It's daybreak on a cold autumn morning, and I'm lying flat on my back on the bathroom floor, trying to dismantle the plumbing. I'm neither fully awake nor fully dressed, and I'm not entirely sure how I got here. There was a friend who became a girlfriend and then a wife, and then I went to law school and took the bar, and then we were celebrating, and then a few weeks passed and there was the faintest little pink line in a urine-soaked window, and then there was this thing, a baby, and it grew and it grew and it turned 2, and the boy -- Pete -- was smart and articulate and funny and precocious and difficult and impossible, and then this morning he caused some kind of commotion involving the toothpaste and a toy hammer and about a thousand hypo-allergenic baby wipes -- "I'm building a dog house!" he yelled -- and in all the ensuing whining and shouting and finger painting with tartar-control Crest, my wife got distracted and washed a $130 contact lens right down the drain of the bathroom sink.
So here I am, stretched out on the cold tile floor, hoping the contact lens has somehow come to rest in the clot of hair and soap and God-knows-what-else that sits at the bottom of the drain. This would be the best-case scenario, I'm thinking, and suddenly I know that my life has gone completely to hell. And in this moment of dreadful epiphany, I become aware of an eerie kind of quiet, and I remember with a shudder and a start that I have lost track of the child's whereabouts. So I race through the house, half-naked with my hands covered in drain-muck, and I see signs of him everywhere -- the Legos strewn about the hallway, the crayon marks on the dining-room walls, the raisins on the kitchen floor -- but he's not there. And then I spot him, a bed-headed mess of a kid wearing a sagging diaper and a sheepish grin. He's in the laundry room, he's got the door to the backyard open, and when he sees me he says, "I was just cleaning." I look out the back door. Where there used to be a patio, I see only an empty orange detergent container and a slick blue sea of Mountain Fresh Tide.
I am in over my head, if not in detergent, then at least in parenting. So I do what I can: I clean the bathroom, the backyard, the child and myself, and I escape to work and get on the web to look for a book that will tell me -- please, can't someone just tell me? -- how this child and I are going to survive the next 16 years without at least one of us going crazy or to jail.
But the books don't tell me that, exactly, and what they do tell me seems so contradictory. While an exhaustive study of all the child-rearing books on the market might reveal some subtleties, I know I don't have time for that. I'm in crisis, and I need a crash course that's going to work. But which one? On the one hand, there are books by the proponents of permissive parenting, the ones who say to sit back and let kids be kids -- no matter what it does to your house, your marriage or your life -- so long as the kids feel good about themselves. And then there are those who advocate "authoritarian" parenting, books by the mostly Christian, mostly male hard-liners arguing that it's time for parents to put kids in their place -- and to hit them now and then if that's what it takes to keep them there.
And then there's William Damon. Damon is a professor of education and director of the Center on Adolescence at Stanford. Through a series of books, research projects and outreach programs, he is helping parents -- indeed, entire communities -- find a middle way to raise kids. Although discussions about raising and educating children often devolve into talk-show shouting matches about school vouchers and sex education and all-or-nothing debates between permissive and authoritarian extremes, Damon believes that all parents share certain common values. "I've worked with every background of people," he explains, "and nobody wants their kids to steal or lie or cheat. The important forefront issues of development are the issues of common decency and civility, and nobody disagrees with that."
Nobody, that is, except maybe my kid -- or yours. And that's where Damon's vision of parenting comes into play. For the last 15 years, he has focused much of his thinking, research and activism on his belief that all of us -- even those of us who "just kind of eke out a moral act now and then" -- have the inherent capacity to live morally correct lives. Parents have the opportunity and the responsibility to turn that capacity into a commitment, Damon says, and they can begin to do so by practicing what he calls "authoritative" -- not exactly "authoritarian" -- parenting.
As an adult and as a parent, Damon explains, "you know that you're in a position of authority, that you deserve to be there and that you have certain things you're going to go to the mat on. You're not going to give up on the idea that your child should not be staying up all night eating donuts, running in front of trucks, taking drugs when they're older, or stealing, or pushing his little sister off a bike. We could all come up with the same list. And you know a lot more about this than your 2-year-old. Your 2-year-old may be a wonderful person, but he doesn't know how to be civil yet. You do know that, and it's your job to teach him."
I'm sitting in Damon's office at Stanford now, 100 miles away from the child and the sudsy backyard, but I begin to feel a child-rearing revelation coming on. As Damon speaks, I realize that I have spent the last year focused on surviving my son. Somehow I have forgotten entirely about raising him. I have forgotten that parenting isn't an end but a process, one that will lead -- with any luck -- to this rambunctious little child becoming an adult. My wife and I have got to get ourselves through Pete's childhood, but we've got to get him through it, too. And while I'll be happy for us if we survive the experience, I know I want something more for him. I want him to learn, to thrive and to leave the nest well on the way to becoming the reasonable, responsible and moral adult that I hope someday to be.
