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THE PURSUIT OF WORLDLINESS A blog by Barry Edelson CRUEL JOKE 4:Children Are InnocentANTAGONĒ I notice that you're not driving your own car today. QUERIOUS No, it's my daughter's. I have to take it in for service. ANTAGONĒ Again? You've spent a fortune on that car already. It hardly seems worth it. QUERIOUS What can I do? She bought it from a friend who swore to her it was in good condition. ANTAGONĒ Kids. QUERIOUS Kids. Gotta love 'em. ANTAGONĒ If you say so. QUERIOUS Isn't that why you had kids? For love? ANTAGONĒ No, I had them so I could share in the general aggravation and heartache of parents everywhere. QUERIOUS Oh, come on, it's not that bad. You get plenty of joy from your children, too. ANTAGONĒ You and I do, perhaps, but many parents don't. For the most part, families are a constant source of pain and tension. Is there really such a thing as a truly healthy and happy family? QUERIOUS By whose definition? Tolstoy's? ANTAGONĒ I'm not trying to apply a psychological theory; it's a purely empirical observation. Parents may have children with the best intentions in the world— QUERIOUS One hopes so. ANTAGONĒ —but as soon as they're born, the actual raising of them proves to be an exhausting, unrelenting mess. If everyone in the household survives until the kids reach adulthood, and if there isn't some utterly shattering adolescent rebellion or some other traumatic episode, even parents and children on good terms wind up circling each other warily for the rest of their lives. And how can it be otherwise? The relationship is implicitly imbalanced. The total dependency of the child and the almost absolute emotional power of the parent places them at odds with one another from the outset. Parents have this overriding need to control their children's lives, even if they're what you would call good, loving parents. QUERIOUS I would have said that parents have a powerful instinct to protect their children from harm, and that controlling them is just an unfortunate by-product of that effort. Most parents eventually learn how to give their children their independence without letting go entirely. ANTAGONĒ The best parents manage it, perhaps, but they're the exception, not the rule. The basic problem with being a parent, good or bad, is the wrong idea that all adults have about what is means to be a child. QUERIOUS Which wrong idea is that? ANTAGONĒ That children are essentially good and that only by living in the big, bad world do they become tainted and capable of committing crimes of their own. There's a mechanism in our brains that shuts off almost all conscious memory of everything before the age of about five. By the time we reach adulthood, we literally don't know any more what it was like to be so dependent. We accept the receding of memory as normal, but why should it be normal that we remember what happened yesterday more clearly than what happened 20 years ago? That's just the way our minds happen to work. Unfortunately, it prevents us from maintaining a sensible attitude about kids. However much we learn about the way our brains are structured from the time we are in the womb, and even if we profess to believe that we are predisposed from birth towards most of the behaviors we will ultimately exhibit, we still cannot quite abandon the conviction that a newborn is a tabula rasa. QUERIOUS Well, they certainly seem that way at first. They're the most dependent creatures on Earth. It's easy for parents to imagine that their baby cannot possibly exist without them, and perhaps the belief that the child starts with nothing enables them to make the rather daunting commitment to raising them. Perhaps our belief in their innocence is just an evolutionary trait we've inherited. ANTAGONĒ I think it's more likely that parents simply see their children as extensions of themselves and want to believe that they're innocent because it provides evidence of their own lost goodness. It would explain why they try to maintain their dominance over their children for as long as they can, and why parents and kids can never see one another with even the slightest degree of objectivity. One's children are in a different category from all other children, just as one's parents are in a separate box from all the other adults in the world. That's why kids are always bewildered that anyone would want to be friends, let alone intimate, with their parents, and why parents are equally mystified about their children's choice of companions. QUERIOUS You're describing an incidental detail of family relationships, not its essence. Of course parents see their children in a different light, and vice versa. They're not friends or acquaintances, and why should they be? I'm always a bit appalled when I hear kids calling their parents by their first names or see so-called adults dressing in clothes a generation too young for them and treating their kids as though they were all in some sort of club together rather than as a family. You're right, the relationship is unique, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's as good or as bad as people make it. ANTAGONĒ And that's the problem: most people make a total hash of it. The world is overrun with ill-mannered, greedy, selfish people. And who do you think taught them to be that way? Bad parenting is the root of all evil. QUERIOUS