having a baby has stopped being an inevitable part of the life cycle and started to be one of those things-to-do-before-you-die, like climbing Machu Picchu or running a marathon.
Gwynne Watkin’s op-ed on Joyless Parenting. We’ve become accessories, trophies to our parents. Our charms and abilities are quantifiable and marketable indicators of the superior genes and management skills of our mom(s) and dad(s). When people become items to be procured, do we get buyer’s remorse when the hell-raisers don’t play to our expectations? Can we go to customer service and get a refund?
Categories: General
Comments (4)
“Having children, as the New York article points out, was once an economic necessity: Parents needed the free labor that a large family provided.”
Bizarre. Newsflash to Marxists — babies have not always been so much a necessity as a given. And I strongly suspect some parents even loved them.
I like the point Watkins makes that “being a parent isn’t about getting a happy ending. There is no ending. As soon as your child is born, the profound truth hits you: this is forever.”
That is why the decision to have a child (or to adopt one) should be carefully considered and made with a commitment that is without conditions or loopholes.
I disagree with Watkins’ belief that one can divide the people who have children into those who do so for “reasons of self-gratification” and those who do so (apparently entirely selflessly) “to make room for another human being.”
People are more complex than she allows.
Besides, probably most people even today have children by accident, with little or no planning. (After all, isn’t that the reason proponents of Proposition 8 in California now give for preventing same-sex couples from marrying. Supposedly my not being able to marry helps discourage “irresponsible procreation.” I know it doesn’t make any sense; you had to be there–or at least read a transcipt of the trial–to believe it.)
But those who do plan thoughtfully to have children do so for a mixture of reasons, from the biological imperative to reproduce to the religious exhortation to multiply, from a “selfish” desire to perpetuate their own bloodline to a desire to please their parents or extended family, from a belief that having a child will cement their relationship with their partner or a hope that their child will fulfill dreams that they have not been able to themselves. In short, the decision to have a child, like most decisions, is not either totally selfless or merely selfish.
I think Senior article was fascinating and worth a read. Watkins’ article is a bit thin (to be fair, she has less room) and the point about experience vs expectation was made in the original. Anyway, the one thing that really caught my eye was the Danish result that Watkins dismisses as being about some vague essential Danish-ness. It is addressed more fully and usefully in the original:
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“One of the things he noticed is that countries with stronger welfare systems produce more children—and happier parents.
Of course, this should not be a surprise. If you are no longer fretting about spending too little time with your children after they’re born (because you have a year of paid maternity leave), if you’re no longer anxious about finding affordable child care once you go back to work (because the state subsidizes it), if you’re no longer wondering how to pay for your children’s education and health care (because they’re free)—well, it stands to reason that your own mental health would improve. When Kahneman and his colleagues did another version of his survey of working women, this time comparing those in Columbus, Ohio, to those in Rennes, France, the French sample enjoyed child care a good deal more than its American counterpart. ‘We’ve put all this energy into being perfect parents,’ says Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, ‘instead of political change that would make family life better.’ ”
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It not that they are Danes, it is that Danish society has made a financial commitment to use the power of the state to make family life easier and it has worked (of course, they can’t actually afford the bill for the promises that they’ve made…but that is a separate rant.)
The funny thing about both articles is that while they both describe and/or decry the weirdly energetic anxiety that animates the idea of parenthood in America, they are both designed to point out what we are doing wrong.
OK,you may return to your regularly scheduled tsk-tsk.
-Hernan
Hernan. I agree.
what’s that thing they say?
It’s not the car wreck that is stressful. it’s the dealing with insurance, shopping for a new car, figuring out how to manage picking the kids up from their various practices…. its all the little worries that add up that make it a nightmare.
healthcare, college tuition, maternity leave, all these things you talk about add up.