Psychoanalysis × Business × Parenting
For Doing It Right
I had graduated less than a year earlier when I was chosen to teach Introductory Psychology to first-year students at a well-known private university in Lima. I knew I was young to stand in front of a room of freshmen, so I decided to do it right. And doing it right, for me, meant being proper: demanding, precise, distant. No familiarity, no jokes, nothing that could be read as a professor who didn’t know where he stood.
The evaluations came at the end of the semester. I did poorly in exactly the category I had wanted to do well in. Not in knowledge, not in preparation. In the ability to teach.
It took me a while to understand. I had wanted to teach well, but my idea of how a good professor should behave had come between my students and me. I took shelter in being professional and serious, and stopped using common sense to notice when that attitude helped and when it got in the way. I kept preparing classes and thinking about what I taught. What I had stopped revising was how I taught it.
Years later it happened to me again, in the consulting room. I had learned that a good analyst doesn’t advise, doesn’t give opinions, doesn’t reveal himself; for a while I held on to those rules because they protected me from being wrong, without asking myself enough what each patient needed. Reading Anne Alvarez, an analyst who has worked with severely disturbed and autistic children, helped me question that certainty. There are patients for whom greater reserve opens up space to think; others need a more active presence for that space to exist at all.
I didn’t need to give up the theory. I needed to recover the ability to use it.
I tell this through my own mistake because the problem doesn’t necessarily begin with indifference. Sometimes it begins with wanting to do it right.
The Word Comes From Business
In Peru we talk about tercerización and, for certain services, about a service; in English, outsourcing. A company hands one of its functions to another company in order to concentrate on what it considers central. The literature on core competencies, associated with C. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel, helps frame the strategic question: which capabilities do you need to keep and develop, because what your organization can do depends on them?
Outsourcing can work very well. A meta-analysis by Lahiri and colleagues (2022) found a positive association between outsourcing and firm performance, stronger when the outsourced activities were not central. But applying that logic requires a prior judgment: telling what is central from what we can entrust to someone else. And it requires revisiting that judgment when circumstances change.
In business, outsourcing doesn’t mean disengaging either. You can contract a function and keep responsibility for its results. I want to borrow the word to look at a more uncomfortable possibility: that when we hand over a task, we also hand over the question about what is happening.
That is what I did with my rule about how to teach. The rule kept running in my head even though the classroom needed something else.
What happens when we bring this distinction into parenting?
What Do They Do With That
A father or a mother, tired and worried, take their child to a psychologist. They need help. Perhaps they have spent months trying to understand a behavior that baffles them, perhaps they have tried everything they can think of. Finding someone who can take charge of part of the problem is a legitimate relief.
Sometimes, along with that relief, an expectation appears: that the professional will fix the child for them.
The difference is not in the first sentence they say as they walk in. A parent may put it that way because he is exhausted and then become deeply involved in the process. The interesting part comes later. The therapist begins to understand something about the child and communicates it to the family. That understanding may confirm what the parents sensed, but it may also make them uncomfortable: perhaps a certain behavior doesn’t mean what they thought, perhaps an understandable reaction of the adults is helping to keep the conflict going.
What do they do with that?
Help can expand their ability to observe the child, allow them to respond differently, and ease the feeling of being alone. It can also stay locked inside the consulting room, as if the problem belonged to the professional during the session and had nothing to do with the life that goes on outside.
That second possibility is what I am calling outsourcing.
Not because the professional should take less responsibility for his work. He has to take charge of his part. But his participation does not replace the relationship the parents have with their child, nor the decisions that relationship demands of them.
Something similar happens in adult therapy. We understand a problem better and we want the therapist to tell us what to do. Sometimes we need concrete guidance; other times, time and company to find an answer. Receiving either kind of help can give us back the capacity to act. The risk appears when we expect the other person to live the decision and its consequences for us.
From the outside, receiving help and disengaging can look very much alike. The distinction requires looking at ourselves: what we still want to understand, what we are willing to hear, and what we would rather not know again.
School Doesn’t Replace the Question
Nobody outsources their child by sending them to school. Raising a child requires others: relatives, teachers, caregivers, friends. That network can offer things parents don’t know how to give or can’t. Recognizing it is part of parenting.
And yet we can use that same network in a way that distances us from what is happening. That school contributes to educating our children does not mean their education has stopped concerning us.
Participating doesn’t mean doing all the homework with them, checking every grade, or stepping into every disagreement either. A parent can control a great deal and understand very little. I am interested in a different kind of attention: knowing something of what the child is living, listening to how he understands what he learns, noticing when a difficulty persists or a solution that used to work has stopped working.
As a boy, one question drove me to despair: what was I ever going to need so many subjects for? It stayed with me through university. Later, when I came across the distinction between technical skills and the skills needed to work with others, I found a partial answer. At school I had also learned to sustain an effort, to face difficulties, and to collaborate with people I hadn’t chosen.
That idea let me see part of my own school years differently. When I have shared it with kids, it sometimes helps them find meaning in activities that seemed useless to them. It doesn’t make every course good or invalidate their complaints. It can be the beginning of a conversation in which we, too, discover that they are right.
That is participating: keeping the willingness to think with them. Even when what they tell us calls our first answer into question.
But that availability has a cost. Tiredness doesn’t go away because someone reminds us how important it is to listen. There are families that need more support, better schedules, less pressure, or a fairer distribution of the daily work. Asking for help may be precisely what allows a parent to become available again.
That is why the distinction doesn’t come down to how much we do ourselves. There are moments when taking charge consists of finding someone trustworthy and letting them work.
