How Should I Harm My Children?

We, as parents, are called to harm our children.

This is a provocative way of stating something that I think is not controversial: Sometimes we must cause our children temporary and minor pain in order to prevent them suffering greater pain. When we deny them sweets, we are causing them the sadness of not eating something tasty that will give them pleasure; we do this not because we are sadists who like to see our children suffer, but because we don’t want our children to experience the ill effects of eating too much sugar. We deliberately expose them to the chance of minor adverse effects and the (small) chance of major adverse effects of vaccines when we take them to get their shots, because by doing so, we are preventing the much greater chance of them suffering the adverse effects of the illnesses being prevented. When we make our children turn off the TV and run around, we are preventing them enjoying the entertainment that TV provides because we want them to develop their minds and their bodies. When we delay gratification, we are teaching them an extremely important skill that will help them to make good choices in life.

The fact that parenting is a tradeoff between harms explains, I think, why there can be so much dispute over a particular decision that seems trivial to nonparents. Let us consider that battleground of parenting, The Juice Question. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, a whole piece of fruit is much better for children than is juice, which is sugary and acidic and provides lots of calories without satisfying the appetite. This is a reversal of earlier opinion, which held that juice is good for you because of all the vitamins in it. Parents have the following sets of choices:

a) Allowing unlimited access to juice; if it’s real fruit juice, the children will be obtaining the vitamin C and other nutrients in the juice, but at the cost of wearing down their tooth enamel and taking in empty calories.

b) Allowing limited access to juice, which may include watering down the juice. Since children tend to enjoy juice, they may not replace the nutrients in the juice with suitable amounts of vegetables or even whole fruit, but they’re not expecting sugary drinks as a matter of course.

c) Never keeping juice in the house, but allowing it as an occasional treat at a restaurant or a friend’s house.

d) Treating juice like rat poison and going to extremes to prevent this liquid from ever crossing the child’s lips.

Now there are harms associated with all of these positions, but I would judge most harm occurs at extremes a) and d). Juice really is quite sugary, and in my opinion children shouldn’t drink it every day in place of plain water or milk. (But milk is another controversy.) However, making juice the Forbidden Fruit (drink) is likely to backfire; either the child may develop an exaggerated fear of juice, perhaps making himself unpopular as he lectures upon the evils of OJ, or the child may, upon growing up, overindulge in juice in an effort to make up for his deprived childhood. Or perhaps the child, never having acquired a taste for juice, may choose soda regularly instead, which has all of the detriments and none of the benefits of juice.

Nonparents may read this foregoing and think that the juice question is far too minor and petty to get worked up over. But at least in wealthy countries where children are highly likely to survive to adulthood, I do assure you that parents are constantly agonizing over parental choices, starting from infancy–breast, formula, combo? Sleep training or not? Feed on demand or a schedule? What about cosleeping? Sometimes the stakes really are high. More often a particular choice matters little in the long term, but as parents we are constantly aware that we are navigating sets of possible harms to our children, and trying to minimize harm while maximizing wellbeing. We put sunscreen on our children’s skin to lessen their odds of developing skin cancer, but ensure that they take in adequate Vitamin D to offset the harm done by preventing the sun from producing endogenous Vitamin D.

Differences in parenting are often explained by the different risk assessments parents have: One may believe that the psychological benefits of cosleeping may offset the risks of suffocation and SIDS, whereas another may come to the opposite conclusion. This also explains why parents can be so repulsed by parenting that is different than their own; if you really believe that vaccine-preventable diseases are no big deal and that the additives in the vaccines might hurt your child’s neurological development, then of course you’d be horrified that public health bodies so heavily encourage you to vaccinate your children. On the other hand, if you believe (as I do) that vaccine-preventable diseases can cause significant morbidity and mortality and that vaccines are safe and effective, then of course you’d be horrified that your friend is encouraging everyone to forgo shots in favor of essential oils.

Even when parents agree upon the same facts, they may still make different decisions for their children. Healthy adults harm themselves deliberately. Exercise involves straining one’s body, and causing small amounts of damage to our muscles so that our body may repair them. Without exercise, our bodies atrophy and become weak and dysfunctional. Arthritis makes exercise painful, but this exercise will help improve the arthritic person’s overall pain level. But a person with severe heart disease or some other condition that limits exercise must make different decisions to keep his body in the best possible health than someone without that same condition.

In the same way, the individual parents of individual children may decide to do something different than other parents, and believe that they are doing the best they can for their children without necessarily condemning others’ choices. Very generally speaking, all children need food, shelter, medical attention, education, love, and security. The ways in which these children will obtain the “best” upbringing, however, vary greatly from parent to parent, and from child to child. All of us parents–every single one of us, no matter how excellent and well-meaning we may be–will make mistakes with our children. But it is right and good that we consider how we may do the best for our children, and this world being what it is this means how we shall choose to harm our children.