, because it is personal. But I’m also tempted to generalize based on my experience with my own children, my observations and the work I have done with children in early years settings, and messages I’ve received from others. None of this is “scientific” - it is very much qualitative and narrational and based on my personal thoughts and interpretations. I don’t believe this makes it any less valuable.
I defined what I mean by the adult gaze in my blog post. It’s complex and layered and it’s a term that holds so much. I worry that perhaps it holds too much! Like, perhaps it’s just too broad.
But anyway - what I want to talk about here is about the adult gaze as it shows up in our own homes. Yep - like, me and you and my husband and your partner and any other adult that regularly interacts with your children. But mostly, me and you.
How do we look at our own, unique child? There is a place for sitting back and looking at how we perceive children in general. I will talk about this more soon too. But right now, I’m going to dig into how I look at my own child. How you look at your own child. Specifically.
What Toni Morrison said in this interview, recounted by Brené Brown, really stayed with me. What does my face say, and what do my words and actions say when I see my child? If you see yourself in this (as I did - both as a child and as an adult) then you’ll understand how powerful it is to literally work on changing the way we LOOK at our child - and what we say and do as a result of that gaze.
This seems so obvious. Of course we love our children, of course we should look at them with love. But for those of us healing from a life of self-criticism and self-shaming and being hard on ourselves, it’s not easy. Because in its deepest, most fundamental way, the adult gaze is the gaze we turn upon ourselves.
The adult gaze is, to some extent, not about our children at all! It’s about the way we as adults look upon ourselves and rush to judgment, criticism, shaming and belittling. It's about the ways we were treated as children, that we’ve rationalized and brought with us to adulthood, and continue to perpetuate on ourselves. It’s about our inner wounds and the way we regard and speak to our inner child. Does this sound familiar? Do you have this inner adult gaze?
I know some of us do not - you look upon yourselves with love and positive regard, and as a result you can turn the same gaze upon your children. Perhaps you were just born this way, or you were raised with love, or perhaps you have worked super hard to get there.
I feel like I’m inching closer to that, but for the longest time was categorically not that person. I was the person that looked at something I’d done and immediately picked out the flaws. That looked at a picture of myself and saw only where I was lacking. That self-sabotaged, and felt guilty, and shamed myself. I mean I’m making it sound like I’m this new person now - I’m not, I still do ALL those things, but just less, and less often.
All of this is not just me (or you) - it is the adult gaze within us. It is a societal adult gaze that is embedded in systems that are patriarchal and ableist and discriminatory in so many ways. The more identities we claim that fall outside of the “norm” these systems were built to promote (and continue to be very successful at promoting) the more you will feel this.
For me, it always felt like a literal gaze. Like someone - actual people - were watching. Perhaps this is because I’ve always been sensitive, or perhaps this is because that is what going around in the world actually feels like, a lot of the time. The truth is, most people actually don’t care, until they do. So telling people that “nobody cares what you do, so just do you” is disingenuous. People whose job it is to maintain the status quo, do care. That is literally their job - caring about anything potential threatening. That is the job of the adult gaze - it is embedded in systems and perpetuated by the people in them. Unconsciously, much of the time.
And the issue with this is that when I had my own children, I turned around and projected that same gaze onto them. Unconsciously, of course. I didn’t realise what I was doing - but they did. Especially my daughter. She felt it. She felt the tone in my eyes when I looked at her, she felt my judgment even when I said nothing, she understood what it was that I approved of and what it was that I didn’t approve of, even if I had never actually said it. She got good at showing me the side of herself that she understood, based on my words and actions, was “acceptable” and therefore worthy of love (and hiding the side of herself that, according to my adult gaze, was not).
The way we look at our children matters. It can hurt them and disempower them and shame them. It can have long-lasting effects - the effects we are carrying into adulthood ourselves, because we felt it growing up!
I recognise some children don’t feel this, and some adults don’t project it. I also know that our regard can be positive. We can project unconditional love and admiration and wonder and gratitude and all the warm fuzzy things. This is not the adult gaze - this is unconditional positive regard, or perhaps the parent gaze or the loving gaze.
I also want to recognise that the adult gaze is systemic - we can work to deschool and heal individually, of course, but ultimately the adult gaze is woven into our very systems and it shows up as adultism, discrimination against children, double standards, the evaluative gaze of school, the silencing of children’s voices, the projecting of conceptions of the child that strip children of humanity, emotions on a par with adult ones, and the ability to construct their own learning and identities.
It’s not enough, and it’s also not fair, to put the burden of deconstructing the adult gaze on individual people. It is just much deeper, more complex, more insidious than that.
There’s a lot. But I’ll stop here. I’ll say more about the adult gaze we see embedded in systems and institutions another time.