The Screen That Soothes
Think of an ordinary scene. A family waits for hours at an airport. The child grows restless and one of the parents hands him a phone while sorting out a problem at the counter. I have done it. In that situation, technology is a perfectly reasonable help.
The question changes if the screen becomes our habitual answer to any distress. We may end up entrusting it with something that is not peripheral: accompanying the child while he learns to recognize and manage what he feels.
A study published in JAMA Pediatrics in 2023 followed 422 children aged three to five and their parents for six months. It found associations between using devices to calm them and greater emotional reactivity afterward, with differences by sex and temperament. It also found the reverse relationship: more reactive children were later given devices more often to calm down.
The study doesn’t prove causation. Its authors suggest that frequently turning to devices could displace opportunities to learn other ways of regulating emotion. That possibility deserves attention without turning every use of a phone into a parental failing.
The point is to recognize what function it is serving and whether we can still reconsider it. A tool that helped during a difficult wait can become an automatic response we no longer examine.
The Machine That Answers
With artificial intelligence, another version of the same problem opens up.
We can ask it for data, explanations, objections, or help organizing an idea. We can also ask it for a finished answer and stop wondering how it got there. With children, the difference can be hard to see: two equally well-presented assignments may have required very different learning processes.
Taking an interest in that process allows something that inspecting the grade does not. What did he understand? What did he ask? Which part didn’t convince him? Could he explain in his own words what he handed in? Here too, the adult may learn something he didn’t know and revise his own way of using the tool.
This essay was written with the help of artificial intelligence. I asked it to verify sources, to object to my arguments, and to have one machine criticize what another had helped organize. But following that procedure doesn’t guarantee that I am thinking either. I can ask for criticism and keep only the parts I find comfortable.
In one of the revisions, the AI suggested moving parenting away from the center and turning the text into a more general essay about the rules that keep us from thinking. I had to stop and specify what I wanted to do: offer parents, and myself, a way to tell help from outsourcing. The observation was useful because it forced me to recognize an intention the draft was not yet communicating. I didn’t need to accept the whole recommendation to benefit from it.
That, too, requires common sense: being able to use an answer without turning it into an authority that spares me from judging it.
Resting Without Abandoning
Being a parent includes a difficulty the consulting room doesn’t reproduce. A therapist has a bounded time to listen and understand. Parents must also work, run the household, educate, resolve conflicts, and keep being there when they are tired. Looking from the outside can help, but it can also make recommending too easy.
That is why I wouldn’t want this distinction to become a demand for perfect presence. We can rest without abandoning. We can trust without checking every step. We can acknowledge that someone else knows more and let their judgment change ours.
What I am trying to point to is the moment when a form of help stops expanding our possibilities and begins to serve us as a way of not looking at something that needs us. We don’t always notice it right away. I needed my students’ evaluations and, later, other readings and other clinical experiences.
Nor is everything central in parenting left to our preferences. Our child has needs of his own and keeps changing. We can decide how to organize ourselves to meet them; we cannot assume they stop existing because someone else is taking care of them.
The useful question, then, is not whether we are doing everything ourselves. It is whether we can recognize what we are doing, what we have entrusted to others, and what happens when reality asks us to revisit that arrangement.
That is the orientation I would like to leave. If this essay helps a parent notice that he was disengaging from something, it will have served its purpose. And if it allows me to use a theory, a rule, or a technology again without losing the ability to observe when it helps and when it gets in the way, it will have served me.
I wouldn’t want “keep thinking” to become another rule to hide behind. I would like us to keep the freedom to recognize when we need an answer, when we need help, and when we need to ask the question again.
Including the question about what you have just read.
Want to Go Deeper?
At The Crossover Project, we care about the rigor behind the mix.
On core competencies:
Prahalad, C. K., & Hamel, G. (1990). The Core Competence of the Corporation. Harvard Business Review, 68(3), 79–91.
Why read it: The article that popularized the question of which capabilities an organization cannot hand off without ceasing to be what it is. It is the question this essay carries over into parenting.
On when outsourcing works:
Lahiri, S., Karna, A., Kalubandi, S. C., & Edacherian, S. (2022). Performance implications of outsourcing: A meta-analysis. Journal of Business Research, 139, 1303–1316. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.10.061
Why read it: More than a hundred studies across nearly three decades show that outsourcing usually works, and works best when what gets handed over is not central. The distinction matters.
On technique that adapts to the patient:
Alvarez, A. (2012). The Thinking Heart: Three Levels of Psychoanalytic Therapy with Disturbed Children. Routledge.
Why read it: Alvarez argues that the analyst should adjust how they intervene to each child’s level of functioning, sometimes with a far more active presence. A good antidote to using theory as a rule.
On screens that soothe:
Radesky, J. S., Kaciroti, N., Weeks, H. M., Schaller, A., & Miller, A. L. (2023). Longitudinal Associations Between Use of Mobile Devices for Calming and Emotional Reactivity and Executive Functioning in Children Aged 3 to 5 Years. JAMA Pediatrics, 177(1), 62–70. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2799042
Why read it: The study behind the section on screens. Worth reading for how its authors describe a relationship that runs in both directions, without blaming parents.
Clinical Note: This essay is a cultural and interdisciplinary analysis. It does not constitute a psychological diagnosis, prescription, or therapeutic treatment. It describes no patient.
A note on process: FABLE 5 helped me as a style editor, with the English translation, since English is not my native language, and in finding the JAMA Pediatrics article cited in this essay.
What is The Crossover Project?
A space where ideas that do not normally share a room collide. Not to resolve the tension between them, but to hold it – and see what appears when we stop looking for easy answers.
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