It’s Mother’s Day when we record this. We discuss Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon. We start out discussing how similar we are to Solomon’s statement that parents have children to perpetuate themselves. Nancy doesn’t think that was so true for her. Linny says it was true for her to the extreme in that she even thought she knew what her child would look like and when he looked different than she expected, she was really shocked. But, the love and commitment to her son was there immediately. So, though to a very different extent, she feels she somewhat understands the shock parents may feel when their child is born with a visible physical disability. She also said ultimately, her son was different from her in many ways and so she had to remind herself that she needed to raise him as he needed, not like she was raised. Nancy offers the Williams sisters and Tiger Woods who were raised by their parents to conform to their parents’ expectations for who they would become. Linda liked Solomon’s framework of vertical and horizon. Vertical similarities are those values and attributes that children have that are like their parents, transmitted through DNA or nurture. These may include ethnicity, religion. Horizontal differences are those that the child holds different from their parents, also through DNA or other factors. These may include disabilities, homosexuality, criminality. These differences are foreign to the parents and therefore they may cause separation between the parent and child. In Chapter 1, Solomon says, “Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity.” Nancy liked how Solomon points out that we are all very different from one another in many ways. He says, ““All kinds of attributes make one less able. Illiteracy and poverty are disabilities, and so are stupidity, obesity, and boringness. Extreme age and extreme youth are both disabilities. Faith is a disability insofar as it constrains you from self-interest; atheism is a disability inasmuch as it shields you from hope. One might see power as disability, too, for the isolation in which it imprisons those who wield it.” Nancy thinks Solomon’s thesis is around unmet parental expectation causing separation with the child. Nancy mentioned she also thought about how higher education for first generation college students sometimes serves to separate them from their families. Solomon explores the many ways in which children are different from their parents. Six chapters deal with categories of difference that have been long-classified as illnesses, four chapters deal with more socially-constructed difference. The six long-classified “illness” chapters cover: children who are deaf, those who are dwarfs, and those who have down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, other disabilities. The socially-constructed differences cover children who: are prodigies, the product of rape, commit crimes, and are transgender. For this book, we both read the first chapter which introduces the book and is also largely autobiographical. Then, we both selected a couple chapters to focus our discussion on. Linda read the chapters on schizophrenia and crime. Nancy read the chapter on prodigies and the final chapter about his journey to becoming a father. Linda selected the chapter on schizophrenia because it was the only mental illness and she really likes learning about schizophrenia. She chose crime because we’ve talked about crime before on the podcast and an adolescent recently committed a crime in her community. Nancy chose prodigies because it seemed like such an outlier when compared to the other chapters. She chose the last chapter because it closes the arc of the book with the author talking about his own decision to become a father. Linda says the schizophrenia chapter immediately made her remember Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road book we discussed in episodes 35 and 36. She says schizophrenia is a challenging disease for parents because they have raised a child, sometimes who has excelled socially and athletically, that they send off to college who then becomes ill, because the onset of the disease is often after the parents feel they have successfully launched their children. Solomon notes that schizophrenia and autism have the similarity of parents feeling like they have bonded with their children before the disease is detected, though with autism the onset is much earlier at 2 to 4 years old. Linda notes that schizophrenia and autism are also similar in that the children may look typical but then the parents face criticism from others when the children do not act in typical ways. We move on to prodigy. Solomon defines prodigies as children who are able to function at an advanced adult level in some domain before the age of twelve. Solomon says, “Being gifted and being disabled are surprisingly similar: isolating, mystifying, petrifying.” The word prodigy comes from the Latin word prodigium which is a monster that violates the natural order. He distinguishes prodigy from genius in timing - many people have genius without having been precocious. Nancy felt Solomon worked hard to get us to understand how prodigies are similar to children with more traditionally understood differences. Solomon says, “Like a disability, prodigiousness compels parents to redesign their lives around the special needs of their child. Once more, experts must be called in; once more, their primary strategies for dealing with the aberrance often undermine parental power. A child’s prodigiousness requires his parents to seek out a new community of people with similar experience; they soon face the mainstreaming dilemma and must decide whether to palace their children with intellectual peers too old to befriend them, or with age peers who will be bewildered and alienated by their achievements. Brilliance can be as much of an impediment to intimacy as any developmental anomaly.” He says prodigiousness manifests most often in athletics, mathematics, chess, and music. In this chapter he mostly focuses on music because he knows more about music than the others. And, mostly it is the world of classical music he explores. Nancy wonders whether the biggest challenge to parents might be to those who want to exploit their children and become stage parents, because they see the monetary gain or fame dancing in their eyes. Linda says she has had families in her practice who are prodigies and she says raising prodigies is very much a challenge and can be mystifying because the child is so different from the parents. Nancy says the chapter made her think about Howard Gardner’s eight intelligences and how children could be prodigies in any of these. Gardner’s intelligences are: Visual-spatial, linguistic-verbal, logical-mathematical, body-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. A ninth intelligence, existential, has also been suggested as an addition. Linda says the crime chapter very much focuses on the broken justice system in the United States. Similar to schizophrenia and autism, parents may feel that they have successfully raised their children to a certain age until the criminality manifests. However, 3 out of 4 incarcerated juveniles have a mental illness, though it may have gone undiagnosed. Linda says this chapter made her think about the Van Jones book, Beyond the Messy Truth, from episodes 33 and 34. The final chapter of the book, Father, is primarily autobiographical. In it Solomon recounts how he became a father and how his research into this book informed that experience. He says, “I started this book to forgive my parents and ended it by becoming a parent. Understanding backward liberated me to live forward.” Linda feels the book would be a good resource for parents who have a child with differences that feels like it is separating them, but says, since it is such a big book, read the first chapter and then dip into the chapters most relevant to the parents. Linny and Nancy think the book is affirming to families who are working through any kind of difference. Difference, in fact, can be unifying and create an accepting community and even meaning.