Last year, a friend of mine sent a shipment of green rubber flooring, at great impractical expense, to a villa in the south of France because she was worried that over the summer holiday her toddler would fall on the stone floor. Generations of French children may have made their way safely to adulthood, walking and falling and playing and dreaming on these very same stone floors, but that did not deter her in her determination to be safe. This was, I think, an extreme articulation of our generation’s common fantasy: that we can control and perfect our children’s environment. And lurking somewhere behind this strange and hopeless desire to create a perfect environment lies the even stranger and more hopeless idea of creating the perfect child.

Of course, for most of us, this perfect, safe, perpetually educational environment is unobtainable; an ineffable dream we can browse through in Dwell, or some other beautiful magazine, with the starkly perfect Oeuf toddler bed, the spotless nursery. Most of us do not raise our children amidst a sea of lovely and instructive wooden toys and soft cushiony rubber floors and healthy organic snacks, but the ideal exists and exerts its dubious influence.

This fantasy of control begins long before the child is born, though every now and then a sane bulletin lands amidst our fashionable perfectionism, a real-world corrective to our over-arching anxieties. I remember reading with some astonishment, while I was pregnant, a quiet, unsensational article about how one study showed that crack babies turned out to be doing as well as non-crack babies. Here we are feeling guilty about goat’s cheese on a salad, or three sips of wine, and all the while these ladies, lighting crack pipes, are producing intelligent and healthy offspring. While it’s true that no one seemed to be wholeheartedly recommending that pregnant women everywhere take up crack for relaxation, the fundamental irony does appear to illustrate a basic point: which is that children, even in utero, are infinitely more adaptable and hardy and mysterious than we imagine.

And yet the current imagination continues to run to control, toward new frontiers and horizons of it. A recent book generating interest in the US is called Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives. It takes up questions such as whether eating more fish will raise the intelligence of your child, or what exact level of stress is beneficial to the unborn child. (Too much stress is bad, but too little stress, it turns out, is not good either. One doctor reports that she has pregnant women with blissfully tranquil lives asking her what they can do to add a little healthy stress to the placid uterine environment.)

Then, just last month came the well-publicised British study that suggested that a little drinking during pregnancy is healthy, and that children whose parents drank a little bit were in fact, if anything, slightly more intelligent than children whose mothers refrained entirely. One might think this new evidence would challenge the absolutism of our attitudes about drinking and pregnancy, the near-religious zeal with which we approach the subject, but it’s equally possible that it won’t actually have much effect. Our righteousness and morally charged suspicion that drinking even the tiniest bit will harm an unborn child runs deeper than rational discussion or science; we are primed for guilt and sacrifice, for the obsessive monitoring of the environment, for rampant moralism and reproach, even before the baby is born.

One of my friends asked me, very sensibly, “Is it worth even the smallest risk?” about a glass of wine late in my pregnancy, and of course the answer has to be no. What kind of Lady Macbeth would place her own fleeting desire for a glass of wine above her child’s health, or ability to get into an excellent college? However, the question itself betrays its own assumptions: our exaggerated vision of risk and sensitivity to the impossible idea of control may also be damaging to a child.

If you drink a little, the popular logic goes, your child might be a little dumber. He won’t be damaged per se, but he’ll be a little dumber. Behind this calculation is the mystical idea of engineering the perfect child. But perhaps the question we should be asking ourselves is, even if we can engineer him, will he grow up to be unbearable?

You know the child I am talking about: precious, wide-eyed, over-cared-for, fussy, in a beautiful sweater, or a carefully hipsterish T-shirt. Have we done him a favour by protecting him from everything, from dirt and dust and violence and sugar and boredom and egg whites and mean children who steal his plastic dinosaurs, from, in short, the everyday banging-up of the universe? The wooden toys that tastefully surround him, the all-sacrificing, well-meaning parents, with a library of books on how to make him turn out correctly – is all of it actually harming or denaturing him?

Someone I know tells me that in the mornings, while making breakfast, packing lunches and laying out clothes, she organises an art project for her children. An art project! This sounds impossibly idyllic – imaginative, engaged, laudable. And yet, is it just the slightest bit mad as well? Will the world, with its long lines in the passport office and traffic jams, be able to live up to quite this standard of exquisite stimulation? And can you force or programme your child to be creative?

