Chapter XV: Marriage and Children

IT used to be that when people were married they were thought to be through with making major decisions. Thereafter they had only to live happily together so far as possible and to wait decently for God to send them children. Now all this is changed.

No sooner are people married than they have another sweeping question of life policy to decide. Shall they have a baby? They regard babies as things that one can have or not as one chooses. Even if they are ignorant of adequate birth control methods, they still think of pregnancy as a state which they are free to accept or reject. Fiction writers no longer drop their heroines at the betrothal or the wedding, but follow them through this second crisis. Viña Delmar’s Bad Girl is the story of a bride who finally made up her mind to have her baby, after friends had been advising this way and that. That a book entitled A Child is Born should be crowned by the French Academy and that Fannie Hurst should entitle her novel A President Is Born gives further evidence that our literary tradition is appropriating dramatic elements of the marriage situation which the older tradition passed over. Even the movies have developed a new pantomime for announcing a pregnancy. We are coming to such a pass that the friends and neighbors are less interested in knowing whether the new baby is a boy or [p.168] girl than in guessing whether or not it was wanted and evaluating the reports that it came contrary to plan. Most significant of all, there has come forward for discussion a proposal for a species of marriage contract in which the procreation of children is, at least temporarily, excluded from the intention of the husband and wife.

In the mores of other civilizations than ours the practice of abortion or infant exposure has been sanctioned as a means of disposing of unwanted children. The ancient Greeks used exposure; the Polynesians prefer abortion. The modern technique of contraception permits parents to control the size of their families without resorting to the violence of infanticide or abortion, but requires in consequence that they keep the thought of whether or not they want children constantly in mind. The only effective decision against children is that decision which is an ever present article of faith.¹

There is a certain stultifying habit of mind by which [p.169] merely potential children are thought of as having supreme claims upon us, as if they were already lying in their cribs and reaching up their hands. This way of regarding the potentialities of the womb is much in use among elderly sentimentalists who wage a war of propaganda against birth control.

Of course, it is not the role of children in the family that is new; the novelty is the need we now feel for understanding that role. Our attitude toward the coming of children into our own family now involves recurrent acts and decisions which we would like to base upon intelligible principles. Children are a potentiality to be decided about, not a fait accompli to be reckoned with. We have, therefore, a great practical interest in knowing how children fit into the functioning of a family and into the individual life scheme.

In the organization of the family the children fill a triple rôle. They are a kind of joint property, the cherished objects in the enjoyment of which both parents participate and by which the husband and wife are consequently drawn together. They are also competitors, competing against the mother for the loyalty of the father, against the father for the love and attention of the mother, against both for the things that money can buy. When they grow older they come to participate as independent personalities in the system of loyalty, benevolence, and appreciation which arises out of domestic interaction. As cherished objects, children tend to raise the level upon which families function; as competitors, they tend to lower it; as participants, to complicate it.

In a large family living in poverty a new baby is unnecessary as a means of drawing the parents together [p.170] and relentlessly insistent as a competitor. On the other hand, the firstborn child of a wealthy couple is all-important as a mutually cherished object, and quite insignificant as a competitor. And what part will the child play in the family when he ceases to be a mere object, a pet, a thing to be taken care of, and becomes an independent person? Perhaps the little infant which has enhanced the domestic quality of the wealthy family will grow up to be the spoiled child and irresponsible youth who injures the home he once helped. Often the baby which placed a strain upon the resources of a humble home becomes a key member of the family as he grows older.

How then are we to draw the line between the children that enhance domestic life and those which degrade it? If we think of children as infants merely, the question is whether the competitive potentialities of the child overshadow its capacity to serve the family as a cherished object. If we take the longer view and consider the whole period during which the child is with the family, we must note that the relations of children to each other and to their parents can be organized on any one of the fundamental domestic systems: romantic, pseudo-patriarchal, biological, or impersonal. The infant receives its mother’s care but renders no thanks; this is the unilateral situation. The child is radiantly appreciative of the kindness it receives from its parents, but assumes no responsibility for their welfare; this is the asymmetrical situation. The youth begins to meet the parents on equal terms and to take responsibility and thought for their happiness. The movement from the lower to the higher level in the relationship of parent to child, and of children [p.171] to each other, is the excellence which the family derives from the growing up of its children.

Let us then examine these three aspects of the child’s place in the family. It is at once cherished object, competitor, and member.

The place of children as cherished objects in the family is best understood if we compare them with other possible objects of mutual interest to husband and wife. Two lovers may find themselves drawn together by some aesthetic interest. They both like Dowson’s poetry or Russian music or football games. The fact that they share this interest gives them means by which they can pleasantly do favors for each other. They will get along better if both like football or both like Dowson than if one has no interest in football and the other is bored by Dowson. It is a well-recognized fact that love thrives upon such sharing of interest.

