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Being a parent raises so many urgent, concrete questions—Will this movie cause nightmares? Is this enough sunscreen? Where are the Cheez-Its?—that the abstract ones often slip beneath the surface, only to emerge later, unbidden. In the morning, making breakfast, you can look up from the waffle mix to see your kids and think, Wait—did I make these people? On lifeguard duty, you can feel suddenly watched by an imaginary adult version of the child in the pool and wonder, How much of that grownup already exists, and how much has yet to arrive? Parents know their children with astonishing, intimate specificity, and yet each child is also an unknown—a whole and separate individual living an independent life in your house. This duality contributes to both the challenge and the thrill of raising children.
The fact that children are their own people can come as a surprise to parents. This is partly because young kids are so hopelessly dependent, but it also reflects how we think about parenthood. Before we have children, we often ask ourselves if we want them; we mull whether having them will make us happier or more mature, or bring meaning to our lives, or in some sense fulfill our destinies. We talk as though having children is mainly “a matter of inclination, of personal desire, of appetite,” the philosopher Mara van der Lugt writes, in “Begetting: What Does It Mean to Create a Child?” She sees this as totally backward. Like Dr. Frankenstein, we are neglecting the monster’s point of view. What will our possible children think of their existence? Will they be glad they’ve been born, or curse us for ushering them into being? Having children, van der Lugt argues, might be best seen as “a cosmic intervention, something great, and wondrous—and terrible.” We are deciding “that life is worth living on behalf of a person who cannot be consulted,” and we “must be prepared, at any point, to be held accountable for their creation.”
From a historical perspective, these may be new concerns. Before contraception, van der Lugt writes, people used to just have children in the course of life, whether they wanted them or not. Back then, it was God who shouldered the moral burden of being “the creator”; we turned to him, perplexed, to ask why he’d bothered to make us even though “man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” Today, though, we are all creators, and so the theological has become personal.
“Begetting,” accordingly, reacts to a larger movement to reconsider the ethics of procreation. Against “pronatalists”—among them Donald Trump’s Vice-Presidential nominee, J. D. Vance—who urge us to have more kids on practical, moral, and existential grounds, “anti-natalists” maintain that having children may be morally wrong, perhaps because it increases the total quantity of suffering in the universe (life is hard!) or because it pushes the planet closer to ecological collapse. Van der Lugt is not pronatalist, but she isn’t anti-natalist, either. Her contention is simply that we should confront these questions more directly. Typically, she observes, it’s people who don’t want kids who are asked to explain themselves. Maybe it should work the other way, so that, when someone says that they want kids, people ask, “Why?”
The problem is that it’s hard to say. Van der Lugt inventories the reasons why people have children, ranking them from callow (conformity, boredom, satisfying your parents) to admirable (purpose, companionship, happiness, love). Yet she finds that even the best, most sincere reasons come up short: life can be full of struggle and is possibly meaningless, death is inevitable and sometimes painful, and “love alone cannot justify all things.” (As a rule, philosophers are not easily satisfied.) Van der Lugt concludes that having kids is such a big deal—especially to the kids—that nothing we can say is really equal to it. And so we might proceed with a sense of trepidatious, hand-wavy gratitude, admitting to ourselves that our future kids could decide that what we’re doing is outrageous. Van der Lugt cites the example of a Flemish couple who took “parental vows” at their city hall. “In the presence of witnesses and a local magistrate, they promised their child things such as safety, a proper education, no violence, and to keep the child’s interests at heart in the case of conflicts,” she reports. Many parents, probably most of them, hope to give such things to their children. But the import of those hopes is different when you express them in public, possibly addressing someone who hasn’t yet been born. It’s as though you’re humbling yourself before the judgment of the independent person your child will someday become.
What about after we have kids? In a 2014 book, “Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships,” the philosopher Harry Brighouse and the political theorist Adam Swift ask how we might relate to our children if we understand them, from the beginning of their lives, as independent individuals. There’s a tension, they write, between the ideals of a liberal society and the widely held “proprietarian view” of children: “The idea that children in some sense belong to their parents continues to influence many who reject the once-common view that wives belong to their husbands,” they note. But what’s the alternative? What would a family look like if the fundamental separateness of children was taken for granted, even during the years when they depend on us the most?