How can I -- how can we -- work toward that goal and get through the day, too? Damon suggests something he calls "respectful engagement" (see sidebar). The idea is to set up an activity where a parent gets the chance to teach a moral or intellectual lesson. But this is no finger-wagging lecture. The child is allowed -- no, encouraged -- to express his or her views, and the parent listens and tries to understand why the kid might see things differently.
This may sound like some kind of moral free-for-all -- the kid thinks it's okay to pour Tide on the porch, I don't, and we're both entitled to our opinions -- but Damon is quick to correct the misimpression. As a parent, Damon says, "you will stand your ground one way or the other on what's right. You're not going to forget that, and you're not going to act as if that's up for grabs, as if the kid has just as good an insight on that as you do. And if he decides it's okay to take a CD from Tower Records because 'they've got lots of money,' you're not going to say, 'Well, I'm glad those are your values; those aren't my values.' You say, 'No, that's wrong -- you don't steal things; you're violating their rights.' You've got your position, and you're going to stick with it."
That's the hard-line part of Damon's conception. Then there's the respectful part. In the same dialogue, he says, "you'll listen to the child and you'll engage with the child. The kid is not doing this in order to wheedle you out of a position; and, in fact, part of the art and science of parenting is remembering that the length and determination of the kid's argument is not going to affect whether you give in." That's easier said than done, he acknowledges. It takes a lot of patience, but at least there's the solace that you've got a parenting plan.
A parent must direct like an "authoritarian" but be a "permissive" listener, Damon says. That combination -- a core tenet of middle-ground, "authoritative" parenting -- provides the best way for the child to come to grips with the parent's position and for the parent to comprehend a child's views. In other words, you need to understand why the kid thinks dumping Tide in the backyard amounts to "cleaning"; the kid needs to understand why it doesn't.
This need for mutual understanding increases as the child grows older. At 2, it may be enough simply to tell the child not to do it anymore. At 6 or 8 or 10, talking through the reasons and ramifications may be more helpful. "One of the mistakes that people make is assuming you can reason a 2- or 4-year-old into things," Damon says. "We've all tried it, and it doesn't work. In those early years, the habits are the front lines, and in order to develop the right habits, you have to make sure the action or behavior is in the right direction." As children edge toward adolescence, it becomes essential to deal with them on an increasingly intellectual level.
Again, Damon says, patience is the key: "You get into these discussions, and slowly -- it won't happen the first time you have the conversation -- but slowly the kid will develop an understanding, and then it will become the child's own reason, and he doesn't need you there to say no."
Like much in the social sciences, Damon's views sound like the commonsense conclusions that any of us would reach if we just thought about these things long enough. But competing conceptions of parenting today seem to leave little room for common ground, let alone for common sense. The permissive Penelope Leach scoffs at parents who think they "have the right" to tell a child what to do but "don't want to concede him the same," while the authoritarian John Rosemond offers up a "bill of rights for children" that includes the child's "right" to hear his parents say "because I said so" frequently, as well as the "right" to learn early in life "that he isn't the center of the universe (or his family or his parents' lives), that he isn't a big fish in a small pond, that he isn't the Second Coming, and that he's not even -- in the total scheme of things -- very important at all . . . so as to prevent him from becoming an insufferable brat."
Damon is often lumped in with the authoritarians -- the New York Times Magazine dubbed him the "academic dean" of the group, and Rosemond praises him as "a voice for traditional values in a field -- parenting -- characterized by nauseating political correctness." But while Damon's overarching emphasis on teaching civility aligns him with the authoritarians, the respectful, nonviolent way in which he would instill these traits -- in particular, his opposition to corporal punishment -- sets him apart from them. As Rosemond puts it: "Bill stands for educating children in morals and manners, the linchpins of a civilized society. He and I differ on some specifics, mostly when it comes to the question of 'how?' But we are much in alignment when it comes to philosophy."
Damon knows why he is sometimes viewed as an "authoritarian" -- though he rejects the label. "It's easy for the media to digest a single answer," he says. "That makes for a lively story." So his views on discipline -- that kids should be punished, that they should learn to take 'no' for an answer -- have been trumpeted by journalists and by leaders in the authoritarian camp. But his more nuanced positions -- the importance of engaging children and pushing them to make choices autonomously -- often get ignored. "I'm really alone in the field in saying that there are two things that are important: habit and reflection," he says. "Everyone else is either lined up on the side of habit -- 'Don't have kids be a bunch of Hamlets, don't question, and just do, do, do the right thing' -- or they're lined up on the side of reflection -- 'Kids should just figure things out themselves.' "
As a developmentalist, Damon believes that moral understanding grows step by step throughout life. "The difficult things -- the things that are puzzling and challenging -- are things that give us pause. 'Should I really give a whole bunch of my money to the poor or the kids in East Timor when it means I won't be able to give my kid that new bike next week?' That's a tough one. There are a bunch of things in life that aren't tough any more, like, 'Should I take the wallet of the guy who works down the hall from me?' You figured that one out a while ago. . . . But you wrestle with some things, and it may be in five years that the things you wrestle with now become habitual. That's development. And in development, if you really want to get a fully moral person, it's very important that we encourage good habits and that we encourage the ability to reflect and think."