There is another and somewhat higher level of common interest in a thing. Socrates observed that the man who has made his own fortune loves money with an additional intensity of feeling which men render to the things they have themselves created. If husband and wife by joint sacrifices have bought a home, or if they have planted on orchard or garden, they will derive from these things not merely the satisfaction of shared delight but also the satisfaction of a joint authorship. The thing in which both feel their common authorship may be a piece of property, or a song to which one has written the words and another the music. The aesthetic side of sex life is developed upon this level. The act of sex is an artistic product which both create and which both should learn to enjoy.

[p.172] Sometimes the work which bears the impress of cooperation is not merely a thing enjoyed and appreciated, but a thing which seems to have ultimate ethical value. The missionary pair who have created a flourishing missionary center where once the long grass grew, or the revolutionary spirits who have risked and suffered together for the world revolution, combine with the feeling of joint authorship a thrill of comradeship in arms. They are comrades striving together for an ideal. Their work is not of the present only, but of the future as well.

The baby appeals to its parents upon all of these levels. It is sweet, it is “cute,” it is attractive, it is interesting as it wiggles and laughs. It is their own, and has taken its eyes from mama, its chin from papa. It has brought with it the possibility of further achievements in rearing it well, giving it every opportunity, making its life beautiful, starting it on the road to the presidency. And even beyond this it has some kind of an ultimate meaning which the parents grasp easily enough without the implements of metaphysics. How often the old doctor has seen the face of a new father light up with the tremendous realization of the place of a child in the scheme of things!

Most married people want to have children. Dr. Hamilton’s research disclosed the fact that, of the two hundred spouses who were asked, “Do you wish to have children?” only eighteen responded with an unqualified “No.” while ninety-two answered, “Yes,” without reservation.

If we think of children simply as cherished objects, like old china, rare books, or great causes, it is clear that some families have more need of them than others. The lack of them may leave a great void in the domestic life [p.173] of those who know no significant object of mutual interest save sex play. But where a man and wife have some more ample purpose which they pursue together, children are less necessary to them. Their lives can be well lived without children. It may even happen that children are an obstacle rather than an aid to the development of a high level of domestic existence.

Here we must consider the competitive aspect of having children. Where competition is present in a personal relationship, there is always great likelihood that jealousy will enter. And even when no jealousies arise, a child’s competition may interfere with a domestic system. The mother lavishes all her energy upon the child. It takes up time and attention from everything else; especially it takes up the time that was previously devoted to caring for the husband. The baby’s diapers are washed, but the husband’s shirts are not ironed. There is a lapse in domestic activity, a change in the ritual of the home which is not merely a matter of new routine but of new interests. The level of family life slips down from the romantic to the pseudo-patriarchal. Perhaps jealousy supplants appreciation. This particular type of degradation is so common to experience that young mothers are often vehement in protesting that the baby will not make any difference in their relation with their husbands. In Viña Delmar’s Bad Girl, Dotty, whose domestic life was already pseudo-patriarchal, declared when she decided to have her baby that she would continue to love Eddie just as much as before. But how can the competition of the child be met without destroying the balance of the relationship of husband to wife?

There is always at hand a satisfactory solution to [p.174] this problem. The husband must be so wrapped up in the child that he appreciates the things done for it as if they were done for himself. And the marriage partners must continue to regard their bond as paramount. Aside from this spiritual means, there are two more or less mechanical devices for accomplishing the same end. Nursemaids and governesses can take up so much of the load of the child’s care that the wife’s preoccupation is reduced to something more nearly equal to the husband’s. This is the device of the wealthy. The young people of meager means who must both keep their jobs have worked out another solution. The husband and wife share in the drudgery of caring for the child, and come thereby to share a common attitude toward it.

When the fortunes of the family are such that the arrival of a baby involves heavy sacrifices, a different kind of competition is often introduced. Sometimes the sacrifice falls unequally upon the parents. The father may have to give up his recreation, or the mother may sacrifice a world of pleasant friendly contacts. Sometimes the sacrifices are shared equally. An ambition to raise one’s social status is thwarted, or the family standard of living is brought below that which the parents had regarded as a minimum for themselves. These tragedies are so common, and the risk of them so obvious, that some of the younger married people are almost savage in their determination to beget no children.

The immediate effect of the arrival of a child upon the level of the domestic activity of the family depends partly upon whether it is received as a cherished object or as a competitor and partly upon the level of domestic activity already reached by the husband and wife.

