Monday, November 27, 2006

What Are Children For? The Case for Kids

I was looking for something else at the Christianity Today website and came across this excellent article discussing the benefits of having larger families.

Perhaps it was a divine moment, considering I've read a few different pieces over the last week on the Quiverfull movement. First, there was this rather positive critique of a Newsweek article described as "balanced." From there (don't ask me how), I ended up reading this less flattering critique of the Newsweek article on Pandagon, where Amanda accused the Quiverfulls of not only being "obsessed with male virility" (I'm not making this up) but racist and possibly mentally ill as well. From there, I ended up at Deep Thought, whose author had spent quite a bit of time at Amanda's place trying to get her to explain why encouraging people to have children (within marriage, of course) was racist.

The article I linked to from Christianity Today is written by a woman with six children. She's had the rather rude question "Why so many?" asked of her, in addition to hearing, if not being called, a breeder (hasn't virtually everyone with kids?). The author, Leslie Leyland Fields, explains the stigma this way:

The messages are constant and clear. They are posted throughout the internet, and they descend upon me in my small hometown through almost weekly public accostings. In exceeding the national norm, which currently stands at 2.034 children per household, according to the Population Reference Bureau, I've stepped down the ladder of achievement and broken not one, but several social contracts. First and foremost: If you are an educated professional woman, you will not want innumerable children. Women who are ambitious and smart have better plans for their lives than hosting Tupperware parties and singing "I'm a Little Teapot"—with hand motions—at play groups. In the words of Katharine Hepburn, "I was ambitious and knew I would not have children. I wanted total freedom."

I have only slightly more than that 2.034 average, but as I wrote recently, the messages I received in law school were very clear: smart women have practices. Dumb women have children.

The contempt for women with many, several, or even one child are readily apparent in a variety of places.
The internet flickers with similar lively ideas and proclamations. The most reasonable of these sites, with "Happily Childfree" scripted as its background, asks in bold print, "Are all parents breeders?" It lists the identifying marks of a breeder (as opposed to a responsible parent), 43 in all. Top on the list: "You give your child some trendy soap-opera-based name or a traditional name with absurd spelling." Thankfully, I'm still in the running for a parent, until I hit number 25: "You believe that every child is a 'miracle' despite the fact that any cat in heat can also produce numerous 'miracles.' " I give up on any test that does not distinguish between a newborn baby and a litter of kittens.

But unlike the Quiverfulls and their supporters, Fields quotes authors who say we shouldn't become worshippers of children or maternity.
In Reclaiming the Body: Christians and the Faithful Use of Modern Medicine, authors Brian Volck and Joel Shuman confront the question in a chapter entitled, "What Are Children For?" After tracing the effect of an increasingly intrusive medical technology that reduces conception and the building of a family to a consumer choice, they warn, too, against a nearly opposite trend—the temptation to worship children and life as uniquely sacred. "Only God, who gives each of us life, is sacred. Christians must therefore respect life, but not worship it."

The problem that I see with much of the modern disdain for large families is that those opponents see motivations that typically aren't there, particularly racism (they also sometimes claim a form of evangelism from it, which seems just plain weird to me). In fact,the only place I've seen any discussion of race at all has been by opponents of large families. If family planning is a personal "choice," then why do those determined to have no children feel compelled to negatively label those with large families?

Regardless of their reasoning, there are still a number of people who want and enjoy having large families. Fields discusses the virtues her children have learned through having so many siblings.
The question—What are children for?—may be best answered personally, as it is lived out in my own family, not anyone else's. I must begin with an essential piece of information: Most families are larger than intended. The National Institutes of Health says that 60 percent of pregnancies in the U.S. are "mistimed, unplanned, or unwanted altogether." It was not my plan to have six children—it was God's. Though the last pregnancies were difficult, life was the only possible choice. What else could I say but, like Mary, Yes, I am your servant.

What happens in larger families? Children are more tolerant. They learn that they are one part of a whole much larger than themselves and that the common good usually takes precedence over their particular desires. They also discover the principle of scarcity; they learn to conserve. Their clothes are on loan and passed on to others when they are done. They have to share their toys. They cannot take more food than they can eat, or someone else will not have enough. They can't take long, hot showers, or someone else gets a cold shower. They learn that their singular behavior affects multiple people. They are not the center of the universe.

Children with multiple siblings are also more accepting. They practice living with a variety of temperaments, quirks, and ages. Older children cannot stay safely within their own peer group. They learn to hold babies, sing lullabies, and change diapers. A teenager cannot retreat, morose, into his bedroom every afternoon to listen to his music—his 3-year-old brother will jump on his back and demand a gallop around the room. A 16-year-old girl will trudge through the door from school, worry on her face, to be greeted by a flying 18-month-old jumping into her arms.

Children from larger families have to work together. Every morning, the grump, the overachiever, the early riser, the dreamer, the snuggler, and the toddler must negotiate their separate concerns toward a single goal: to get out the door and to their respective schools on time. In summer, for a family with a commercial fishing operation like ours, the goal is to pick all of the fish from all of the fishing nets before the next meal. The children have to help each other. They have to work together in storms on the ocean.

I like that statistic about the number of unplanned pregnancies. It sort of deals with the idea that everybody who has kids anticipated them. And I also like Fields' description of what children with lots of siblings learn. They learn how to play well with others, including sharing, compromising, being empathetic and sympathetic, and negotiating. And just think, there's no mention of race anywhere.