First: apologies for the radio silence. I have been futilely applying for jobs, finishing up the dissertation, and teaching two classes. As I finish up job apps, I should have a bit more time.
There are a series of posts I would like to write over the next week about being the parent of a disabled child.
For the first, I’d just like to recount a conversation I had yesterday. The point of which is to emphasize: there is a way in which people really don’t understand how we love our kids.
SCENE: Philosophy department. Cinderblock walls that fail to be enlivened by art posters and potted plants. Smell of coffee and copier toner pervade. ENTER emeritus faculty member and me, discussing the topic of ‘cuteness’ as an objective aesthetic predicate.
He: You would take care of your children whether you thought they were cute or not.
[I forgot to tell him there are data that parents pay less attention to their less cute children.]
Me: I think cuteness is part of an evolutionary function ensuring parents take care of kids. It’s no coincidence parents think their kids are the cutest.
He: If you had a deformed child, say, you would still take care of him.
Me: I do have a “deformed” child. And I think he’s cute.
He: [taken back] You do? What, if I may ask, is wrong with him?
Me: He has a genetic syndrome that results in multiple cognitive and psychomotor disabilities.
He: You love him. But you don’t think he’s cute.
Me: I do think he’s cute.
He: Then he must not be apparently deformed.
Me: No, it is perfectly apparent to all who see him that he is developmentally disabled and has dysmorphic facial features.
He: Perhaps you are responding to his gestures.
Me. His gestures are very sweet. They make his disabilities, however, much more apparent. But I think he’s cute regardless.
He: You are very fond of him, but do not find him cute.
I call out to two more people within. ENTER the world’s kindest department secretary and a close friend who is a faculty member my age.
Me: [to department secretary and close friend] Is James cute?
Department Secretary: He is absolutely darling.
He: You are responding to his personality, perhaps.
Close friend: He is adorable. Every time I see him, I pick him up and cuddle him. My own children get jealous every time we visit.
Me: These two have come to love him.
He: Then he does not look deformed. His facial features must be more normal.
Me: He has dysmorphic facial features, although perhaps less dysmorphic than others with his syndrome. Look. I’m with you that a lot of aesthetic properties are objective. But cuteness isn’t one of them. It’s emotion-based.
He: So is beauty.
Me: But beauty involves our recognition of how many other people might respond, or how we might respond under ideal conditions. Cuteness is more like sexiness or tastiness or fragrance.
Emeritus faculty member EXITS murmuring about how that is not the case. [He has written on beauty for years, so I ought to give him some cred on that score.] After sharing a post-game recap with department secretary and close friend, EXEUNT OMNES.
This is phrased in talk of objective and subjective properties. But behind the philosophy chatter: he does not understand the way in which I love my child. That I really love him. That I could find him cute. Of my two typical kids, I think one is handsomer to the world. But I find them both equally adorable. It’s pretty similar. I know people are put off by my kid with disabilities. But he’s adorable to me. Just as adorable as my other two. Even when drools, even when he rocks or taps his head.
This reminds me of when Jeffrey Goldberg had a note of surprise that a father died sacrificing his life to save his son with Down syndrome. Sacrificing oneself to save a typical child is perhaps morally obligatory. No one would have trouble understanding if a father risked his life to save a typical kid. But saving a kid with Down syndrome? Clearly supererogatory.
Not everyone feels this way. Kids with disabilities are more likely to be abused and neglected than typical kids. But I would love it if some people could understand that for many of us: we love our kids. Really, really love them. Not out of a sense of duty. Just love them. The way you love yours.
i’m sure philosophers have a technical term for this, but that guy’s a dick.
That doesn’t seem fair. He just seems like a guy who is wedded to his own idea / ideology / philosophy, and is, perhaps, not a parent.
As a general proposition, parents love their children. We are pre-programmed to find child-like features “cute” (even in puppies, or cartoon characters, we respond emotionally and protectively to neotenous features.
And, while I completely understand what Rose is saying about her own love for her child, her colleague’s position is not created from whole cloth: Rose acknowledges research that less-cute kids get less attention from their parents. I cannot completely grasp the emotional tone of their conversation from the words, but it sounds as though he was respectful, just uncomprehending.
He was respectful and uncomprehending, yes. It was simply incomprehensible to him that I could possibly apply the word “cute” to someone who was visibly disabled. Like, he literally did not understand and thought there must be a conceptual error somewhere. Doubling down when someone else’s practice goes against your pet theory is fairly standard behavior in the field. Certainly not nasty.
It was simply incomprehensible to him that I could possibly apply the word “cute” to someone who was visibly disabled.
Huh, that goes against my own experience. I had a cousin with Downs’ Syndrome. His family lived a thousand miles away, so we saw them only occasionally. So we were not close, and honestly I found him disturbing. Not threatening–he was generally very sweet–but the syndrome itself frightened me, so I tended to avoid him as much as possible without being clearly rude.