[p.175] In a family which is functioning on the nondomestic level a baby which arrives as a competitor, demanding sacrifices, threatens the profitivity of the marriage and hence renders it unstable. But babies have a natural way of overcoming sales resistance to themselves. Even though they appear to be competitors when they arrive, they may quickly enough become cherished objects in which both parents can express their loyalty to each other, and through which the level of domestic conduct in the family is raised toward the symmetrical. This is a fact which so often leads older people to advise younger ones to have children as an antidote for selfishness.

A child is in every case a potent means of changing the level upon which a family functions because the habits and routines of a childless family are shattered when the baby comes. The baby requires the formation of new habits and the organization of a new domestic system. The change is especially marked when the parents have organized their play life in a way that takes them constantly out of the house, to theater or party. Unless they can find adequate ways of playing together at home, they will come to feel keenly the competition of the child. The husband has inherited from courtship days a standard gesture wherewith to give expression to his affection for his wife – he “takes her out”. Now the baby makes that gesture impossible, and nothing new is invented to take its place. The comic strip situation in which the husband’s play is habitually away from his home, in poker game or bowling alley with his male companions, is often a result of the disorganization of a romantic routine which came about when the children were born. The change of routine does not require a change in attitude and [p.176] loyalty, but may give occasion for such a change. The romantic type of family life may become pseudo-patriarchal, as in the case of the wife whose paramount loyalty shifts from the husband to the child in the critical years during which the baby requires constant attention. Or a pseudo-patriarchal type of family may become romantic when the new routine imposes such responsibilities upon the wife that she rises from the status of a plaything and pet to that of an equal partner in the home.

As the child grows to maturity he continues to be, as he was in infancy, a cherished object and a rival. In addition thereto he becomes something else: a member of the family.

Hitherto in this study we have had to do with personalities as completed facts, but in the growing up of children we have to do with the creation of personalities. The most adequate study of this process is made by the psychoanalysts whose doctrine, as Malinowski aptly puts it, is a doctrine of the influence of family life upon the human mind.²

Every individual first learns self, love, and hate in his family environment. His first experience of love of an object other than himself is parent-love. This is usually accompanied by an infantile idealization of the parent which embeds itself so deeply in the character that no subsequent experience ever cancels it out. Along with object-love and self-feeling comes the experience of thwarted desires and jealousy, which issues in an emotion of hatred. The emotions of child toward parent are thus ambivalent: they include in themselves elements of [p.177] loving and of hating. The first attachments which these emotions make (to mother or father) and the subsequent displacements of their object (ultimately from love of parent to love of spouse) determine the love life of the individual. The degree to which an individual is autonomous or dependent seems also to be determined by early family environment. The child who is helped too much becomes incapable of self-help. It is fortunately unnecessary here to engage in the discussion of such mooted points as the importance of sexuality in infant life and the universality of the OEdipus complex. These disputed points of psychoanalytic doctrine come up for review only in connection with the specific art of educating children. They are not directly engaged in the question of whether to have children. What we have here set forth is the generally accepted minimum hypothesis as to the development of a personality in the family.

The important thing is that children do develop personalities, and that this development takes place through time. Just as the growth of a love relationship through stratification of habits requires time, so also the physical and personality growth of children is a time-product. The physical make-up of the species determines the main lines of the child’s development. As the infant ceases to be a mere bundle of pink protoplasm he acquires a capacity for feelings of appreciation (object-love for parents) and then, as conduct becomes more rational and autonomous, and as he learns different skills, he acquires a capacity for benevolent activity. The capacity for the opposite attitude and line of conduct is of course acquired at the same time.

We have little control over the tempo of this develop[p.178]ment which equips the child to participate on an equal footing with parents in the reciprocities of domestic life. We cannot appreciably hasten or retard the appearance of these capacities in a child. Thus the rate of growth of a child sets an absolute time-limit for family life. The rearing of offspring is a “work of long breath.” For this reason, children bring with them into a family something of a guarantee of stability for a period of time. By requiring duration in a marriage they enhance the absolute excellence thereof, and afford husband and wife more definite tenure during which to build up family organization by stratifying habits.

As the children come to enter fully into personal relationships with each other and with the parents the family develops a subsidiary structure of amazing complexity. No two families are alike. The simple paths of loyalty between husband and wife are intersected by all kinds of transverse loyalties or jealousies between parents and children and among the children themselves.

The complexity of the fabric of personal relationships in a family which includes children increases the artistic difficulty of building up a good family organization. It is as if one undertook to paint upon a larger canvas with more colors and a more intricate design. There is more likelihood of botching the work, but the success is more significant when it is achieved. The large natural family, knit together by many intersecting and well contrived bonds of loyalty and benevolence, is more durable because of its size. It approaches in this respect the super-family kinship group (patriarchal or matriarchal) which is immortal.