Just as van der Lugt explores the mysteries of begetting by trying to justify it from first principles, so Brighouse and Swift ask, “Why parents?” They entertain a few non-parental ways of raising kids: “state-regulated quasi-orphanages, in which children are raised by trained and specialized employees”; kibbutz-like institutions that combine parents with “designated child-raising specialists”; and communes in which “a large group of adults collectively and jointly raises a group of children,” with no one being particularly responsible for anyone else. Although there are theoretical reasons for favoring such arrangements—it’s possible to imagine that a state-run quasi-orphanage might treat its charges equally, for example, whereas some families are richer than others—they conclude, after an extensive discussion, that “children have a right to be raised by parents.” This is because kids have a more general right to a good upbringing, and such an upbringing is “best delivered by particular people who interact with them continuously during the course of their development.” Steady, attentive caregivers—biological or not—are best suited to deliver “familial relationship goods.”
This is an odd, even torturous way to think about something as familiar as the family. And yet it yields interesting results. If the relationship between parents and children is based not on the proprietary “ownership” of kids by their parents but on the right of children to a certain kind of upbringing, then it makes sense to ask what parents must do to satisfy that right—and, conversely, what’s irrelevant to satisfying it. Brighouse and Swift, after pushing and prodding their ideas in various ways, conclude that their version of the family is a little less dynastic than usual. Some people, for instance, think that parents are entitled to do everything they can to give their children advantages in life. But, as the authors see it, some ways of seeking to advantage your children—from leaving them inheritances to paying for élite schooling—are not part of the bundle of “familial relationship goods” to which kids have a right; in fact, confusing these transactional acts for those goods—love, presence, moral tutelage, and so on—would be a mistake. This isn’t to say that parents mustn’t give their kids huge inheritances or send them to private schools. But it is to say that, if the government decides to raise the inheritance tax, it isn’t interfering with some sacred parental right.
Similarly, we often think that parents are entitled to pass their values onto their children. Are they? To a great extent, passing on your values is a natural consequence of having an authentic relationship with your kids. But not always. Children have a right to become more autonomous as they grow older, Swift and Brighouse write; they are entitled to the kind of parent-child relationship that encourages them to develop ever greater intellectual and emotional agency. Good parents, therefore, insure that their children have “the cognitive skills and information needed for autonomy,” while restraining themselves from adding too much to “the emotional costs borne by their children should they decide to reject the parents’ views.” It’s all right to raise your children to be progressive or conservative, religious or secular, athletic or bookish. But it’s wrong to make it too hard for them to renounce your way of life. “For parents to raise their children successfully they must establish themselves as loving authorities,” the authors write. A loving authority isn’t an ultimate one.
In the epigraph to their book, Brighouse and Swift quote from “On Children,” a poem by Kahlil Gibran:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
“The basic point is simple,” they write. “Children are separate people, with their own lives to lead, and the right to make, and act on, their own judgments about how they are to live those lives. They are not the property of their parents.”
But what about the nightmares, and the sunscreen, and the Cheez-Its? Someone has to be in charge of it all—or, at least, to try to be. Books like “Begetting” and “Family Values” can seem, at times, cartoonish—the philosophical equivalent of my son protesting, “You’re not the boss of me!” Yet they actually trace a subtle line, identifying an insoluble balancing act. Clearly, there are parents who actually feel that their kids are extensions of themselves; they can be seen on the sidelines at soccer games, gnashing their teeth and pulling their hair. Even the most well-adjusted parenting, however, contains an element of self-defeat. To be a good parent—arguably, to even become a parent—you need to exercise your power. But that power is always slipping through your fingers, undermined by the unpredictability of life, your children’s resistance and liveliness, and the passage of time. Gibran’s poem can read like advice, but it might not be. It could just be an articulation of something parents are always coming to know. A person’s life can never be fully explained, justified, or contained—not your child’s, and not your own. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