So I can’t say that I loved him. And yet even I thought he was cute. In fact his syndrome was part of that, because it kept his face childlike, even when he was in his fifties. How can a childlike innocent face not be cute?
eh, i stand by my hasty value judgement. he may have been respectful, but at some point you have to presume the parent is either sincere in their statements or lying – either way, you let the topic drop when that topic is the life of the person you’re speaking to.
“I’d rather win the discussion than, you know, not.”
I see the opposite of this play out at my school during admissions visits. At least twice I’ve had kids come in for visits who folks just oo’ed and ahh’ed over how cute they were, insisting that we didn’t even need to assess them because, gosh, how cute and they would just love to teach them. Of course, both children were little white girls with blue eyes. It was a really uncomfortable conversation on a number of levels, including the presumption that “cute” children would be easier to teach and/or free of the types of difficulties that might make us hesitate to accept them.
Rose,
Awesome post! Allow me to challenge you a bit. Your son’s particular facial features make him look elfin. They make him cute in a different direction than most children are cute, but they are objectively cute. A whole genre of anime cartoon characters exists* that is drawn roughly in the direction of your son’s facial vector so that they are more cute than the average face. Add to that he is small and relatively defenseless, and that evokes the cuteness response in me and others. And possibly in you, too.
*Oh, I forgot to mention that I like the “cute + evil” of the image I linked to. That reminds me of your son, too, what with the attempts to choke me while he sat on my lap 🙂
Yes, we are still working on his strangling problem. We have largely solved hair-pulling, only to have an emerging pinching problem.
I very much see what you mean, especially with the first picture! One of the syndrome moms once said that the grown-ups with the syndrome look like the Na’vi in Avatar. There is definitely something to that. http://crispme.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/avatar-movie-11.jpeg Before we had a diagnosis, and there was a list of possible syndromes he might have, my husband and I thought: well, Ridiculously Rare syndrome (the one it turns out he has) is the most severe, so we hope he doesn’t have that. But we were just a tiny bit consoled that RR kids were the cutest of the syndromes! My kid also has a relatively less dysmorphic face than many syndrome kids.
Right, so I think there might be something in him that a good number of people respond to. And when he has himself all together (i.e., he’s not drooling, he’s not rocking or biting his arm or pulling his hair or staring into the middle distance), and he’s making contact and smiling at people, people generally respond VERY positively to him. They are much more drawn in than I would have thought.
We have a joke that he would be a great spokesperson for severe disability, but he can’t talk. A great gesture-person?
I’ve only seen pictures, and I’d call him cute too.
That is so kind of you! THank you! It warms the cockles of my heart, whatever heart cockles are.
Nothing like hot cockles.
This is one of Russell’s and my favorite movies, and I was indeed vaguely referencing it. Consider my cockles now hot.
Not only is that one of my favorite movies, but that is one of my favorite scenes.
Zazzy and I have already had the, “What if the baby’s ugly?” conversation. That’s normal, right? We ultimately decided we’d love it anyway. The kid’s lucky the coin came up heads.
I feel compelled to state for the record that James is adorable, and I think so despite the blistering contempt I have for his mother, whom I plainly detest.
Sigh.
That’s twice today I’ve had to clean off my monitor…
I’ve also noticed in how much contempt you hold James, the malice you continually spew at him. So if you find him adorable, well then….
Indeed. I find him so despite the scorn that grips my heart, vise-like, whenever I encounter or think of him… yea, of your entire reprehensible brood and kin.
I don’t think he was being a total poopyhead, but reading the dialogue it sounds to me (and granted, I don’t know him) that he was trying to nail down in hard terms exactly what cute means. I don’t think he gets it at all. But he doesn’t come across as being conciously hurtful, for instance, although inadvertantly might be a different story.
I definitely got no impression he was trying to be hurtful. And I like when people don’t tiptoe around my feelings. The post was more about how he just couldn’t conceive of even a parent of a kid with disabilities thinking he is cute.
I also got a slight sense of, I dunno if “Mansplaining” is the right word, but something to that effect.
Here were three women, seemingly cooing over the cuteness of a child… EMOTING! And this esteemed academic was just going to have to explain to them how WRONG they were because, dagnabbit, that is what the intelligent position is.
But I wasn’t there so I might be reading more into it…
That is DEFINITELY there with this guy. In, like, every interaction I have with him.
I’m glad I could mansplain that for everyone. 🙂
I take it the prof doesn’t have children?
Personally, I think both of my kids are adorable. Of course, as my grandmother sued to say, ‘Every mother crow thinks her babies are the blackest’.
I think ‘cute’ has something to do with emotional response more than anything that can be defined by visual criteria. I think of my neighbors with an amazingly obese, bug-eyed pug dog. Her nose is so pushed in that she can’t breath w/o making asthmatic snuffling sounds, she’s ridiculously bow-legged and she drools. By most objective standards, this is an ugly animal. However, there is something undeniably cute about her – maybe just the pure innocence when she begs, as though she has no idea that she isn’t simply irresistible.