I’m no expert but…
I’ve been reflecting on a point someone raised last week in my stories, which is this: How will children learn to do the annoying, ordinary, mundane stuff of everyday life if they are not made to do it growing up?
I bet you all have thoughts about this. I would love to hear them. Here are mine.
I believe this person was talking about stuff like making their bed, doing laundry, cleaning, paying bills, food shopping, daily admin and self-care and care of others and your living space.
My first point is I am not sure there is a direct relationship or even a correlation between children who grow up doing the boring, mundane stuff, and children who do not. This is purely anecdotal but my siblings and I did very little housework growing up, and here I am doing the laundry and dishes and taking my kids to the doctor and running errands. This stuff isn’t rocket science - it’s not like a couple decades of laundry will somehow make you immune to the drudgery of it later on in life. If laundry is boring for you as a child, it will probably forever be boring for you. But at some point you’ll realise that if you don’t do it, nobody else will, and so you’ll find a way to make it a part of your life.
I’m not sure if there’s a study on this - to see if children who did chores growing up became adults who more willingly do chores. But I’m willing to bet that it literally makes no difference. Boring, mundane stuff will always be boring and mundane. It won’t get any less boring because you grew up doing it.
As an aside - I’m not saying children shouldn’t do chores. I expect my children to do stuff around the house because we share a living space, and so we all help out. I also think it’s important for them to know HOW to do stuff, even if they don’t do it with any regularity. Every family will figure this out in their own way. All I’m saying is that I don’t believe that doing this day in day out will somehow immunize my children against future boredom.
Basically - it is not hard to learn to do laundry and wash dishes. When they need to do it, they will do it. And also - I still don’t make my bed some days. It’s my bed - I can do whatever I want with it! If I don’t care, then no-one else should (other than my husband perhaps, in which case he can make it himself).
Sooo.. if we assume that children don’t have to be coerced into doing chores in order to guarantee future adults who do chores, perhaps we can look at the whole “how will they learn to do things they don’t want to do” thing in a different way. More from a long-term perspective rather than something we do for short-term gain eg. having a made bed every day.
Self-determination theory is one of my favourite things. It basically states that for intrinsic motivation to happen, we need 3 things to be present: mastery, relatedness and autonomy. For anything that relies on intrinsic motivation (such as participating in your community, or pursuing an interest) this theory offers a lot of good guidance.
But what about the stuff that, realistically, our kids will never be intrinsically motivated to do? I can safely say I’ll never ever feel an inner drive to do laundry for no reason other than my love of laundry. Never. What about those things? We can’t be intrinsically motivated for everything - it just isn’t realistic. Some stuff just sucks and we still have to do it.
I have two points: the one above, that says it’s a long game, our children will see us doing the shitty stuff and will eventually do it themselves.
Point two: they will eventually hit a point where extrinsic motivation kicks in. Like the example of having no more clothes to wear, or being hungry because there’s no food in the fridge. I do a version of this at home: when they forget to put their clothes in the laundry basket, those clothes don’t get washed. They will still have clothes to wear but perhaps not their favorite t-shirt. That’s extrinsic motivation right there - you clean up so you can wear your favorite t-shirt.
So yeah. I’m a fan of intrinsic motivation but I think its unrealistic to expect our children to be intrinsically motivated to want to help out at home or even in the community IN EVERY WAY. There might be some things they do out of the goodness of their own heart, because they genuinely want to help. But most things just won’t get done because we’re doing them. And we’re doing them because there’s no-one else who will do them otherwise!
This question is somewhat related to the “how will they do hard things” question but the difference, for me, is that we all often do hard things from intrinsic motivation. Like right now - writing this is challenging but I’m doing it because I love it, it brings me joy. So I draw a distinction between boring, mundane things that we all just need to do in life, and hard, challenging stuff we might want to do but struggle to do because it’s hard.
Lastly - I think this loops back to the adult gaze, and the way we often turn it on ourselves. We view ourselves with judgment and can be prone to shaming ourselves as parents if we’re not making our kids do the things that society tells us they should be doing. We can also end up projecting it onto our children - seeing them as lazy and selfish because they aren’t doing laundry or making their beds every day. When really, it’s more a matter of needs than one of inherent character flaws (in ourselves and our children).
Please, write me back if you have a whole other take on this. I want to hear it! I’m coming at it from the viewpoint that we don’t pay or coerce our children to do chores that I do for free, or their father does for free. This is our personal choice. This is how I square it in my head. Perhaps you do one of those two things? Or you have a whole other take on the “how will they learn to do boring stuff” thing? Or you think the boring stuff and hard stuff debate is actually just one thing, not two separate ones?
I’d love to know. Email me back or find me on instagram.
Thanks for reading!
Fran x