Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

by Andrew Solomon

Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity.

we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do.

Our children are not us: they carry throwback genes and recessive traits and are subject right from the start to environmental stimuli beyond our control.

Though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us.

Because of the transmission of identity from one generation to the next, most children share at least some traits with their parents. These are vertical identities.

Attributes and values are passed down from parent to child across the generations not on...

Ethni...

Language

Religion

Nationality

someone has an inherent or acquired trait that is foreign to his or her parents and must therefore acquire identity from a peer group.

horizontal

sexuality

A child conceived in rape is born into emotional challenges that his own mother cannot know, even though they spring from her trauma.

those parents frequently prioritize functioning in the hearing world, expending enormous energy on oral speech and lipreading.

While some deaf people are good at lipreading and produce comprehensible speech, many do not have that skill, and years go by as they sit endlessly with audiologists and speech pathologists instead of learning history and mathematics and philosophy.

would be better off straight and sometimes torment them by pressing them to conform.

A child’s marked difference from the rest of the family demands knowledge, competence, and actions that a typical mother and father are unqualified to supply, at least initially.

Vertical identities are usually respected as identities; horizontal ones are often treated as flaws.

Many conditions are both illness and identity, but we can see one only when we obscure the other. Identity politics refutes the idea of illness, while medicine shortchanges identity. Both are diminished by this narrowness.

I thought that someone whose core being is deemed a sickness and an illegality may struggle to parse the distinction between that and a much greater crime. Treating an identity as an illness invites real illness to make a braver stand.

peace. In the gnostic gospel of St. Thomas, Jesus says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.”

The disability rights movement seeks, at the most basic level, to find accommodation of difference rather than erasure of it.

Members of minorities who wish to preserve their self-definition need to define themselves in opposition to the majority. The more accepting the majority is of them, the more rigorously they need to do so, because their separate identity collapses if they countenance its integration into the majority world.

You are never to use the word normal, and you are certainly never to use the word abnormal.

impairment, the organic consequence of a condition, and disability, the result of social context.

Recent academic work suggests that people who know their condition to be irreversible are happier than those who believe their condition may be ameliorated. In such cases, ironically, hope may be the cornerstone of misery.

Fixing is the illness model; acceptance is the identity model; which way any family goes reflects their assumptions and resources.

Deformity has been brought into beauty’s fold, a catalyst for justice rather than an affront to it, and society has changed enough to marvel at a dancer on crutches, a model with prosthetic legs, an athlete whose speed relies on carbon-fiber calves.

Those disabled people, however, may be angered by the prospect of interventions that would make them function more like nondisabled people without mitigating the hard reality of their disabling condition.

The principle extrapolates from wrongful death, which results from physician negligence, and wrongful birth, which can be claimed when a family has not received adequate prenatal counseling.

Wrongful-birth suits are brought by parents in their own names and will compensate only for costs they incur as parents—usually for care and support until the child is eighteen.

Wrongful life compensates the disabled person rather than his or her parents and may enta...

cover not a loss but a gain: the fact of some...

Disabled French people went ballistic about the implication that being dead was better than being handicapped.

Curlender v. Bio-Science Laboratories.

Although wrongful-life cases address an ontological question about what kind of life is worth living, this is hardly what prompts them.

stating in legal documents that they wish their children had

never been born.

“If something or someone doesn’t work, it’s in a state of grace, progress, and evolution. It will attract love and empathy. If it does work, it has merely completed its job and is probably dead.”

The world is made more interesting by having every sort of person in it. That is a social vision. We should alleviate the suffering of each individual to the outer limits of our abilities.

Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.

Intersectionality is the theory that various kinds of oppression feed one another—that you cannot, for example, eliminate sexism without addressing racism.

The syndrome encompasses a highly variable group of symptoms and behaviors, and we have little understanding of where it is located in the brain, why it occurs, or what triggers it.

Autism is deemed a pervasive disorder because it affects almost every aspect of behavior, as well as sensory experiences, motor functioning, balance, the physical sense of where your own body is, and inner consciousness.

the syndrome is rooted in a disruption of social function.

Autistic children and adults often think in an extremely concrete manner and may have difficulty understanding metaphor, humor, irony, and sarcasm.

Autistic people are frequently confounded by things that please most other people.

autism is defined as a spectrum that includes varying severity of varying symptoms.

The cliché about autism is that the syndrome impedes the ability to love, and I began this research interested in how much a parent could contrive to love a child who could not return that affection.