The bookshelves offer bright assistance: Amazing Minds: The Science of Nurturing Your Child’s Developing Mind with Games, Activities and More; Raising Your Spirited Child: A Guide for Parents Whose Child Is More Intense, Sensitive, Perceptive, Persistent, Energetic; Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Kids (Without Going Nuts with Worry). These books, and the myriad others like them, hold out the promise of a healthy, civilised venture, where every obstacle, every bedtime, every tantrum, is something to be mastered like an exam at school.

. . .

Can we, for a moment, flash back to the benign neglect of the 1970s and ’80s? I can remember my parents having parties, wild children running around until dark, catching fireflies. If these children helped themselves to three slices of cake, or ingested the second-hand smoke from cigarettes, or carried cocktails to adults who were ever so slightly slurring their words, they were not noticed; they were loved, just not monitored. And, as I remember it, those warm summer nights of not being focused on were liberating. In the long sticky hours of boredom, in the lonely, unsupervised, unstructured time, something blooms; it was in those margins that we became ourselves.

And then, of course, it sometimes turns out that the perfect environment is not perfect. Take for example, the fastidiousness a certain segment of modern parents enthusiastically cultivates. The New York Times recently ran an article called “Babies Know: A Little Dirt Is Good for You”, which addressed itself sotto voce to parents who insist that everyone who enters their house takes off their shoes, who obsessively wash hands, or don’t allow their children on the subway and carry around little bottles of disinfectant. Apparently, there is, from a sensible scientific point of view, such a thing as being too clean; children, it turns out, need to be exposed to a little dirt to develop immunities, and it seems that the smudged, filthy child happily chewing on a stick in the playground is healthier than his immaculate, prodigiously wiped-down counterpart. I like this story because there may be no better metaphor for the conundrum of over-protection, the protection that doesn’t protect.

去年，我的一位朋友花了不菲的代价，把一批环保塑胶地板运至位于法国南部的别墅，原因是担心在暑假期间，她蹒跚学步的孩子会在石板地上摔伤。虽然一代代法国孩子可能就是在同样的石头地上跑、摔、玩、睡，而且平安长大成人，但这并未阻止她要确保安全的决心。我认为，这极端体现了我们这辈人的普遍臆想：我们能够控制孩子，让孩子的成长环境完美无缺。在这种为孩子营造理想环境的奇怪而又徒劳的想法背后，暗藏着更为奇特、也更为徒劳的理念：培养理想化的孩子。

当然，对我们多数人来说，这种完美、安全、无时不在教育的氛围实难企及；通过翻阅《居住》(Dwell)或其它精美的杂志，我们可以体验到这个只可意会的梦想——美仑美奂的Oeuf婴儿床以及一尘不染的托儿所。我们多数人抚养孩子的时候，没有成堆可爱而益智的木质玩具、松软的塑胶地板或是健康的有机零食，但这种臆想存在于我们的脑海中，发挥着难以捉摸的影响力。

控制孩子的臆想早在孩子出生前就已存在，虽然在追求时髦的完美主义的过程中，不时有真知灼见闪现，也算是在现实世界中对我们过度焦虑的矫正。记起当初怀孕时，我曾有些惊愕地读到过一篇平铺直叙的文章，说研究表明毒品婴儿(crack baby)最终会与非畸形儿一样聪明伶俐。现如今我们连吃色拉中的羊奶奶酪、喝几口葡萄酒都觉得很愧疚，而这些吸食毒品的女士生出的竟然也是聪明健康的宝宝！实际上，虽然确实似乎没人真心建议所有的孕妇都靠吸食毒品来放松自己，但这个根本的讽刺似乎阐明了一个要点：即便是还在子宫里，宝宝们也比我们想象的更具适应能力和忍耐性，也更为神秘莫测。

然而，目前的心思仍是控制孩子，甚至到了登峰造极的地步。美国新近出版了一本引人关注的书——《源头：出生前九个月如何影响我们的一生》(Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives)。书中提出了各种各样的问题，诸如多吃鱼是否会提高孩子智力，多大压力有益于未出生的宝宝等等。（压力太大不好，但压力太小也不好。某医生的研究表明：有些生活惬意宁静的孕妇询问她该如何做，才能给安安静静呆在子宫里的宝宝增加点健康压力。）

然后，就在去年10月，英国一项广为人知的研究表明：怀孕期间少量饮酒有益健康，事实上，相比于滴酒不沾的妈妈，稍微喝点酒的父母生出的孩子反而要略微聪明一点。你也许会认为，这条新证据会挑战我们在饮酒与怀孕问题上一刀切的态度——近乎虔诚的热情，但也可能喝酒对孩子实际上没多大影响。哪怕喝一丁点酒都会伤害未出生的宝宝，这种正当性以及充满道德考量的怀疑比理性的讨论和科学依据更加根深蒂固；甚至在宝宝出生前，我们就准备好了愧疚与牺牲，准备好了周围人众目睽睽的监督，也准备好了铺天盖地的道德考验与非难。

