With a baby on the way in just a few weeks, I have all kinds of thoughts about parenting, but they are difficult to put in words – in part because this is one of the most deeply personal things we do, and also one of the things we have the most inflexible opinions about: in other words, it may not be a productive topic for public discussion. What one person believes is necessary for their children, another person believes is actually immoral (for me this comes up most clearly with economic questions – many people believe that the greatest gift they can give their children is privilege. Needless to say, I do not believe this). And conversations of this sort very quickly and easily, with issues so deeply personal, cause offense.
But one thing I think I can say is that I believe we are in the midst of a revolution in values and mores, one which I am, myself, going to try to resist. The revolution is this: my generation, I am certain, will spend less time involved in the raising of children than any other generation in human history. And the time we spend doing it will probably also mean less to us than it has meant to other generations. This latter part I fear even more than the former. I can force myself to spend time with my kids – but I have seen many parents who are frankly bored by their children, and don’t find it as meaningful as they would have thought. They are happy that there exists an education industry, and a daycare industry, and a vast child entertainment industry.
I hope to resist all these things, and in general I think the greatest satisfactions in life come from taking back the activities that the economic world of specialization is continually trying to take from us. Because in this way we get in touch with archetypal energies inside ourselves, the release of which is a deep source of satisfaction. We can be more than just Man the Worker: we can be Man the Builder, Man the Lover, Man the Priest, Man the Poet, Man the Toolmaker, Man the Finder, Man the Dreamer, Man the Animal, and so much more, if we give those portions of our lives a little sun and space and water.
And just as Man the Son is an archetype that is not just a personal relationship, but an entire stance toward the past, so Man the Father is a stance toward the future. I remember hearing Richard Rohr asking, “What have you really fathered?” and thinking it one of the ways of measuring a life. What life have you really created outside of yourself in the world?
As I say, I am full of these questions right now. But one piece of this resistance to economic specialization, and an attempt to vindicate the importance of parenthood, I see in the work of my friend Amber Scorah. This past summer her family suffered a terrible tragedy, and she has been transforming the grief from that event into an attempt to give parenthood in America at least the kind of protections it has in other wealthy countries, by seeking more robust parental-leave laws. It will be an uphill battle in a place which considers its main business to be business, but we will see what happens. I think the more likely option is that high-end companies will continue to improve their parental leave policies, but a single law will be difficult to enforce across the country. For Amber’s story, see her beautiful piece in yesterday’s New York Times’ blog.
I consider legislation of this sort one small part of a broader cultural effort to reclaim the dignity of parenthood. For people who work in the kind of companies which really can have better parental leave policies, I think this is a fight worth fighting.
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“For people who work in the kind of companies which really can have better parental leave policies, I think this is a fight worth fighting.”
Every kind of company can have better parental leave policies if we as a society value caregiving enough to share the cost of it. The cost, as we can see in many other countries, is nothing in comparison with the value of giving parents and children at least a year to bond at the beginning of a baby’s life.
I also disagree that many parents are bored by their children or don’t find raising them meaningful. Every parent I know of our generation is enamored with their child and finds great meaning in their child’s life. Much more so than I think parents did in the 70s and 80s, when we were raised. The difference is that back then most families only needed one income earner, so the moms didn’t have to work. Most parents don’t go back to work nowadays because they are bored or find childrearing lacking in meaning. It’s because they have no choice.
I realize your situation is different because you were able to buy land without a mortgage, and have a place in the city with your mom, thereby keeping your costs down, but many of us don’t have that.
The country is so large and culturally diverse that I don’t myself think that a single federal law can really fit it all. In rural areas, including the Catskills which is not even very far from the bluest of the blue areas of the country, paying employees for even a single day when they are not working would be countercultural and counterintuitive. On farm jobs (e.g. maple syruping), you don’t even get a paid lunch. If you’re not working, you don’t get paid, that’s all. I’ve had good jobs here, but never one with benefits, not even to have a single paid sick day, much less paid vacations or paid leave. Since many of the employers around here often make less than $20,000 per year themselves, there’s not much room to make them offer parental leave. It’s true there are a few jobs from larger employers – e.g. I think there are two or three McDonald’s in the county – but not many to make much of a difference. Most of the jobs are doing specific tasks – harvesting things on farms, serving food in restaurants, selling things in shops, paving driveways or doing carpentry or home contracting work – for small amounts of money. There is a social safety net already in place – welfare – which is sufficient because there are almost no jobs here where going on welfare would involve a pay cut. The whole system, as you note, is predicated on, and floated by, the fact that people, rather than banks or landlords, own their land, typically because it has remained in the family. Because of this, people live on much lower incomes. And the attachment to a job is much less profound here – people here usually don’t ask, “What do you do?” They ask “Where do you work?” You keep a job if you do it well – e.g, if you’re a good carpenter or landscaper you keep getting work of that sort – but if you injure your arm you go on disability or welfare until you can work again. If you lose your job at the restaurant, there will be another restaurant that needs a waitress at some point soon. And we’re used to losing jobs for silly and political reasons – the boss doesn’t like you, or doesn’t like your type, or you’re not from the right family, or he wants to give the job to his cousin – but there’s work somewhere else, if you’re willing to scrape by. It’s very different from life in the city.