I don't think you even believe that. But even if it's true, what's the alternative? Some Skinner-like utopia in which parents turn over their children to the collective wisdom of some randomly assembled community? No thank you. That idea has been thoroughly discredited, and with good reason. ANTAGONĒ I didn't suggest that there was an alternative, apart from people not having any more children and the human race calling it a day. QUERIOUS You've completely overlooked the issue of love in parent-child relationships. However troubled those relationships can sometimes be, they are, at bottom, motivated by the parent's unequivocal love for the child. There is no other relationship between people in which selfish motives retreat quite so far to the background. ANTAGONĒ You must be kidding. Haven't you ever heard of child abuse? Haven't you ever heard of children sold into virtual slavery for their labor? Where is the love of those parents? QUERIOUS You aren't proving anything by pointing out humanity's worst excesses. Certainly there are miserable people who have no business being parents in the first place, but they are in the minority. Virtually everyone who has children, whether he plans to have them or not, turns his life upside down to raise them once they arrive. Some do it badly, as you say, and others ought to go to jail for the way they mistreat their children, but the overwhelming majority care more for the well-being of their children than for anything else in the world. The bond between a parent and child is like no other. ANTAGONĒ Don't you think it's possible that parents are more interested in the unequivocal love the child has no choice but to give to the parent than the love they can give in return? I am certain that you are confusing the desire that many parents have to raise a better version of themselves with an altruistic impulse to raise an independent human being. Children are just an idea to many parents who don't really have the slightest inkling of why they have them in the first place, and who haven't got a clue about what to do with them once they appear. All they have is a vague, self-serving image of an improved version of themselves: how could this beautiful, yelping, innocent infant turn out otherwise? Few parents, if any, are prepared to confront the idea that their children are going to turn out to be distinct individuals, not carbon copies of themselves that they can mold, onto whom they can project their own frustrated wishes and desires, and who will be their loyal and obedient servants for the rest of their lives. QUERIOUS And you know for a fact that this is the reason why people have children? ANTAGONĒ I know the results. Think of Goya's or Velasquez's portraits of the infant kings and queens of Spain in their regalia, dressed and posed like miniature adults, absolute monarchs in training from birth. They were clearly never allowed to be children at all. QUERIOUS But those were royal families, whose views of the world were rather different from everyone else's. ANTAGONĒ In this respect, I don't think there's the slightest difference. Having children is, first and foremost, a selfish expression of oneself. The only difference between rich and poor in this regard in that the rich tend to know who their ancestors were, while the rest of us are adrift out here on the vast, protoplasmic sea. What do you know about your grandparents' grandparents? Nothing, I'll bet. QUERIOUS True. ANTAGONĒ Neither do I. We have no idea where we're from, genetically speaking, and our descendants three or four generations down the road will probably never have heard of us, either. The species meanders forward at random. QUERIOUS As long as we keep having children, what does it matter? ANTAGONĒ It matters because people don't want to believe that it truly is random. What is a blind attachment to a national group if not a desire to proclaim one's lineage? If we don't have an ancestral pedigree handed down to us, we tend to make one up of our own choosing. An awful lot of people get hurt in this world — a lot of children are killed, I'm sorry to say — in defense of the notion that heredity matters more than anything else in human society. Is this a noble reason to bring children into the world, to perpetuate the abomination of racial or ethnic supremacy? QUERIOUS That's the second grossly exaggerated reason you've given for why people have children. ANTAGONĒ Enlighten me, then. Why did you have kids, in general terms? QUERIOUS But that's just the point: people don't have children in general terms. I know what you would like me to say, that bearing children is no more than the biological urge to procreate, and that all the philosophy we spout about bringing beautiful new life into the world is just so much nonsense to rationalize what we would have done anyway. Or you expect me to acknowledge that having children is the ultimate act of vanity, a way of vicariously living my own life by imposing my will on genetic duplicates of myself. Or that having a child is no more than a justification or vindication of a parent's life, a means of defining a miserable, pointless existence by producing offspring, the one thing any idiot can do. Is that right? ANTAGONĒ Something like that. QUERIOUS Well, maybe people do have kids for some of those reasons, or all of them. My life was more meaningful