September 10, 2010
New York Times Magazine
By LISA BELKIN

Remember Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs? You learned about it in your intro psych course: a neat and tidy pyramid, with fulfillment of “physiological needs” at its base, then things like “safety,” “love,” “belonging” and “esteem” stacked on top, all capped by “self-actualization.”

A group of academic psychologists have redesigned the nearly 70-year-old triangle. Most notably they have knocked “self-actualization” off the pinnacle and replaced it with “parenting.” Right below, they have added “mate retention” and “mate acquisition.”

This very academic change — which was an attempt on the part of its proponents to look at human motivation based on evolution — has sparked some very visceral responses. It has brought protest from people who don’t want children (and who see the redesign as a criticism of their choice) or can’t have children (who see it as an intimation that they are not psychologically complete) or who oppose gay marriage (who see in this an attempt to legitimize same-sex parenting as a psychological right). Most of all, it raises the question of whether the tendency in recent decades to all but sanctify parenting has gone just a bit too far.

All science reinforces or refutes what came before, and when Abraham Maslow published his paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” in 1943, it was a rebuttal of the prevailing theory that everything humans do stems from physical needs. A baby learns to love by bonding with its food source, the older behaviorist thinking went. Maslow’s newer argument was that humans are not motivated simply by hunger and thirst but by higher goals. “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself,” he said.

Over the decades, though, Maslow’s triangle came to be seen as “aspirational” — a description of what fulfilled individuals “should” do — rather than as an explanation of how human motivation actually works. Viewed through an evolutionary lens, some aspects of Maslow’s hierarchy make no sense, says Douglas T. Kenrick, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University, who argues for a new pyramid. If the only purpose of art, music and literature is self-fulfillment, how does that abet the survival of the species? After all, he argues, “the time you spend playing the guitar or creating poetry or contemplating the meaning of life could be otherwise spent finding food.” Kenrick isn’t saying the pursuit of art and such has no evolutionary purpose; he just sees it as subordinate to the main act. “Look at it this way,” he says. “If you are a good poet or a good musician, there is a reproductive payoff: women are attracted to men with these abilities. What a man is saying when he is playing his guitar up there is ‘look at my good genes.’ ”

Which is why, in the paper published earlier this summer in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, Kenrick and his co-authors redefined “self-actualization” as an indirect means to attracting a mate and, ultimately, parenting children. They chose the word “parenting,” rather than “procreation,” quite deliberately, he says, because our genes do not live on unless our children reach puberty healthy enough to have children of their own. And if those children are attractive as potential mates — the result of good schools, years of tennis lessons and the ability to play the guitar or write poetry — so much the better.

Kenrick and his colleagues are careful to say that, unlike Maslow, their pyramid is not aspirational, and that by placing parenting at the top they are not promoting it as the “right” or “laudable” path. They are simply explaining, with illustrations, why we, as a species, act as we do. In fact, Kenrick — who is the father of two sons, one 6 and the other 33 — says he believes the earth would be better off if fewer of us had children.

Point taken. But I find it hard to look at the new pyramid, with parenting at its apex, and not see a value judgement. That’s because in the decades since Maslow proposed his hierarchy, in the decades, even, since Kenrick became a father, “parent” became a loaded verb. Once, “parent” was something you were, not something you did. We have elevated it into a profession, a competition, a calling. Women, freer to choose, find themselves unexpectedly torn by the choice. Men, once free not to be involved, are now expected to plunge in. (Kenrick himself says he is “a lot” more involved in raising his younger son than he was with his older one, though that’s easier now that he has tenure.) Society, with virtual, actual and imagined predators, demands more vigilance from parents.

A result of a certain kind of overparenting, we are learning, is children who are better prepared for college but less prepared for life. They are more dependent, expecting trophies just for trying and texting their parents to ask for advice about what to eat for breakfast. Childhood, some experts say, now continues well into the 20s.

All scientific inquiry relies on assumptions that go unseen because they are so tangled up with their times. Maslow’s conclusions seem ethnocentric now, but the idea that some cultures might not value individualism as much as Americans do was not so obvious then. Similarly, Maslow never mentioned parenting as one possible subset of “self-actualization” perhaps because he couldn’t fathom the idea of children as “life’s work,” at least not for the audience of men to whom he seemed to be speaking.

So while this new construct may not set out to glorify parenting, it nonetheless reflects a moment when too many have lost sight of the goal of all parents — to make ourselves unnecessary. Just as Maslow’s views look quaint through a modern lens, we may look back on this version too as an artifact of a muddled time. Our current tendency toward “too much for too long” arguably influenced researchers to crown their revision with parenting. Yet that same tendency is delaying our children from reaching independent adulthood, which is, on any pyramid, the entire point.

Lisa Belkin is a contributing writer and the author of the Motherlode blog.

by Vera von Kreutzbruck  – September 3, 2010

Last winter film director Lisa Cholodenko came to Berlin to present The Kids Are All Right at the International Film Festival. Dressed in black with short dark hair and thick-framed glasses Cholodenko is an outgoing and witty person, who occasionally swears. She has a winning sense of humor, which is reflected in the new movie. Her films portray the clash between conservative and creative milieus, places she knows first-hand. Though The Kids Are All Right has not done well outside of the large cities and art house theaters, the topic is “timely” and significant.