我的一位朋友曾经非常谨慎地问过我一个问题：在怀孕后期喝上一杯葡萄酒，“这样微小的风险是否值得一冒？”回答当然是不。为了自己一时贪杯的欢愉而拿孩子的健康或者能否上名牌大学来冒险，这样追悔莫及的傻事只有麦克白夫人(Lady Macbeth)干得出来。但是，这个问题本身就背离了自身的假设：对于无法实现的控制孩子的念头，我们夸大其风险和敏感行，本身可能也在伤害孩子。

通常的逻辑是，如果你喝点酒，你的孩子可能会笨一点。孩子本质上不会有啥伤害，但就是稍微笨一点。在这种考虑背后，就是制造出完美孩子的说不清道不明的心思。但也许我们应该扪心自问：即便我们能造出这样的孩子，他长大后会不会让人受不了？

你知道我说的孩子是什么样：金贵无比、天真轻信、呵护备至、喜欢挑剔，身穿漂亮的毛衣或是精挑细选的时髦T恤。我们全天候地保护孩子，不让他沾染尘土、暴力、糖果、空虚、蛋白，以及偷他的塑料恐龙玩具的坏孩子，一句话，每天都让他免遭尘世间一切纷扰，这算是为孩子好吗？即便孩子周围满是木质玩具，即便家长苦口婆心、无私奉献，家里培养孩子如何成材的书籍堆积如山，这一切事实上不是在伤害孩子，或者是改变孩子的天性吗？

我认识的一位女士告诉我：在早上做早餐、准备午餐以及整理衣服时，她就为孩子们做好了艺术计划。艺术计划！听起来充满了难以想象的诗情画意——想象力丰富、安排紧凑、值得称道。然而，这是否也有点太过疯狂？我们如今生活的世界签证处人满为患，交通拥堵不堪，它能达到如此近乎完美的启发水准吗？你能强迫或者把你的孩子设计成充满创造力吗？

提供“真知灼见”的书不胜枚举：《神奇大脑：用游戏、活动等开发孩子智力》(Amazing Minds: The Science of Nurturing Your Child’s Developing Mind with Games, Activities and More)；《如何培养灵气十足的孩子：培养奔放、敏感、睿智、持之以恒及精力充沛孩子父母必备》(Raising Your Spirited Child: A Guide for Parents Whose Child Is More Intense, Sensitive, Perceptive, Persistent, Energetic)；《培育全面型孩子：如何培养自主型稳靠孩子（无忧虑之虞）》(Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Kids (Without Going Nuts with Worry)。这些书（以及无数类似的书）都声称可以培养出健康、有教养的孩子，每个障碍、每段就寝时间以及每次发脾气，均可像学校的考试那样加以把握。

. . .

我们能否暂且回溯至宽仁放任的上世纪七八十年代？我记得父母开party时，孩子们四处疯玩直至天黑，捕捉萤火虫。孩子们饿了就自己随便抓几片蛋糕吃，吸入了大人们抽的二手烟，把鸡尾酒端到已经有点语无伦次的大人手里，那时候压根就没人注意他们；他们也得家长疼爱，只是没人监督。我清楚地记得，那些没人管的温暖夏日夜晚是多么地自由自在。在那些闷热无聊的日子里，在单独、没人监管、无人指手画脚的岁月里，孩子们茁壮成长；正是在这样的岁月点滴中我们长大成人。

当然，有时理想的环境实际上并不理想。就拿部分现代家长乐此不疲地培养孩子时的一丝不苟的态度来说吧。《纽约时报》近日登载了一篇名为《宝宝知道：脏东西对身体有好处》(Babies Know: A Little Dirt Is Good for You)的文章，针对的就是这样一些家长：坚持进屋必须脱鞋、必须随时洗手、不许孩子乘地铁以及随身携带小瓶消毒剂等。文章写得底气不足。很显然，从理性的科学观点说，的确存在过分讲究卫生的事；事实证明，孩子要有免疫力，还得接触点脏东西，而且在操场上高兴啃着棍子、全身脏兮兮的孩子，似乎比那些全身干干净净、完美无缺的孩子身体要好。我喜欢这个说法，原因在于这也许是描述过度呵护这个难题的最好比喻，而这种呵护压根就起不到任何保护。