Ghost Children

The crunchy conman, Rod Dreher links today to a recent report by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe called "Life Without Children" detailing the decline in the number of children American adults are having and what that does and will mean.

Being a parent has never been easy but today it is a source of growing distress and a rising chorus of complaint. Increasingly, Americans see the years spent in active child rearing as a grueling experience, imposing financial burdens, onerous responsibilities, emotional stress, and strains on marital happiness. The cri de coeur is loudest among the most privileged. For upscale parents, it seems, every step of parenthood, from getting pregnant to choosing the right childbirth method to getting the kids into a nursery school to managing the Herculean task of college applications, is fraught with difficulty, anxiety and a growing sense of isolation from the adult mainstream.

Hardly a day goes by without a story appearing somewhere detailing exactly what the authors mention above. The absolute freakish paranoia about "kidnapping" being but one of the many supposed crises that parents are supposed to be wringing their hands in fright about daily.

So what is behind the anxiety and consequences of couples having less churlen?

The answer lies in a recent and dramatic change in the adult life course. For most of the nation's history, Americans expected to devote much of their life and work to the rearing of children. Life with children was central to marriage and family life, to norms of adulthood, and to an adult sense of purpose. Today, however, child rearing occupies a smaller share of American lives. An ever-diminishing proportion of the entire adult life course is devoted to the nurture and care of minor children.

What I have been seeing a lot is new married couples who are far more interested in getting a dog than having a kid. Dogs are to our modern American life what children were to the '50s.

A big part of why childlessness or less of them is so popular now is the definition of marriage has radically transformed from what it traditionally meant--the union of a man and a woman for the purpose of making a family and what it has become--the union of two (or more, why not?) people for the purpose of making each other happy.

How we lost the vitally important understanding of what the entire institution meant in so few years is astounding and depressing. Of course, the usual suspects of feminism and secular humanism have been the most effective vehicles for this sea change. I also have to lay some of the blame at the feet of consumerism and the ridiculous expectations of luxury that many Americans think is simply middle class living since another thing couples fret endlessly about is how many children they can "afford". What is really meant is "How many kids can we have without changing our (relatively) opulent lifestyle and stuffing our 401k's every two weeks?"

What the two new life stages have in common is a focus on the self. This does not mean that adults in the non-child-rearing years are selfish. But it does mean that their lives, by necessity as well as by choice, are oriented to self-improvement and self-investment (ed: umm, isn't that the definition of selfish?). Indeed, the cultural injunction for the childless young and the childfree old is to "take care of yourself."

I could go on and on but the whole thing is well worth a read.

Btw, I was just thinking about Ally McBeal. Remember when she would be haunted by that little dancing baby? I always took that to mean she aborted that child and it was her conscience (they can be a bitch) coming back to bite her. But for some reason I don't think the writers of the show ever intended it that way.