On July 15, 2010 a civil rights milestone was set – Argentina became the first country in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage. Not so long ago, in fact until 1983, homosexuals were persecuted. Homosexuals in Argentina now have the same rights as heterosexuals, including the right to adoption, inheritance, pension, and social security. This is a sign of evolution in a nation in which a Macho-driven culture unfortunately still prevails.

Four years ago film director Lisa Cholodenko gave birth to her child with the help of a sperm donor. During the process she decided to make a movie about it. The Kids Are All Right was one of the most talked about movies at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The dialogue is smart and amusing – often playing on society’s prejudice against homosexual couples. The cast’s performances are all fantastic. Julianne Moore and Annette Bening play the lesbian parents, Mark Ruffalo is the sperm donor, and Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson are the teen children.

In a room with dark wood-paneled walls of a fancy Berlin hotel I sat with Lisa Cholodenko to talk about family upbringing, gay marriage, and the intention of her film:

Do you think that your new movie The Kids Are All Right shows a family situation in a way that nobody has seen before in cinema?

I do. It feels like a relief because when I was writing I thought this is too good, this is too timely. I was so amazed that nobody took that subject on before. The press coverage about gay marriage and kids finding their sperm donors in the States is becoming so popular.

The movie is about family. Why did you choose the title The Kids Are All Right for it?

I think it’s my ironic comment about how people are always afraid that kids of gay parents are going to get fucked up. In this case the kids are more stable than their moms.

Did you choose to make the script more comedic to broaden the appeal to a mainstream audience?

I just felt that the subject really lent itself to that. There is something so inheritably ridiculous about all of it. I totally respect and identify with it. It’s very much my own experience because my partner and I have a kid with a sperm donor. When you peel away the layers of what happens in a long term marriage: people going outside of the marriage to keep their marriage exciting, or what they don’t do. I can’t play this straight. It would be ridiculous. Everybody is struggling, but it’s kind of ridiculous too.

The two moms are very different.

Annette Bening is more type A. She wears the pants in the family and is less overt with her feelings. Juliane Moore is more the nurturing, “get in touch with your feelings” kind of mom. It was a fun thing to play with and that it actually was plausible that these people with such psychological differences would be attracted to each other.

It’s not the first movie where you have free-spirited characters clash with more structured people. This dynamic seems to be a recurring theme. What attracts you so much to this exchange between characters?

I think that it’s something that is universal. Maybe it’s expressed in a very specific way in my films because they are in very specific places and milieus. The tension between going the right path, the conventional path, and moving outside the box, doing the wrong thing, I think that that is a universal theme. So far I’m still interested in it. It might be the last one.

What was your own upbringing like? Was it strict?

It was a little bit of both, which is why I can switch between these two worlds. It was conventional in the sense that my parents have been married 50 years and they still live in the house that I grew up in. There was always dinner at seven o’clock when my dad got home. But I grew up in Los Angeles in a liberal environment. Things were a little bit looser – it was the seventies.

There was a rigid structure at home?

There was a rigid sense of family life and appropriateness as a family, about what you did: the whole thing with “Did you write the thank you card, did you call blah blah blah?” Those sorts of things. In certain families there is this idea of what is appropriate and I had a mother that was quite like that. It’s oppressive, you always had to be doing the appropriate thing. On the other hand, both of my parents worked and we were kind of on our own during the day and it wasn’t like we were supervised and had to have our homework checked or anything like that. We were smoking pot and hanging out and nobody was really noticing.

What would you like people to walk away with after seeing this movie?

I feel like it’s really a film about family. It’s a portrait of a family. I want people to walk away with a really good feeling about family. That it was a fair, sort of even-handed representation of the shit people go through and the storms people can weather and kind of stick it out for good reasons with genuine feeling intact because I really think that families are great if you can make them work. I’m all for the family, especially with kids in the picture.

Do you think that the film can help gay marriage become more accepted in America?

Yes, all the stuff that is going on brings me down. I’m proud that this film isn’t overtly political. It’s just a portrait, it’s just a story and I think it’s coming in a good time. I feel ashamed of what is going on in our culture.

Do you think it’s getting better?

I think it’s changing. It’s incredibly slow, much slower than it should be and much slower than Western Europe. I’m pleased that it translated culturally here in Germany, that cross-cultures are responding to it, that’s really hopeful to me.

Do you think that Catherine Bigelow winning an Oscar is a milestone in the film industry?

Yes, it’s a step forward but I don’t see things changing for women in a quick or epic way. But I think incrementally we see more opportunities and women taking out projects that are bigger, more lucrative, more ambitious.
About the Author
Vera von Kreutzbruck was born in Argentina. She started her career in journalism at the English language newspaper, Buenos Aires Herald. After a fellowship in Germany, she decided to settle in Berlin. She currently works as a freelance journalist contributing to media in Europe and Latin America. Her articles focus on international news and culture in Germany and the European Union.