A Case Against Consulting
There is a word I use for what I do, and I am not sure I believe in it.
When parents come looking for answers, when something is not working and they want to understand why, it is usually by using the word consultant that they will find me. It is how I name the support I provide, and usually how parents refer to ‘us’. Because when you need help, you search for the broad shape of the thing you think you need, and you use the words other people use, because those are the words that return results. Consultant is a shape that sounds reassuringly solid: someone who knows, someone who will tell you, someone who has the answer you do not.
However, it is far from exact, and many parents and so-called consultants are not entirely comfortable with the word. Consultants even half apologise for it. And parents are not sure they are the sort of person who hires a consultant, or that their problem is the sort of problem that warrants one. I will admit that I am not entirely comfortable with it either. And still it is the word we both end up using, because parents have guessed, correctly, that this is what people look for when they need the kind of help I offer. And personally, I have not found anything better to put in its place. There is a gap there, between the careful words we would each choose to describe ourselves and the broad categories we are funnelled into the moment we go looking online. The word is rarely the one we would have picked. It is just the one that works.
I think my discomfort comes from the fact that consultant seems to carry two quiet promises, and I am not certain I can keep either. The first is that there is a correct answer to be delivered, like a manual, a method, a right way to do this that you simply have not been given yet. The second is that the whole thing is a transaction: you bring the problem, I bring the solution, we exchange, you leave fixed. Both promises misrepresent the work. Neither, I have come to think, is true to what actually happens in a consultation.
The carpenter and the gardener
One book that has helped me find language for my discomfort is Alison Gopnik's The Gardener and the Carpenter. Gopnik draws a distinction between two ways of imagining the raising of children. The carpenter has a plan, a blueprint, a finished object in mind. She selects the right tools and applies the right techniques, and if she is skilled enough, the wood becomes the chair she intended. The gardener does something different, and somehow humbler. She does not build the plant. What she does is tend the soil, manage the light and protect what is fragile, and then she steps back and lets a living thing become what it was always going to become, in its own time, in a form she could not have fully predicted.
Gopnik's argument is that we have started treating parenting as carpentry. We have turned a relationship into a project, with goals and metrics and methods, and we have invented the verb parenting to describe the labour of producing a particular outcome in a child. But children are not outcomes. They are gardens. And a garden does not need a better technician. It needs someone who understands the soil and looks after it.
Here is where it gets uncomfortable for me. Because if parenting is not carpentry, if there is no blueprint, no correct technique to transmit, then what, exactly, am I offering when I call myself a consultant?
A consultant is a carpenter's word. It is worth remembering where it comes from. The consultant, as a profession, is a fairly recent and thoroughly industrial invention: it grew up around the turn of the twentieth century, in the world of factories and firms, when engineers and accountants began to be brought in from outside to make businesses run better. It was built to optimise. Its whole purpose was to arrive with expertise, identify inefficiency, apply best practice, and deliver measurable improvement. That is a noble enough thing to do to a supply chain. It is a strange thing to aim at a baby. The word belongs to the world of blueprints and outputs and right answers. It does not match what I do.
What I am actually doing
The simplest part of what I do is being present and offering reassurance. Sometimes it is most of the help. But it goes beyond that, and the part that goes beyond it is the part that does, fairly, belong to the consultant's world: a kind of expertise that comes from knowledge and experience. Though it is not the passing of raw information. Parents drown in information; they do not need more of it from me. It is not prescriptive advice handed down from a height. And it is not the enforcing of an approach.
On that last point I should be clear, because it matters to me. I do not recognise myself in any single school or method of parenting, and I have not set out to build my own. I sit deliberately to one side of all of them. Not because I think I am too original for them, not from any place of arrogance, but simply because labels and approaches are not what I do, and not what I aspire to do. The moment I commit to an approach, I start fitting families to it rather than the other way around.
What the work is, when it works, is quieter and harder to name. It is helping connect the dots. It is noticing the part that is missing, the one thing nobody has thought to look at, and saying so. It is bringing perspective, the kind that comes from having sat with a great many families and learned what tends to matter and what tends to pass. It is reassurance, which is not a small thing. And often, most of all, it is simplification. Parents in difficulty tend to zoom in, closer and closer, until a single feed or a single bad night fills the entire frame. Part of what I do is help them zoom back out: to see the whole situation again, the child and the family and the circumstances taken together, and from there to work out how to build something more liveable and sustainable.
It is never a single fix, handed over once and finished. It is a process of trying something, watching, and readjusting. We take your situation and your child as a whole, we look at the shape of it, and we shape it together, slowly, into something that works better than it did.
On telling parents what to do
When I say my work is not about telling parents what to do, I mean something specific: it is not how I see the work. I do not arrive with a method and a list of moves already in my head. I try, as hard as I can, to stay away from those shortcuts, because the moment I have decided in advance what the answer is, I have stopped looking at the child and the parents in front of me. The job is the looking. Find the missing piece, if there is one. Remove the confusion, if there is some. That is nearly all of it.
I do give direction. When a parent asks what to do now, I answer. Let it pass. Hold them. It is alright to put them down. Sometimes what I say is not even the long-term answer; it is what makes sense in this particular moment, with everyone at the end of their rope, or a first step toward something different later on.
So I am not against direction. The distinction I care about is this: a good direction is not a prescription, it is a reading. When I say it is alright to put a baby down, I have looked at this particular baby in this particular moment, and that is what I see. The instruction is only the surface; underneath it is an act of attention. It is the difference between a diagnosis and a protocol. A good doctor tells you what to do, but only after she has listened and looked and thought. The telling is the end of the attention, not a substitute for it. A protocol can be written down in advance and handed to anyone. A reading cannot exist before the child does.
A word I am keeping, for now
So this is my case against consulting. It promises a right answer in a domain that has none, and it dresses a relationship up as a transaction. I believe that case. I also believe it does not matter quite as much as it seems to.
Because the word is the door, not the room. Consultant is what a tired parent can actually find, and finding me is only the beginning. Everything that matters happens afterward, in the relationship, where I get to gently undo the very promise the word made. I get to show that parenting is not an exact science and was never going to be, and that this is not a failure but the actual nature of the thing. What I have instead is a frame: a way of helping you see your own child, and your own situation, with a little more clarity than you could find alone.
Maybe one day there will be a better word for that. I have not yet found a name for the thing that sits between the expert and the friend, between the manual and the village we no longer have.
Until we find it, I will keep the imperfect word, and quietly mean something better by it.