On the raising kids point, I think every stay-at-home mom I know fights boredom and the feeling of not having a worthwhile, full purpose that is socially recognized. Stay-at-home dads particularly get the sense that they don’t have a real full role in their society. I also know people who love everything about parenting and never want to go back to work ever again. But many of those people hated work to begin with. They still only rarely find domestic life fully engaging.
I think that’s where the work is, in reclaiming those values. People get meaning from things often particularly when they get social recognition for it. And when there is a peer group around them that sees what they are doing and offers praise and guidance. Modern parenting I think for many people – I suppose especially up here, where there might only be a two or three families with children per town – is very lonely. I think it’s part of a larger cultural revolution that would value nature, the land, farming, and all the other essential tasks of our society. If you look at our economic system, the rule is that the more important a task is, the less money it earns, and the less important a task is, the more money it earns. So if you harvest food you are often a migrant worker with no citizenship rights getting paid less than minimum wage – because food is essential. Caring for children, building homes, doing sewage systems – also all essential, and all the worst paid jobs. Acting, however, or throwing a football, or designing hedge funds – all completely unessential work, and the best paid jobs in our society. The values need to be turned rightside up again.
It’s funny how much I disagree with this, having been a parent. Just last night I was talking to another mom who told me that since her daughter was born a year ago, every day has felt infused with a meaning that was not there when it was just her and her husband, married happily for 6 years. Lee and I both felt that every day with Karl was so interesting, to watch him grow and develop, to develop a relationship with him, to see him become at home in his world and develop relationships with others. They change so quickly, it’s fascinating to witness. Sure, some things about parenting are mundane, but that’s no different than any other aspect of life. I think it’s an over simplification or a generalization that is based statements based on things you’ve heard parents say. Even though a parent may complain about domestic life being boring, I don’t think that equals a feeling of it not being a worthwhile, full purpose, all the same. And I think that there is a way of raising a child but still engaging in the world, you just engage differently than you did when you did not have offspring to look after.
Another thing I wonder at is that you view the solution as one that would have something to do with individual businesses having to fund these leaves. I’m not saying that at all. In most countries that have had family leave for decades (countries that, just like America, are made up of people who work in trades or on farms or in restaurants, among other venues) fund parental leave by a pool of money that all workers and employers pay into, just like social security. There’s a lot of studies that show it would cost not much more than $100 or so dollars per year per employee to provide a national parental leave system. And when the workers go on parental leave, temporary workers take their place. The employer by no means can foot the bill; large companies can do this, yes, but obviously small companies cannot. It works in hundreds of countries, why not here? It can. It’s about valuing caregiving and family enough to institute it.
Or, better yet, we could just cut these entitlements to the 1% and use that money to fund family leave:
http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/15227/10-taxpayer-handouts-to-the-super-rich-that-will-make-your-blood-boil
1. The issue stressed in the article has a lot to do with the sacrement of child, a sacrement that is not being recognized or understood by any economical, political, social structure, especially in this patriarchal society that we live in, therefore the ” polis” won’t be able to encourage the bonding parent/ child, or reward it in any way. Pseudo-Dionysius mentions this feature in the Divine Names, Chapter one, part 4:[…we, in the diversity of what we are, are drawn together by it… They also describe it as a Trinity , for with a transcendent fecundity it is manifested as three persons. This is why ” all fatherhood in heaven and on earth is and is named after it…]-Pseudo-Dionysius, The Classics of Western spirituality, The Complete Works, Paulist Press, NY, 1987, p. 51.
The polis will build within its city walls its own ” archetypes”: we are either slaves that pay tribute to Caesar, keeping our freedom, or slaves with no freedom of soul. That is why we have to know which fight to fight.
We also have , with Nietzsche, in Also spracht Zarathustra, in Chap. 66-I used the online Romanian translation: (…” Zarathustra has changed, Zarathustra is a child; 67:” …and they split, the old man and the man, laughing as children laugh…”, 69:”…men, at some point you were monkeys, and even today’s man has kept from the monkey much more than just a monkey”)- this is my translation from the Romanian version; and , of course, there should be checked all the passages with reference to this above sacrement.
Your article has many issues to address; one of them is that we don’ t even know at this point what is the essence of life; S. Hawking has addressed it, in his scientific language, but do we really know it?-see http://www.hawking.org.uk/life-in-the-universe.html
Thank you for your courage to touch on so many issues with this article.