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The Muddied Meaning of ‘Mindfulness’
As usual with modish and ideologically freighted words, this one has also come to inform high-minded prescriptions for raising children. Evidently they’re no longer expected to mind their manners; we are expected instead to mind their emotional states. Recently, Hanna Rosin, in Slate, argued that mindful parenting might be a Trojan horse: Though the mindful mother claims to stay open-minded about her child’s every action and communication, she ends up being hospitable to only the kid’s hippie, peacenik side — the side she comes to prefer.
In
Rosin’s example, a mother supposedly mindful of her son’s capacity for
violence nonetheless doesn’t rest until he gives a peaceable,
sympathetic explanation for it — that he was hurt and overreacted. “I
was mad, and he had it coming,” which might be the lad’s own truth,
doesn’t fly. The mother’s “mindful attention,” rather than representing
freedom from judgment, puts a thumb on the scale.