Why Do We Have Children?
Author: Kalman Heller

A century or so ago that was a fairly easy question to answer.
Children were primarily commodities. The majority of families
were farmers and shopkeepers and children were essential for
cheap labor. Of course, having children back then was not
exactly family planning either! Contraception was a non-entity.
So families were large and children had important roles in the
survival of the family. Formal education was for the elite. The
education of most children was by apprenticeship, ideal by the
way for children with ADHD or the hands-on type but not for the
intellectual or artistic child. My how times have turned things
around.

It's worth noting that the mothers of that era were working in
the fields and shops as well as at home. The "second-shift" is
no modern phenomenon. The key difference, however, was that a
lot of homemaking and childcare was done by the older daughters.


So children were needed. They had an important role within each
family and within society in general. In the 20th Century
(remember back then), our country became more industrialized and
began to pass laws limiting the use of children as laborers. In
addition, education of all children became the norm, but it took
a long time before a high school degree came to be a desired and
important goal. Most children would drop out around 6th to 8th
grade to learn a trade. Only the really good students of the
newly developing upper middle class were protected and urged to
get a diploma. A smattering even began to go to college.

Of course we were a "melting pot" during the first 25-30 years
of the last century, so the waves of immigrants were usually a
step behind, consumed with finding a way to survive in the New
World, and their children were less likely to finish public
school and were still primarily commodities.

In the forties and fifties, a much more dramatic shift took
place. After WWII, men went to work farther from home, farming
and shop-keeping became secondary occupations, women were now
"housewives", and there was an increased focus on educating
children for their future life as adults. This represented a
dramatic shift in the reasons for having children. It became a
mixture of societal continuity, carrying on the family name
(which meant the paternal name), and, a new phenomenon, the joy
of parenting! Of course that meant that parenting now became a
more defined responsibility for mothers with an increased
expectation of being skilled at this task even though it was not
truly given social value. Two critical outcomes of this shift
were the evolution of parenting experts attempting to establish
that there were right and wrong ways to raise children and that
if children had problems, mothers were to blame.

As our society went through some dramatic changes in the
sixties and seventies, parenting, too, was significantly
changing. Women were less satisfied with being restricted to the
role of housewives, divorce rates skyrocketed (don't know if
there's a causal relationship between those last two points),
and college degrees became the educational goal instead of a
high school diploma. Simultaneously, apprenticeship learning
disappeared and children who did not fit the rigid, complex, and
highly focused classroom day became problem children.

As divorce became more commonplace, a new reason for having
children appeared: To save a struggling marriage. Meanwhile,
with children no longer needed as workers and modern means of
conception available, family size shrunk dramatically, except
among the poor, who ironically could least afford to have large
families.

But children's lives were still fairly reasonable. They
typically had their own bedrooms now, TV was a wonderful
diversion, and neighborhoods evolved with children running free
with their friends after hours of being cooped up in a
classroom. Over the previous decades a new concept for children
and their parents had evolved, namely the goal that children's
achievements would exceed those of their parents. But the idea
of going to college was still so special that there was limited
pressure about what college one went to. Middle America was
still predominant. The Upper Middle Class was just beginning to
emerge. Thus, the perception was that it was still a very
achievable goal for children to be more successful than their
parents.

Over the past few decades all this has changed very
dramatically. Our society has reshaped its class lines, with an
Upper Middle Class that predominates and has created an image of
the successful American that has become rigidified and made to
seem essential for "the good life." The Baby Boomer generation,
the highest educated and most exceptionally successful of any
previous generation in our country's history, suddenly set the
bar so high that the increasing fixation with achievement and
material success created unrealistic expectations for their
children. Some have said their children will be the first
generation whose standard of living will not exceed that of
their parents. Well, that was like throwing down the gauntlet to
Baby Boomers, who never saw an achievement they couldn't master.


The result is that having children became about the potential
achievements of their children. Parents developed an obsession
with finding ways to promote the intellectual, social, artistic,
and athletic accomplishments of their children. They turned more
than ever to the "experts", soaking up every new story about
what would generate stronger minds and bodies for their
children. There's no playtime in childhood anymore – there's
only developing social skills that are believed to be essential
to achievement in adult life. Free time!! You must be joking.
There is just no time to waste. Parents only have eighteen years
to forge the minds and bodies of their offspring into lean, mean
fighting machines prepared to go out into the world and conquer
all adversity. Any college!! You must be joking. Only those who
go to the best colleges will have a chance out there.

So too bad if you're not a strong student by nature – we'll get
you tutors. Or else, we'll have you spend many hours in sports,
music, art, dance or whatever hint of talent you show in order
to find some area of excellence that will give each child an
edge out there. Thank goodness we have the option of all kinds
of specialized summer camps that can sharpen any of these skills
so children no longer have to waste time at camps where they
just swim and play. My child will be a successful child so
he/she can be sure to be a successful adult.

Of course, the majority of this is being done in homes with two
employed parents or a single working parent who have little time
for anything, no less running around to get their children taken
care of by all these special programs and services. The extra
services and programs and increased choice of private schools
cost a lot of money, creating a vicious cycle of needing the
extra income, having to earn more income, therefore not having
much time to enjoy being a parent. Nor do children have much
time to enjoy being children.

So why do we have children? Increasingly it appears children
have once again become commodities for parents. But this time it
is not to aid in the survival of the family. Instead it is to
serve the intensified worshipping of actualization – the concept
that the purpose of life is all about achieving the maximum one
is capable of achieving. We seem to have lost our way with the
increased choices that came about in the second half of the last
century. We've lost community life. We've lost our spiritual
life. We've lost our sense of the value of enjoying life and
that meaningful relationships are at least the equal, if not
superior, key to the good life. Can the children of the Baby
Boomers, who are now becoming the next generation of parents, be
remembered for righting the ship and establishing a more
complex, gentler set of reasons for having children? Parenting
can be fun you know! We just need to stop taking it so
seriously.


About The Author: Dr. Heller is a clinical psychologist, now
retired, who specialized in providing services to children,
families, and couples since 1968. He has written over 150
columns about parenting and marriage which are available on his
website, http://www.drheller.com.