Wondering If Children Are Necessary

By LANCE MORROW

In the Leave It to Beaver suburban world of the American '50s, the family and the child were enveloped in a cherishing mythology. Americans, it was even said, had grown obsessively kiddified; they were child-worshipers who sentimentalized their offspring in a complacent land of Little League and Disney. Toward the end of the Eisenhower years, the literary critic Leslie Fiedler wrote a lively diatribe about the "cult of the child," which he denounced as "this most maudlin of primitivisms."

Today some Americans worry that in the last decade or so the U.S. has veered to the opposite extreme, that it has developed a distaste for children that sometimes seems almost to approach fear and loathing. If that is true, the United Nations' International Year of the Child, just beginning, comes at an ironic time. The premise of the International Year, of course, is not so much that the world's children are disliked or unwelcome as that too many of them are undernourished, badly housed and ill educated. The First World and the Third World have somewhat different perspectives on children.

Those who detect a pervasive, low-grade child-aversion in the U.S. find it swarming in the air like pollen. They see a nation recoiling from its young like W.C. Fields beset by Baby Leroy. Of the 50,000 parents who responded to a query by Advice Columnist Ann Landers a while ago, a depressing 70% said

that, given the choice again, they would not have children; it wasn't worth it. Although a few states have laws forbidding discrimination by landlords against families with children, huge apartment complexes and even entire communities have policies to keep the brats out. A Georgia couple that endorsed a detergent in a TV commercial were assaulted by angry telephone calls and letters denouncing them for having six children. All over the country, school budgets are being killed in tax revolts. That may be more an indication of disastrous inflation and a protest against bad educational systems than a specifically antichild gesture, but such refusals suggest something about a community's priorities.

Specialists in the field now estimate that there are at least 2 million cases per year of child abuse, not 1 million as thought earlier. Even granting that the statistic seems inflated because more cases are reported now, experts think that there has been a substantial real increase in the practice. Last year's Supreme Court decision allowing teachers to spank children in school, thinks Yale Psychologist Edward Zigler, sets an example for institutional abuse, an offense that is even more widespread than abuse by parents. The business of child pornography flourishes. In Los Angeles the police estimate that 30,000 children, many of them under the age of five, are used each year as objects of pornography. A number of them are actually sold or rented for the purpose by their parents. Perhaps both child abuse and child pornography can be regarded as merely aberrational; some child abuse is actually a bent expression of too much caring, and kiddie porn (both the selling of it and the taste for it) may be just a ragged, ugly leftover of the sexual revolution. Still, the profound hostility accumulated in all that child abuse and pornography could be used to wage a medium-sized war.

The much belabored and quite real self-absorption of the '70s implies, by definition, a corollary lack of interest in children. There are many forms of narcissism, of course; one of the lesser arguments of militant non-propagationists has been that children are an ego trip, begotten for the pleasure of watching one's own little clone toddle around. But today having children often seems to have been trivialized to the status of a life-style --and an unacceptable one. The obsession with being young and staying young has led to the phenomenon of almost permanently deferred adulthood. "I know 50-year-olds who are still kids," says Social Analyst Michael Novak. "They're in the playground of the world: single, unattached, self-fulfilling, self-centered. People are trying to make little Disney Worlds of detachment for themselves." For such people, parenthood is an intrusion of responsibility, of potential disappointment and, ultimately, of mortality. The kids are a memento mori.

It can be profoundly disturbing, in a narcissistic time, to have about us, yapping and demanding and growing relentlessly, the generation that is going to push us off the planet.

But behind these symptoms of distaste for children, many complicated mechanisms of change are working. It can be both inadequate and misleading to argue that the nation's adults have become less hospitable to children. In their history, Americans have passed through periods of appalling cruelty and stupidity toward children. To the early Calvinists, a child was a lump of pure depravity. In Massachusetts Bay Colony, it was against the law for children to play. Things were not much better after behavioral psychologists undertook to dictate the treatment of children. Dr. J.B. Watson, an earlier generation's Dr. Spock, insisted in 1928 that children must be treated with cold scientific detachment. "Never hug and kiss them," he advised.

All of that elaborate--and sometimes cruel--attention to the subject of children in the past presupposed one thing: their inevitability. The great changes in attitudes toward children today may revolve around three factors: 1) Whereas children in earlier, rural settings were economically valuable, needed for their labor, today they are a painfully expensive proposition (according to one estimate, the average middle-class family spends $100,000 to raise a child); 2) Children are no longer considered a necessary and inevitable part of marriage; and 3) For reasons of feminism and/or sheer economic need, more women than ever before are working. In fact, of those women who do have children, more than half have jobs outside the home. These developments have produced a very complicated series of readjustments, the social machine fine-tuning itself in hundreds of subtle ways.

