What Snowplow Parenting Misses

Throughout my training, my psychotherapy mentor Donald Kalsched always reminded me how crucial it is to help patients weather suffering and creatively transform it into something personally meaningful and redemptive.  

Quoting from Peter Schaffer's play Equus, where a nurse is begging a psychiatrist to over-medicate and subdue an anguished boy, the doctor responds decisively and wisely:  

“Look... to go through life and call it yours

- your life -

you first have to get your own pain.

Pain that's unique to you.

You can't just dip into the common bin and say 'That's enough!'”

  This couldn't be more true for snowplow parents, those who have gone above and beyond the call of the helicopter parenting of yesteryear and have favored an approach that clears the road of any and all obstacles.

Despite its hardship, we all need to have our own pain, and really dig into it. As the first noble truth of Buddhism, recognition and awareness of this suffering enables us to connect more deeply with our own feelings, and provides the foundation for compassion for the world. It takes fermentation but it is a wine so worth cultivating! 

In truth, it's completely understandable and humane to want to remove obstacles and challenges for our children. It provokes so much anxiety and uncertainty, leaving parents to wonder whether their children will get stuck, fall behind, or become totally demoralized. 

Parents too might also feel a sense of powerlessness or inadequacy in not being able to prevent these blocks from occurring in the first place. They might even have the misconception that they should be able to control these things, and that there is shame or judgment on them for being unsuccessful. 

It's important not scold ourselves for these honest habits, but rather to be curious about the ways in which they easily obscure the genuine fears and insecurities we all have in dealing with the 'outrageous slings and arrows' that life so often unfairly throws everybody's way. And how much worse are these when they are directed at our children! 

Stepping back for a moment with curiosity, we can see that the snowplow mindset presumes these obstacles as only negative, forgetting they may also be the need which, as the old saying goes, become the 'mother of invention.' 

The faith and encouragement at being able to make something out of these unexpected turn of events forges not only character but also an abiding trust in one's own resourcefulness and ingenuity in opening up new narrative possibilities. In short, it becomes a courageous act of self-creation!

Psychotherapist Mel Schwartz writes in his book The Possibility Principle that we would do better to recognize that the world at a quantum and psychological level is built on a foundation of uncertainty and possibility. Two flip sides of the same coin, there is in fact no need to reconcile them at all. Rather, as child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott says about reality and imagination, just hold them and try not try to fuss and smooth over their contradictions.

  Doing so helps us and our children regain our humanity, not having to be so perfect by rising above the obstacles and uncertainty nor avoiding our responsibility in making real choices, by pretending the difficulties away and seeing only Peter Panlike possibility.

This allows us to be real and imperfect, and in so doing, to make our (and their) pain our own. We become more ourselves and more a part of this wildly unpredictable yet heartbreakingly beautiful world.

And that in the end is worth the struggle..