after my kids were born, but it wasn't meaningless before. Having children is neither rational nor irrational, it's just something people do, and once a child comes squealing and scrambling into your life, as you well know, the consequence of it is so immense that the cause of it just doesn't matter very much. ANTAGONĒ Am I supposed to find this reassuring? QUERIOUS Don't take this the wrong way, but it just doesn't matter what you think, because nothing is going to stop people, even utterly rational people like you, from just going ahead and having kids instead of contemplating the unfathomable reasons that are behind it. I don't know about you, but as much as I learn intellectually about what's supposedly going on inside my own body, I have yet to feel a single one of my cells do anything. But cells do, all right, and they control you and me and every other living thing, and all the precious knowing on Earth won't change our most basic instinct to live and bring more life into the world. ANTAGONĒ I can learn nothing from such a sentimental response. You offer no coherent explanation whatsoever as to why adults should value children so highly — except the reasons you scoffed at. If the adoration of babies is purely a reflection of the exigencies of survival, of a subconscious need to attach our fate to the next generation, then so be it. But don't go on about it as though I'm being unreasonable for seeking the reasons why people behave the way they do, and why they find it necessary to ascribe noble purposes to something that is self-evidently lacking in any objective purpose whatsoever. QUERIOUS When did I say that having children conferred nobility on its practitioners? I just don't believe that it's a solely benign, anatomical function, either. There are unquestionably many children born into this world under terrible circumstances, children whose parents and societies don't really want them. But that doesn't make their existence, overall, less of a benefit to humanity as a whole, and not just because they are obviously needed to propagate the species. Children signify hope, and without a belief in a better future we would be a significantly sorrier lot than we are. Except for the most miserable, self-centered parents, we want our own children to have a better life than our own, and we also want their lives to stand as a symbol of a better world. ANTAGONĒ I could just as easily argue that a false faith in the future causes more harm than good, and that we would be better off if we gave up on the idea that mere endurance is a guarantee of eventual happiness. Bearing children in the face of the actual horrors of this world, not to mention the strained relationships that so many parents have with their own parents, is a triumph of hope over experience, and not something to be celebrated. QUERIOUS I couldn't disagree more. I find that to be a sign of human resilience in the face of misfortune, and a trait we couldn't live without. People always believe they can do things better than their parents did, including raising children. ANTAGONĒ But they seldom do, and that's the trouble. Everyone says, "I won't make the same mistakes; my kids will be different," while their parents nod sagely in the background as if to say, "Of course, you're going to make exactly the same mistakes," which, more often than not, they do. The act of having a child implicitly carries a thousand promises — so many promises, in fact, that most of them inevitably must go unfulfilled. No ordinary mortal can possibly live up to the ideal of the all-protecting, all-knowing parent (we have to invent God to accomplish that) and no mere child can possibly live up to the ideal of the innocent progeny of limitless potential. An unavoidable betrayal of trust lies like a cancer at the center of every parent-child relationship. The worst betrayal of all, perhaps, is the promise of independence, when, in reality, children move from tyranny to tyranny throughout their lives. They emerge from home only to fall into the deadening routines of school and eventually to the drudgery of decades of work, or, for some, the barbarism of the army. Even if parents somehow manage to escape their own parents' mistakes, they'll make others that will be no less grievous to the long-term well-being of their children. And the biggest mistake of all is believing that our children are better than ourselves, that we can do a better job of child-rearing (despite a total lack of training) than it's ever been done before, and that our children can break free from the inescapable cycles of life to which every one of us is bound. QUERIOUS If the world is as grim as you think it is, all the more reason to find solace in children. I know you think parents have kids to gratify themselves, but even if that's true, that gratification can take the form of genuine pride and pleasure in their children's development. The relationship between a parent and a child may be inherently flawed, as you insist, but there is as much room in it for fulfillment as disappointment. ANTAGONĒ I'll grant you that, but isn't it likely that the balance would shift more decisively towards fulfillment if we stopped treating children like so much precious cargo? I know that we have an instinct to protect them, and I don't mean to suggest they could manage without our physical care. But we do them no