A friend was visiting New York from Indonesia this week and we took my kids to the park. Although she grew up in New York, she is far removed from the parenting norms that have taken hold here, as they have in every place where the word “parent” is a verb as well as a noun, and while there were many things on which she might have remarked what struck her most was the word “amazing”.
“A girl just asked her dad to watch her jump in the air,” said my friend, “and he turned to her and said, ‘Amazing!’” She looked at me expectantly. “What?” “Well, it’s not amazing, is it?” “I guess not.”
Inflationary praise leads to depressed young adults who have no executive skills. This is what college recruiters increasingly tell us. Yet once the habit of saying “amazing” has formed, it turns out to be hard to drop. Lavishing praise on one’s kids is, it is assumed, an extension of narcissism, an urge to find in one’s children the genius one ascribes to oneself, or else some calculation based on overuse, in popular psychology, of the word “self-esteem”.
My hunch is that it is neither of these things, but is in fact related to the guilt many of us feel for being unavailable to our children for large parts of the day, or else distracted when we are with them. The dad in question, I noted, was, when his daughter had moved away, once again on his phone. In this context, “amazing” sounds to me like an effort to cram a day’s worth of quiet confidence-building into a single, overburdened word of praise.
Later my daughter climbed a steep pyramid of steps then turned to look in my direction. “Wow, amazing!” I said, and my friend gave me a look. “But what else should I say?” “Just say, ‘Good’,” she suggested, as in “good for you, you have exceeded your limitations”, rather than “what you have just done is an extraordinary feat”.
Post-pregnancy literature
Since having kids I can’t eat sardines, or sweet potato, or several other things that made me nauseous during pregnancy, and my taste in movies has changed, too; I have even less tolerance for violence or long films about the mafia. More surprising is the realisation that things I used to hold dear now actively annoy, in particular the poet ee cummings. Even typing those lower-case letters fills me with low-level rage and when I happened upon one of his poems recently – the one about the little lame balloon man who goes far and wee – rather than being charmed, I thought: oh for goodness’ sake.
At the other end of the scale, Don DeLillo, so brilliant to me in my 20s and 30s, now feels over-stylised, too clean and sharp to allow in the dirty business of living. That these dislikes are contradictory – get to the point, but not too much to the point – only makes it more confusing, and this feels to me like a dangerous period in which any day now I’ll start reading Trollope.
In her own words
I admire Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian journalist and Nobel prizewinning oral historian, who is so internationally successful these days the inevitable backlash is under way. I enjoyed her books Zinky Boys, about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and Voices From Chernobyl, and now her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War, has been published for the first time in English.
It comes in for more negative scrutiny than her others. Last year in the New Republic, under the headline Witness Tampering, the writer Sophie Pinkham suggested that acclaim for Alexievich was, if not undeserved, then problematic, as the author relied increasingly on anonymous and contextless material that amounted to “collages of unattributed quotations”.
Alexievich’s own introductions, meanwhile, have become increasingly grandiose. By her own assessment, the writer is no mere recorder of oral history, but describes her enterprise as one in which “I track down the human spirit” – the kind of talk that, Dwight Garner noted in the New York Times last week, “would have gotten Studs Terkel bounced from his local Chicago bar”.
• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
.jpg?w=600)
