Supporting Parent and Child in Extremis

At her own blog, Elizabeth Bruenig has weighed in on yesterday’s discussion of the mother who abandoned her baby in a subway station, and she does an able job teasing out the two tangled questions: what the mother ought to do, and what the law should do in response.  (I’m selling it short by excerpting, so check out the whole thing)

[T]he question then becomes when looking at legal tools: what kind of a world are we trying to create? But I think this question very often becomes confused with: what kind of people would we prefer to create? There are two problems with this:

1.) People are often worse than their worst acts. I recall a time during college when I was in a grocery store on my own. I’m a small person (shorter than 5 feet, less than 100 pounds) and have a very young-looking face, which I forget. A guy approached me while I was leaning over looking at a lower shelf and told me I looked pretty. I laughed nervously (default response to everything) and the guy said some more stuff, speaking very slowly and softly. I registered that he was asking me if I were there by myself. It then began to slowly materialize that he thought I was a young child on my own, and was making some sort of play for my trust. Of course, I was about 21 years old, so the reality is that all he was guilty of was awkwardly hitting on a 21-year-old. But that wasn’t what he wanted to do; what he wanted to do was worse. Here, where people intend much worse than they actually manage, the law can’t help us.

2.)People are often better than their worst acts. We can probably all reflect on our own lives to fill in an example here, but Leah’s works as well: if a mother who recognizes she is not fit to parent attempts to leave her child to the community outside legal parameters, we can attempt to discipline her into personal moral betterment using the penal carceral system, but this seems to me to threaten to break a butterfly upon a wheel. There is some sound moral reasoning, as Leah indicates, in trying to give a child up among multitudes of people; it can be seen as the modern equivalent of knocking on the door of an abbey and leaving an infant behind. It isn’t a morally perfect act, but neither is it one that seems to me to indicate a deep or totalizing moral depravity.

Therefore I hesitate to see the penal system as one that’s terrifically useful when it comes to inculcating private virtue. Thus when responding to situations like the one Leah cites, I think it makes more sense to look at the totality of our legal tools and ask: what kind of world would I like to see? Certainly one in which this never happens, one of the qualities of which is a world made up of happy, strong families. Since we can’t have a world in which wrongs never happen, all we can do is seek to use the totality of our legal tools to make happy, strong family-making very much possible. The practice of throwing people in prison for long, non-rehabilitative sentences is a recipe for a lot of things — abuse, rape, recidivism, prison profiteering — but it isn’t much of a strategy for the creation or maintenance of strong, happy families.

Something has gone seriously wrong by the point that a mother leaves her stroller on the subway platform, but it’s far from clear to me that it’s the kind of thing that’s mended by incarcerating the mother.  The deterrent effect may be weak, or have perverse incentives to get rid of the baby more permanently and privately.  And I’m dubious about the idea that, once the mother has been unjust to her baby, the baby is owed compensatory suffering on its mother’s part.

When a relationship falls apart, something bad has happened to both parties, and I’d like us to be at least a little interested in what we can do for the mother, as well as the baby.  Sometimes a very small intervention makes an enormous difference.

For example, if a child services worker observes a parent yelling at an infant for crying, there’s something very wrong going on, and it’s easy to assume that the parent is constitutionally unfit.  The service worker can remedy the injustice to the child by removing the baby from the household and he can punish the parent with fines or jail to boot, but there’s one other thing to try.

In a study that I’m having trouble finding at the moment (just moved again), researchers were able to substantially improve the welfare of parent and child by coaching the parents to ask “Why is the baby crying?” when it started wailing.  Asking the question explicitly helped them realize that the answer wasn’t “To torment me.”  Without a little help, though, it’s hard for people to work out that kind of reframe themselves, especially if they’re in precarious situations.

Finally, although this may not have been a factor in the New York case, it’s worth mentioning that, if we want to keep babies safe, it might make a lot of sense to pour more resources into help for post-partum depression.  (The New York Times had a great two part series on this recently, estimated to affect 13-20% of new mothers).  It’s hard for a mother to come forward and say that she keeps wishing her baby would go away, or that she’s fantasized about killing or abandoning it, or that she can’t muster the will to take care of her baby or herself.  That means it’s very hard for her to receive support (medical or logistical).

For the good of mother and child, it should be easier to raise a flag and get help, without being too stigmatized or punished.  It’s important for parents to know that post-partum depression is like intrusive thoughts, a relatively common phenomenon rather than the revelation of a secret flaw.  The danger can be serious, so it’s essential to make it easy for people to disclose the problem and get help.

If you want to help when things go wrong, you have focus on making it easy to receive error messages, rather than punishing the guilty messenger.