favors by caricaturing them as the sweet innocents everyone would like to think they are. Didn't everyone read "Lord of the Flies"? I can well imagine why that book stirred such strong feelings when it first came out, and why it's been largely forgotten since. No one likes to face the fact that childhood is just a transitional state, and that the cruelties that children inflict on one another are not anomalies at all but identical in kind to those adults visit upon one another. The irony that made the book so horrifying is that the boys in the story were the survivors of a cataclysm. In other words, if this is what survival of the human race looks like, why bother? QUERIOUS What do you suggest? That children should not be protected from the cruelty of other children, or that of adults? That we should allow them to be neglected and abused because that's what's in store for them anyway? You mentioned child labor before: should we just let that happen? Maybe what you're reacting to is the fact that many children in modern times happen to grow up in prosperity and are naturally spoiled by it. What a pity that more children should have too many toys than should work in textile factories! I cannot subscribe to the idiotic assertion that the spiritual well-being of humanity would be better served by the suffering of children. I should think the opposite would be the wiser course, that nurturing and protecting them will make it more likely that there will be less cruelty in the next generation. ANTAGONĒ I am certainly not advocating some Dickensian poor-house horror, but I do suggest in no uncertain terms that caring too much for children can get in the way of our caring for adults, because it promotes the hideous idea that children are more deserving of compassion than adults. Why is violence against a child more injurious than against an adult? Does the child feel more pain? We should value their lives equally and the put the same effort into preserving them, but we don't, and the reason is this absurd notion of childhood innocence. This fantasy of a brighter future filled with sunny children's faces perpetuates an idealized, dangerous vision of human interactions. Too many people are obsessed with the notion that the goodness and innocence of children is a redemptive force. If children are truly innocent at birth and we corrupt them along the way, then you can't say I'm wrong about the nefarious effects of lousy parenting. But if on the other hand you insist that people will turn out however they will no matter what their parents do, then childhood innocence is a temporary and meaningless illusion that simply makes us feel good about our adult selves, as though we were observing in them a pre-lapsarian version of mankind. QUERIOUS I'm not so sure people see children as innocent, rather than seeing childhood as an innocent state. Obviously that state is temporary, but that's exactly why the existence of children is so important to people, because there are always a lot of them around to give us hope of a better life. And I, for one, would rather live with a false hope than no hope at all. ANTAGONĒ Yes, let's produce more and more self-centered beings who can't imagine that the universe doesn't revolve around them — just like the grown-ups who spawned them. Don't you realize that this is precisely the reason why children experience guilt, because when things go wrong around them they can't imagine that the cause doesn't have everything to do with them? Where is the hope in that? All it does is perpetuate a cycle of recrimination that reverberates through the generations. It occurs to me parents are so often disappointed in their children, not because they don't live up to their parents' expectations, but because they end up being just people, with all the flaws that the rest of us have. Too many parents indulge a stupid dream that their baby isn't just another adult in the making, but the warm, cuddly infant who will remain in this state of pathetically dependent grace forever. How disappointing it must be when they grow up! Didn't you ever read Roald Dahl's short story about Hitler's mother, who, after a number of miscarriages, cries and prays that her little boy will survive? "This one just has to live," she says. QUERIOUS What does that prove? That no one knows whether she'll give birth to a saint or a monster? So what? People don't have children because they want either saints or monsters. They want someone to love, they want someone to love them, and they want life to go on. Are there immature and irrational people with silly expectations for their kids? Certainly, but that doesn't undermine the value and joy of having children. There's nothing more natural in the world. Anyway, we should have this conversation again in a few years, when your kids are a little older and you find that you're not particularly disappointed in them after all. ANTAGONĒ You underestimate me. QUERIOUS That is one thing I never do. But you haven't yet had to teach your kids how to drive. ANTAGONĒ And you think that's going to change my mind about all this? QUERIOUS Finding yourself suddenly at your own child's mercy has a wonderful way of bringing your relationship into focus. posted October 2007 Return to home page • Send an e-mail All writings on this site are copyrighted by Barry Edelson. Reprinting by permission only. |