For Damon, half of these insights came early in life. His father never came home from World War II -- he was missing in action in Germany, and his body was never found. Damon's mother moved in with an uncle and his family, and together they provided Damon with what he remembers as a "traditionalist" upbringing from which he learned a solid core of "basic values." The modernist intellectual aspects of Damon's theories -- notions of autonomy and egalitarianism -- came later, when he was a student at Harvard and Berkeley in the '60s and '70s and then a professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
While at Clark, Damon did extensive studies of the moral actions of children in social situations. At the same time, his wife, Anne Colby, was conducting her own research into children's moral judgment. In the mid-'80s, their work came together when the two attended a Social Sciences Research Council conference on "moral giftedness," the notion that certain individuals -- think Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa -- may have a "gift" for leading lives of moral commitment. Damon and Colby came away from the conference with the desire to learn why certain people seem to have an exceptional capacity for moral action -- and what can be done to foster such a capacity in ourselves and others.
During the next six years, Damon and Colby crafted clear criteria for defining moral excellence and then set out in search of Americans who met the criteria. In interview after interview, they discovered that, while moral commitment took many forms, the morally excellent individuals -- or "exemplars" -- they met frequently shared similar characteristics. From this work came a book, Some Do Care: Contemporary Lives of Moral Commitment (Free Press, 1994; $14.95), and an idea: the notion that "moral giftedness" is not some rare, inborn trait with which some extraordinary humans are mysteriously endowed, but rather a universal capacity attainable by all of us. That insight "utterly transformed my approach to things," Damon says.
Over the next decade, Damon took the lessons learned from the mostly aging "exemplars" and tried to apply them to children and adolescents, both professionally -- as a professor of education and director of the Center for the Study of Human Development at Brown University -- and privately, as a father of three.
Damon says his views on parenting were not fully developed in time to apply them to his two oldest children -- one of whom is now starting a career as an environmental economist, the other just finishing law school. But Damon's third child, Caroline, came along just in time to receive the benefit -- or brunt, as the case may be -- of her father's learning and thinking. Caroline, now 15 and a sophomore at Gunn High School in Palo Alto, has read chapters of her father's works-in-progress, and she says that he really does practice what he preaches -- that he and Colby have instilled in her a sense of morality and honesty, with high expectations for both day-to-day behavior and long-term goals.
Pressed for an example of a past conflict with her parents, Caroline tries hard to remember and then lands on one -- and whether she knows it or not, it's a textbook version of Damon's "respectful engagement." Caroline wanted to listen to "shock jock" Howard Stern's radio show. Her parents disapproved. "But my parents have an open mind," Caroline says, "and we discussed it, and they respected my beliefs, and they told me not to listen to it." Caroline says she did not resent the eventual edict: "My dad usually knows what's right and what's wrong, and he won't back down, but I definitely feel like he's listening to me."
While Damon stresses that "there's no such thing as applying a scientific theory to your own kids," others believe that the interplay of Damon the scholar and Damon the father makes him an especially powerful voice in the world of child-rearing. "Bill Damon commands a unique place in our struggles to raise our children," says Kevin Ryan, director emeritus of the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University. "He combines the disciplined objectivity of an outstanding researcher with the seasoned wisdom of a loving parent. As such, he is a tremendous resource."
Stanford inherited that resource in 1997, when Damon joined the School of Education and assumed the helm of the Center on Adolescence, a small think tank founded a year earlier with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. At the same time, Colby became a senior scholar at the Menlo Park-based Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where she continues to work on questions of moral development, mostly among college students.
The Center on Adolescence enables Damon to work through his theories on child development -- and his broader academic interest in lifelong "moral commitment" -- with intellectuals from every corner of the University, including psychologists, education experts, linguists, biologists and pediatricians. The "big stage" of Stanford gives him the chance to take his research to a larger audience than he might have reached at Brown.
These days, Damon's research and outreach focus on two areas. First, there is the "youth charter," his notion that entire communities can come together and agree on a set of shared standards for youth behavior (see sidebar). Damon has helped several communities through the process, and he is now working on ways to launch the program in other communities without becoming directly involved himself.
At the same time, Damon is working with researchers from Stanford, Harvard and the University of Chicago on a study designed to address moral issues in professions such as medicine, journalism and law. People in these fields share a concern that their professions have lost their moral bearings and are drifting from their original callings. In medicine, for instance, "it's become a business," he says, "and you worry: do they care about the patient anymore? Or in journalism -- is it all sensationalism, or do they care about telling the truth anymore? These fields have always had this problem, but there is a concern now of, 'Are people [entering the professions] getting the right message going in?'"
For Damon, it's all of a piece. Working to improve the "moral climate and the moral values" of doctors, lawyers and journalists starts with teaching a 2-year-old not to make a war zone out of a suburban patio -- and with helping a father remember the real reasons for teaching those lessons in the first place.
Tim Grieve, '86, a former newspaper reporter, is a lawyer living in Sacramento.
