Don't confuse 'I don't know' with 'I can't know'.
‘You never know,’ said my 4-year-old daughter Leah, sometime in the last year or so, ‘Until you see.’
‘Huh,’ I thought, as the car turned a corner.
‘Who said that?’ I asked.
‘I did!’ she replied.
You never know until you see.
Wow.
That is true.
You never know how many buses you’ll see on the drive to nursery… until you see.
You never know if your nursery key worker will be back from her holiday… until you see.
You never know if the parenting decisions you take will be the best for your children… until you see.
You never know if the plan you’re making or the strategy your’re executing will work out… until you see.
Times when you could know.
The predictable world, as the Cynefin framework might call it.
But we don’t live in the predictable world any more. Almost ever.
In the predictable world, ‘I don’t know’ is a suitable reason to pause action, to stop and think. To fret, even.
But too often we think the challenge for us is that we don’t know; we think it’s possible for us to know in advance.
But in reality, we can’t know.
I’m very grateful that Oliver Burkeman had a small child as he wrote his beautiful meaningful productivity book, 4,000 Weeks, because it means the book is peppered with parenting stories.
Burkeman uses them to demonstrate what I see as his main point: that our obsession with trying to work out what the right thing to do is, or which hack we can use, comes from our unwillingness to acknowledge that one day we will die, and our work here won’t be done.
One of his examples, which any modern middle class parent in the UK will likely know, was around the minefield of ‘sleep training’, in which any parent can lose their sanity and their friends.
Do I train them to sleep by force? Do I let my child ‘cry it out’?
Or, do I keep my child strapped to me, skin to skin, smothering them in my love and cuddles for 2-5 years because of the attachment theory ideas that have permeated popular parenting culture?
I’m exaggerating both ends of the spectrum slightly (but not much), but Burkeman’s point in his book is essentially this: most of the evidence that leads people to certainty that their way is the right way and the other way is basically neglect… is inconclusive. Yes, some children in Romanian orphanages who were left to cry for long periods had significant mental health problems. But they were in Romanian orphanages and were left for hours, not nice flats in Harrogate or Hornsey being left with a white noise machine playing ocean sounds and loving family in every other room in the apartment. Yes, Attachment Theory ideas are incredibly powerful (one of the areas of psychology, as I understand, where experiments can be most reliably repeated with the same results), but even with that we don’t know what is best for a child across their life now, based on inconclusive research and no knowledge about the future.
More than that: we can’t know what is best for the child… until much later.
Another way of looking at that problem is: do we want to risk that they have to deal with being a bit more numbed out over the course of their life? Or a bit more oversensitive? They’re going to be acclimatised by the parenting decisions we make… and at some times that will be an advantage, and at some a disadvantage.
You can’t know which will be best for them. Not in advance.
All you can do is love them. Now, and in the future, when it turns out the way you loved them is sometimes a problem for them.
Personally, I find myself relaxing in this knowledge. The mantra of ‘I can’t know what the right thing to do is’ freeing me of the anxious pressure to work it out, and allowing me to see what I’m doing more clearly, and trust… I’m doing ok.
This isn’t just a parenting problem. It is everywhere. Look at any part of modern life and you’ll find contrasting (exactly equal and opposite) advice being shared.
Diet, exercise, learning, productivity, business and more.
What do you mean she says X is right and he says Y is right? Even though X and Y can’t happen at the same time??!?
Which is the right way?????
Well, you can never know…
Until you see.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.