Is a sense of "wonderfulness" and a total focus on the child necessary for child-rearing?
Today's parents are trying to have wonderful relationships with their children. Our foremothers and forefathers were not, realizing that a child required leadership first, and that a parent could not provide proper leadership if the parent's energies were focused primarily on having a "wonderful" relationship with the child...Today's moms orbit around their children, dedicated to trying to make them happy. Yesterday's moms were at the center of their children's attention, dedicated to teaching them to stand on their own two feet...
Yesterday's parents were attuned to the voice of common sense, which is why they did not complain that raising children was the hardest thing they'd ever done. For today's parents, the voice of common sense has been drowned out by a deluge of psychobabble, which is why so many parents tell me that raising even one child leaves them emotionally and physically exhausted at the end of many a day.
It's not just middle-class moms who make their kids the center of their worlds. For some living in poverty, kids are the only things worth living for:
The teenagers who put motherhood before marriage -- before even high school graduation -- become pregnant not because they lack contraception, access to abortion or even access to jobs, though economic deprivation does play a role. They don't give birth simply for a larger welfare check.They have children to give meaning, structure, purpose and love to their lives, in the only way they know how. Marriage is revered but rarely attained and largely irrelevant. Men are untrustworthy and more trouble than they're worth. Motherhood is everything.
''These bleak situations create a drive for meaning and identity that a middle-class person can't understand,'' says Edin. 'I didn't understand it until I lived in Camden. We treat teen pregnancy prevention as just handing out condoms. It's not about birth control. It's really about meaning, and we're going to have to deal with that.''
Both articles say marriage should be present - and be meaningful - for childrearing to have the most chance of being successful.
Posted by kswygert at April 11, 2005 12:51 PM