A Dismal Commentary on Society

Once more I find myself to be well outside the norm of USSA culture. And as usual, I view that as a good thing. However, to the degree that my assessment is accurate, it’s a dismal commentary on our society.

Allow me to take things in reverse, so to speak. First, consider this excerpt from an article by a Harvard psychologist:

Psychologists have measured how people feel as they go about their daily activities, and have found that people are less happy when they are interacting with their children than when they are eating, exercising, shopping or watching television. Indeed, an act of parenting makes most people about as happy as an act of housework. Economists have modeled the impact of many variables on people's overall happiness and have consistently found that children have only a small impact. A small negative impact. ....

Our children give us many things, but an increase in our average daily happiness is probably not among them. Rather than deny that fact, we should celebrate it.

These cherry-picked snippets are from Does Fatherhood Make You Happy?, published near Father’s Day 2006, and authored by psychologist Daniel Gilbert. I have encountered a few of his essays before today, and recall visiting his Harvard web site previously, too. Today I came across a link to that article in Why are People Having Fewer Kids? Perhaps it's because they don't like them very much. by Ronald Bailey. I came across that article via Wirkman Virkkala’s post, Not Liking Children. He says, in part (and again, cherry-picked):

The principle of dosage applies: at first, you suspect a benefit; then, at higher dose, you really feel the benefit; and then, just a few minutes or hours longer in duration, the benefit has become poison.

Equanimity comes when you make peace with this. One way is to accommodate yourself to a childless marriage; another way is to avoid marriage altogether. Or, if you have kids, find ways to minimize time.

These essays—with the exception of Gilbert’s, which focuses primarily on the happines a child might stimulate in his parents—focus on the dropping birth rates in many countries. Casting about for an explanation, Virkkala, Bailey, and presumably others seem to be settling on the “people don’t like kids” explanation. And I don’t understand that—after all, each of us was a child once. Can so many people have forgotten that as to have no empathy for children?

Ah, but Sunni, you say, kids today are whiny, snot-nosed little brats! They have no respect for other people or their property, and act like they’re entitled to anything they want, and throw a fit if they don’t get it immediately! What’s to like about that? Truthfully, I would have to answer: Not much. But instead of leaving it at that, have you ever considered why so many kids are that way? Do you think a baby likes sitting in his own waste and smelling nasty for hours? Do you think a child likes having a perpetually drippy nose from October to March? And we all know that few kids are okay with having others take their property unasked.

Kids are the way they are because their parents have encouraged or tolerated that way of being. The parents are the responsible parties, up to a certain age. If personal needs aren’t met when a child is young, then it becomes much harder for a child to come to understand the importance of hygiene and learn to see to it for himself. If a child’s body or property rights aren’t respected, then it should be no surprise that the child doesn’t respect others’ rights.

Bailey’s article offers a clue regarding the treatment of children today (hyperlink inserted by me from elsewhere in the text):

Demographic Winter asserts that "every aspect of modernity works against family life and in favor of singleness and small families or voluntary childlessness." And surely they are right. Modern societies offer people many other satisfactions and choices outside of the family. ....

[M]odernity essentially transforms children from capital goods that produce family income into consumption items to be enjoyed for their own sakes, more akin to sculptures, paintings, or theatre.

Those “other satisfactions” seem to me to be only part of it. The other is this: many individuals seem to have little understanding of what parenthood actually entails. Having been raised in small families (and most likely, not expected to help with younger siblings) and sent off to school and thereby separated from one’s siblings for the bulk of the day, and seeing the shallow depictions of family interactions on most TV shows gives one no appreciation for both the rigors and the joys of parenthood.

I say that as a person who did not want children for many, many years. I had much of the attitude summarized above. But then I fell in love with someone I respected enormously, and whose principles are consistent with mine. Suddenly, having children was not a bad thing ... in fact, when I discovered I was pregnant with Snolf the First I was overjoyed. Having talked with Lobo about the challenges and rewards of parenting helped prepare me; but the real revelation came when Snolf the First was born. He was such an interesting person from the outset! By paying attention to him, I saw glimmers of the personality that was still to blossom; by respecting his personhood, he has grown into respecting others. We never gave any thought to putting either of our children in day care; not only are they our responsibility, we would miss out on so much of their lives by doing so.

But this perspective on infancy and childhood isn’t very visible in our society ... and for people more interested in possessions than relations it probably sounds like a thin gruel. For me it has been—and continues to be—a bountiful feast. That isn’t to say it’s all pleasant—but I do think if one understands and accepts the fundamental nature of childhood, even the less-pleasant times offer learning opportunities for parent and child alike. Best of all, I have been fortunate enough to find other parents who have the same attitude—that is, one of love and respect—toward their offspring; and not surprisingly, their children tend to be as interesting and genuine as the snolfs are.

For those who see children as “consumption items”, to be dealt with as passively as one views art or movies, my feast will forever remain out of reach. That perspective seems emblematic of my disconnect with modern parenting and with those who cavalierly dismiss children as uninteresting, ill-behaved brats. Proponents of either view seem unwilling to bother to see the individual—the budding adult—within the child, nor to keep in mind their own unhappy childhood experiences when interacting with a child. Such an approach to childhood, coupled with the easy and expected warehousing of children from infancy on, seems to guarantee that for most parents, raising a child will remain a mostly unfulfilling chore.

Bailey’s article closes with a summation of Gilbert’s explanation of why so many parents express happiness in their children when the data suggest that they aren’t really all that happy. And that is one of the saddest elements of this whole situation to me. Many people around the world now have the capability of choosing whether to have children, and when to have them ... yet few seem to give much serious thought to why they want children, much less how to raise them. Without such deep, conscious thinking, far too many parents will default to the unsatisfying treadmill of modern mainstream parenting. As Glen Allport recently wrote, perhaps moreso than anyone else, children need real love and freedom. It is dismaying that so few seem to get them.



Regarding my “cherry picking” of quotes: both Virkkala and Gilbert are not entirely down on kids. Virkkala specifically acknowledges the negative effects possible with “outsourcing” of children to schools and the like; and while Gilbert closes his essay with the observation that our ability to love those who most challenge us is noble, that fails to compensate for the snark sprinkled throughout the essay in my view.