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,

Children whose defining quality annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do.

Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.

The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott once said, “There is no such thing as a baby—meaning that if you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone. A baby cannot exist alone but is essentially part of a relationship.”

Insofar as our children resemble us, they are our most precious admirers, and insofar as they differ, they can be our most vehement detractors.

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.

Whereas families tend to reinforce vertical identities from earliest childhood, many will oppose horizontal ones. Vertical identities are usually respected as identities; horizontal ones are often treated as flaws.

Having exceptional children exaggerates parental tendencies; those who would be bad parents become awful parents, but those who would be good parents often become extraordinary.

To look deep into your child’s eyes and see in him both yourself and something utterly strange, and then to develop a zealous attachment to every aspect of him, is to achieve parenthood’s self-regarding, yet unselfish, abandon.

We are overextended in the travails of our own situation, and making common cause with other groups is an exhausting prospect.

“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.”

There is no contradiction between loving someone and feeling burdened by that person; indeed, love tends to magnify the burden.

For those who love, there should be no shame in being exhausted—even in imagining another life.

The Nobel Prize–winning geneticist James D. Watson, who has a son with schizophrenia, once told me that Bruno Bettelheim, the midcentury psychologist who asserted that autism and schizophrenia were caused by poor parenting, was “after Hitler, the most evil person of the twentieth century.”

Parents whose expectations are diverted by children with horizontal identities need resilience to rewrite their future without bitterness.

“The great surprise of resilience research is the ordinariness of the phenomenon.”

Resilience used to be posited as an extraordinary trait, seen in the Helen Kellers of the world, but cheery recent research suggests that most of us have the potential for it, and that cultivating it is a crucial part of development for everyone.

The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote, “It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or pessimism that makes our ideas.”

people who have won the lottery are, in the long run and on average, only marginally happier than amputees—people in each category having adjusted rather quickly to their new normal.

The potential pitfalls are wishful thinking, self-blame, escapism, substance abuse, and avoidance; resources might include faith, humor, a strong marriage, and a supportive community, along with financial means, physical health, and higher education.

Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell, both academics in disability studies, contend that those who seek cures and treatments often “subjugate the very populations they intend to rescue.”

In the vast literature about disability rights, scholars stress the separation between impairment, the organic consequence of a condition, and disability, the result of social context.

The philosopher Philip Kitcher has referred to genetic screening as “laissez-faire eugenics.”

Some activists have argued against the entire Human Genome Project, maintaining that it implies the existence of a perfect genome. The Genome Project has been construed this way partly because its authors pitched it to funders as a way to cure maladies, without acknowledging that there is no universal standard of well-being.

In the name of biological and historical urgency, it justified the racisms of the state.”

If, as Foucault had also argued, “life is what is capable of error” and error itself is “at the root of what makes human thought and its history,” then to prohibit error would be to end evolution. Error lifted us out of the primordial slime.

Most adults with horizontal identities do not want to be pitied or admired; they simply want to get on with their lives without being stared

Arlene Mayerson, an expert in disability rights law, contends that benevolence and good intentions have been among disabled people’s worst enemies throughout history.

Disabled people are protected by fragile laws, and if they are judged to have an identity rather than an illness, they may forfeit those safeguards.

Because there is not yet a coherent understanding of horizontal identities as a collective category, those who strive for horizontal rights often rely on the disability movement’s methodical rejection of illness models.

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.

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. That is a humanist vision with medical overtones. Some think that without suffering the world would be boring; some, that without their own suffering the world would be boring. Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.

We are more sympathetic to Holocaust survivors than to malcontent children of privilege, but we all have our darkness, and the trick is making something exalted of it.

He argues that inclusion of disabled people “exposes the widespread dependence of people and nations on one another, dispelling the dangerous myth that individuals or nations exist naturally in a state of autonomy and that those individuals or nations that fall into dependence are somehow inferior to others.”

I realized that I had demanded that my parents accept me but had resisted accepting them.

The playwright Doug Wright once said that family inflicts the deepest wounds, then salves them the most tenderly. When

you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes—and we become attached to the heroic strain in our personal history. We

Children with horizontal identities alter your self painfully; they also illuminate it. They are receptacles for rage and joy—even for salvation.

When we love them, we achieve above all else the rapture of privileging what exists over what we have merely imagined.

Rachel admires Charlie’s confidence, and, even more, his courage. “He’s making his soul,” she said. “We live in this society where people are mostly making money or status. Charlie would love money, and he’d love status, but that’s not what he’s doing. He’s taking a long, slow time growing up, but life is quite long.”

We all live in accordance with the norms we pick up socially; stripped of such norms, we can regulate neither ourselves nor others.

Barb turned to me early on and said, ‘I think you’re doing an okay job as a dad, and I know you’re building your career at Disney, but I need more. I need you to be more of a person—a deeper person, a less selfish person.’”

The Australian linguist Nicholas Evans wrote of the urgency of finding “a new approach to language and cognition that places diversity at centre stage,” pointing out that we are “the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels.”

The loss of diversity is terrible, but diversity for the sake of diversity is a lie.

But she is Anna, cornerstone of the family. I wish the road had not been so steep for her, but I’m so glad she managed to climb it with grace.”

Early intervention (EI) is now a federal program for infants with any of a broad range of complaints—low birth weight, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, autism—and it has vastly raised levels of functioning in all these groups. EI services provided before a child turns three may include physical therapy, occupational therapy, nutrition counseling, audiology and vision services, nursing support, speech-language therapy, and instruction on assistive technology, as well as support and training for parents who are having trouble coping. It entails a strong focus on sensory stimulation of all kinds. Hospitals are required to tell parents about these services. EI is available to people at every socioeconomic level, sometimes through home visits and sometimes in special centers.

EI is the full expression of the nurture-over-nature argument—the ultimate triumph of psychoanalysis, civil rights, and empathy over eugenics, sterilization, and segregation.

By demanding that physicians treat their children’s physical ailments as respectfully as they would those of nondisabled children, they have brought about an astonishing increase in life expectancy for people so diagnosed.

Where science and biological cure have been stalled, the social model of disability has achieved wild triumph.