Why do we tell these stories? The ones that begin: “Veronique is an anxious kid,” or “Annie is our wild one”? Perhaps it starts here: an acquaintance peers down into our wrapped bundle of newborn, third girl, Elise, and says: “Can you tell yet what her personality is?” And instead of the proper answer – a raised eyebrow, a polite deflection – I find myself scrambling: “She watches everything, she’s so observant…” And just like that a trope is born, some search for a unifying theme that will allow us to make meaning of something so confusing and contradictory: the personality of a child.
The tendency to typecast becomes magnified when siblings are involved. Whatever Veronique is, Annie must be Something Different, and Elise must be A New Thing Altogether, as if some law of the universe dictates that no two siblings (perhaps apart from twins) could ever occupy the same emotional landscape. We define the first two in opposition to each other, and we wonder where the third one will fit, running in our minds through all of the traits that aren’t already taken. And we take comfort in the lore of birth order, because our kids (at least the first two) so neatly fit into those boxes as well: our first child, the lover of rules and order, our second child, a goddess of chaos.
It’s comforting isn’t it, to have neat categories? My husband teases me about my need to put household items in bins, with labels. It took me a long time to realize that this need has extended to sorting and classifying my children. I do it to keep the chaos at bay, of course, to fool myself into thinking that I can truly understand them. Because if I can truly understand them then I can shepherd them safely through their lives, then I’ll never truly screw up my parenting, then I’ll be able to apply a perfectly tailored solution to every problem.
I am a lawyer by training, and the way in which I sort my children into neatly labeled boxes brings out the most fundamental and also fundamentally problematic of my lawyerly tendencies. All the time I am engaged in a search for corroborating evidence, and I minimize the facts that do not support how I have classified them. And so, when Veronique cries on the morning of her first day of kindergarten, and when she clings to us as the bus arrives, and when her teacher starts sending home euphoric report cards with “OMG” penciled in next to the sky-high count of words that Veronique can read, my version of her is supported: she is our shy intellectual. And when 18-month-old Annie grabs a random stranger by the hand and pulls him into the crowded bar at the back of a restaurant we’re dining at, and when we have to move her from her crib to a bed at only 22 months because we find her one night balanced like Superman, arms out, on the crib rail, and when she daily reports that she hates the tiny amount of academics at her play-based preschool, I know for sure: she is our wild, school-averse extrovert.
But what of those other stories? Veronique falling in love with school in a heartbeat, and after the one fearful first morning, climbing cheerfully onto the bus without a backwards glance. Veronique at her first violin recital, the youngest student, confidently standing before a roomful of strangers, playing her best. Veronique getting in the pool week after week, all summer, despite her fears. And alternately, Annie, newly four, carrying around a legal pad everywhere she goes (even to bed) and asking every person she encounters – family, friends, and strangers alike – to spell words for her so that she can write them down. Or Annie crying and clinging to us at drop-off time, even months after starting preschool. Or Annie at two, terrified of everything: the ice cream truck, fans, our cat. These stories are every bit as true as the others, and every bit as important to understanding who my girls are, what makes them tick.
Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, authors of the brilliant How To Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk warn against typecasting children, not only because of the ways in which doing so blinds parents to their children’s true strengths and weaknesses and needs and desires, but also because the ways in which our labels get communicated can do lasting harm to a child’s self-esteem, and also have unintended impacts on a child’s behavior. The child who knows her parents think she’s stubborn is going to dig in even more since she’s already been labeled (so why not). The child who knows his parents think he’s not good at school is going to keep failing, because if getting better at school is already hard, swimming upstream against a parent’s assumptions is infinitely more so.
Given the myriad reasons why these labels I put on my kids are doing damage, perhaps I can find my way to a truer perspective: that my kids are complex creatures who deserve better than one-word labels, even if acknowledging and embracing their complexity is scary. And maybe next time someone asks me to take any of my girls and put her in a box with a neat label, I will politely decline, and perhaps I will even have the courage to let her personality become whatever it becomes, which will be messy no doubt, but beautiful.