Maggie Jackson, writer and columnist

Slow is on my mind, as you’ll see from my last post.

I am writing the foreword to Christine Louise Hohlbaum’s new book, The Power of Slow, due out in November. And as part of my recent Boston Globe column on slow living, I talked to the wiseman of slow: Carl Honoré, author of In Praise of Slowness and more recently, Under Pressure, a book on the costs of hyper-parenting. Honoré writes about a complex, emotional subject with great clarity and vision; I especially like the way he dips back into history for perspective on our own trying times. He walks a fine line well – calling for change without waxing nostalgic. Honoré spoke from his home in London. Here are excerpts from our conversation.

Q - How is the economic climate changing the climate for parenting?

   A - The economic crunch changes the landscape in lots of different ways. In recent years, we wound ourselves up in a kind of hysteria over children. Parenting had become a cross between a competition sport and a consumerist production. … Every human relationship became a transaction. One of the consequences was that we created a culture of almost stultifying perfection. Perfect teeth, perfect vacations, and you want a perfect child to round out the moment. …

    Now we’ve had this economic wake up call. … We’re at one of those rare times when the things that were untouchable and unquestionable are now up for grabs. One of the things that’s on the table is the culture of hyper-parenting. …  More and more people have realized that we’ve lost our bearings when it comes to children. Rising obesity, serious sports injuries at young ages, substance abuse, depression. Millions of kids get up to take a pill just to get through the day. If a society has to medicate children just to survive their childhood, I don’t think it’s the children’s fault.

      Q – Surely, this change isn’t easy. It’s not easy to cut back on busyness, to question what we believe in.

      A - There is a lot of pain out there. It can make people less willing to try to new things. [But] I feel optimistic. [Slow parenting] involves less money and less energy, less running around. It’s a simplification of things. … Now is a time to retrench and reset our family metronome.

   Q - Is there a downside to slow parenting?  

   A – When people talk about anything slow, slow food or whatever, what they mean is not doing everything at a snail’s pace. What ‘slow ‘means is doing everything at the right speed. There are times to be busy, rushing around, and there are times to change gears. If you can get close to your family’s natural tempo, what works best for you as a family, if a family can get to that rhythm - an enriching array of activities, but time and space for boredom, doing nothing - I find it hard to see disadvantages. Finding that correct tempo is not an easy thing to do. My family is sometime a bit too busy. What we’re talking bout here is relinquishing this addiction to perfection. That contributes to making the drumbeat of modern parenting one of anxiety.

     Q – Is this truly a lasting correction, or just a short-term backlash?

     A – The jury is still out. … But the pieces are there for it to be a real change. I could be wrong. I’m not an oracle.

Slow is hot. In recent years, movements have sprouted to explore slow food, slow art and slow family living. It’s a bit hard to fathom what exactly “slow” means in all these contexts. There’s a bit of pro-green living here, anti-materialism, mindful awareness, community-building, all of which loosely adds up to a slowing down in the tempo of life, or at least finding a speed other than high gear. The idea is hard to define, yet also hard to ignore at this moment in time, when so many complex, high-gear economic, medical, education and other systems seem broken.

Curious about the intersection between the recession and rise of slow, I recently interviewed families around Boston for my Globe column about whether their personal budget cuts had inspired slower living. The answer was a resounding yes. Some parents were already trying to simplify, by downshifting kid schedules or getting more eco-conscious, and job losses/pay cuts invigorated these efforts. Others had to cut spending fast, and were surprised by how good it felt to cut back on “must-have” activities, fancy vacations or even hired help. For these parents, slowing down meant depending on their own resourcefulness more than had for a long time. One mom gushed with pride at making her own laundry detergent.

It’s intriguing that for many families, slowing down means stepping “off the grid,” uncoupling from a dependence on complex consumer and cultural value systems. And according to anthropologists such as Joseph Tainter, a collective wish to go it alone is a sign that a complex civilization is crumbling. When highly evolved cultures begin to break down, citizens have little incentive to contribute to the society’s complex  systems and infrastructures. Cultivating one’s own vegetable patch becomes more alluring than buying from the big-box market. Could “slow” be a harbinger of a simplification writ large, aka a dark age? Dark ages are messy, difficult, times of cultural simplification - that are often followed by renaissances. It will be interesting to see where “slowing down” takes us now.

Note: This post first appeared on Boston College’s Work-Family Network, where I occasionally blog.  

Recently, I was asked a good question - why are we as a nation addicted to multitasking? - by Mike Hoyt, the editor of Columbia Journalism Review, and I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on this topic.

To preface, let’s just say that this topic couldn’t be more important now. A number of people have been pointing out the links between my book, with its sub-title flagging a dark age, and the economic mess we are in. An overdependence on our machinery as an outsourced brain, a tendency to undercut our powers of focus and attention, a yearning for the instant, push-button answer rather than the hard work of problem-solving - these are some of the reasons why we face such a deep, steep economic dive.

And then there’s the multitasking. Let’s take a look at the blind love of multitasking in our culture today.

First, I think that we can trace a line between our economic habits and culture and the legacy of Frederick W. Taylor, the great efficiency expert. His influence on global capitalism is still enormous. There’s a section in the book that gives detail, but in brief, he forced workers to chop up work into almost interchangable parts in order to make each piece of a task go faster. In turn, his influential teachings eviscerated the organic quality of craftsmanship and in many senses, turned people into machines, as Peter Drucker and others have noted.