Around the beginning of the '70s came a convulsion of disgust at what some regarded as the tyrannical conventions of the American family. Both the need for population control and the urgency of women's rights impelled various writers to launch polemics against having kids. It was not an antichild so much as an antiparent movement. Among the voices raised against the tyrannies of automatic motherhood was that of Betty Rollin, who is now a correspondent for NBC News. "Motherhood is in trouble, and it ought to be," she wrote. "A rude question is long overdue: Who needs it?" The feminist Ellen Peck recruited Critic John Simon, TV Performer Hugh Downs and others to form the National Organization for Non-Parents ("None is fun"), devoted to the ideology of non-propagation.

Something interesting has happened to a few of the N.O.N. believers. They have grown older and changed their minds.

Now Rollin says she "feels like I've missed something" by not having a child. A number of women who in their 20s concentrated on their careers decided in their 30s, as they began to contemplate the impending biological limit of their childbearing years, to have at least one child while there was time. Says Novelist Anne Roiphe (Up the Sandbox): "We're seeing a whole rash of people having babies just in the nick of time. There's a difference between what one says at 20 and what one says at 38." Roiphe persuasively argues that the dogmas against children--or at least, against having children--are undergoing revision. "There has indeed been a swing of thought against children, but it was against this whole idea that one must have a family," she says. "Now I think it's probably going to swing back. All the excesses of the women's movement, including that one shouldn't 'look nice' and so on, are all going to be sifted through."

A doctrinal attitude toward children--for or against--is not the prevailing approach of most Americans. Michael Novak suggests that only the "idea elite," the 10% of the population in well educated, upper-income groups whose work centers on education, the professions, communications or some such --may harbor ideological or even environmental biases against children. That group could not have accounted by itself for the almost uninterrupted decline in the U.S. birth rate in the 70s. It is very likely that the economics of child rearing has had much to do with the trend toward smaller families, which has been encouraged by legal abortions.

Jerome Kagan, a Harvard professor of developmental psychology, doubts that there is a generalized American antipathy toward children. Says he: "With the exception of the Japanese, American parents spend more money on books on child rearing, more time at lectures about children than any parents in the world--and it's been growing." Robert Coles, a child psychiatrist best known for his five-volume Children of Crisis, thinks that, if anything, children are unwholesomely overvalued by many parents: "They are the only thing the parents believe in. They don't believe in God, or in any kind of transcendence, and so they believe in their children. They are concerned with them almost in a religious way -- which I think is unfortunate -- as an extension of themselves. That is quite a burden for a child to experience. In that sense, it is not cruelty to children. It is paganism."

Almost no one can discuss children rationally; having children and raising them successfully is an essentially irrational act. It obeys a profound and sometimes self-punishing logic like salmon thrashing upriver to spawn, an impulse encoded in the race's will to go on. All kinds of aversions to and adorations of children occur simultaneously now. The young are battered and cherished, subjected to violent extremes of malnourishment and indulgence. Children are so swaddled in myth and delusion that Marian Wright Edelman, director of the Children's Defense Fund in Washington, argues that Americans should try not to posture about them but instead look hard at statistics: The U.S. has the 14th highest infant mortality rate in the world; 10 million U.S. children have no regular source of basic medical care; 600,000 teen-agers a year, most of them grotesquely unprepared for the experience, give birth to children.

Yet more American women than ever in history now have a choice about whether or not to give birth and how often. That is the most encouraging part of the new situation of children. Couples who wait to have children will probably be more mature in handling the ordeal of parenthood. Those who do not want children will not so often, as in the past, be forced to endure them. Very gradually, it may become more probable that those children who are born are also wanted.

The nation now seems to be achieving some new psychological equilibrium about families and children. The wild swoop from the excessively domestic '50s to the fierce social unbucklings of the '60s and early '70s left confusion and wreckage. A lot of menacing nonsense got flashed around and mingled with difficult truths. Generations bared their teeth at one another.

Parents discovered, as if for the first time, how much their children could hurt them; some of the apparent aversion to children is a leftover fear of that palpable, demonstrated, maddening power that the young possess. Today, many new parents start with the lowest expectations about having children -- everyone has told them how sick the family is -- and then awake in astonished delight to find that the experience is (or can be) wonderful. It is possible that the U.S., with its long history of elaborate delusions about children, is beginning to grow up on the subject. -- Lance Morrow

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