The structure of one of these natural families is an [p.179] artifact, the creation of which is subject to certain elementary principles of composition. The principal requirements are these: the family must develop an adequate love attitude on the part of the children. But the love attitude must be so contrived that its displacement outside the family, by the marriage of the child, will be disastrous neither to the parents nor to the new family which is established.

The ideal development of an adequate love attitude by the child occurs when domestic interaction of parent and child begins on the unilateral level, and rises through the asymmetrical to the symmetrical level of interaction. For a short time the relation between parent and child can display the full mutuality of the romantic system.

This movement of the children from the lowest to the highest level of domestic behavior is much more rapid and complete if there are several children. The only child, and sometimes the youngest child in a large family, is likely to remain over-long on the asymmetrical level. He expects everything from the parents and renders nothing to them. This attitude sometimes becomes so fixed in childhood that full mutuality is never learned. When the only child marries, the level of his domestic behavior often continues asymmetrical and his own family develops only a pseudo-patriarchal system. The lesson of mutuality is best learned in play with brother or sister, and then extended to the parents. For this reason there is an advantage in having one’s children born within as few years of each other as possible, for they best learn mutuality from playmates of about their own age.

Since children advance more rapidly among themselves than with their parents upon the line of domestic inter[p.180]action, it follows that an ideal family of parents and children will consist of a number of subsidiary domestic systems. Father and mother maintain, let us say, a full romantic system between themselves. With their two boys of high-school age they maintain a pseudo-patriarchal system. But the brothers, as between themselves, interact domestically on the symmetrical level. Theirs is an independent romantic system. And they in turn engage in a pseudo-patriarchal system with their younger sister. Thus step by step, the children advance in the domestic scale.

The existence of these subsidiary systems in a family leaves the parents more free to keep open the straight path of loyalty between themselves. Their attention and interest is not so constantly deflected from each other as it would be if the children were not filling their own lives with brother and sister companionship. Thus an important principle of composition in family life requires a kind of balancing of child groups against the parent group.

The second principle of composition requires that the husband-wife relationship must always be dominant. While the children are young the solidarity of father and mother must be maintained in order to keep the confidence of the children. And when the children grow up this solidarity is even more necessary. For if the interests and loyalties of the family are so disposed that the children mean more to the parents than the parents mean to each other, the old family organization is difficult to unravel when the children are setting up new families of their own.

For the same flow of time which serves to build up a [p.181] domestic system in the interplay of love and habit, and which carries the children from one level of domestic interaction to another, must eventually withdraw the children from the parents and leave the natural family to be in old age what it was in youth: a union of husband and wife, alone against the world. The same principles of autonomy and isolation which made their own natural family the thing that it is must exclude them from the families their children set up.

Here again the significant distinction between primary and secondary family membership comes into play. Primary membership is necessary and coextensive with the life of the family; secondary membership is contingent and transitory.

Those who bring children into the world will do well to ponder upon the inevitable transience of their claims upon their offspring. This second parturition, whereby children tear themselves from the family, may be more painful than the first when they separate from the body of the mother. A kinship group institution like the Chinese or Jewish kinship organization may render it possible for parents to hold on to their children permanently, but such claims are enforced at the expense of the natural family, which finds its isolation and autonomy compromised by such institutions as these.

Parents have every chance to put their relationship with their children upon such a footing of love and respect that they will always be welcomed in their children’s homes as well-loved friends and tactful guests. But they have no real claim upon their children, and if they try to assert such a claim they become not friends and guests but intruders. Dr. Hamilton’s research tends [p.182] to confirm statistically the prevalent belief that visiting relatives endanger good domestic life.

These are harsh facts which have in them the seeds of many tragedies.

It repeatedly happens in modern psychiatry that broken-hearted individuals come for aid when the parent and child relation, having been abnormally close, is broken by other attachments on the part of the child. This is frequently the case when the son or daughter wishes to marry. “I wouldn’t stand in the way of his happiness, but I feel that he is making a serious mistake,” a woman will declare, trying to rationalize her desire to hold her son in perpetuity. “I’ll gladly give my daughter to a man I can trust – but I don’t like this young fellow,” a man will say, with the conviction that his daughter is a possession he can bestow or keep for himself as he wishes. . . . We have mistakenly thought that the parent and child relation was beyond question a permanent and enduring relationship. . . . A little thought can show the absurdity of our common attitude. There can be but one real love relation and that is the relation of marriage, the spiritual mate relation. The parent relation may, or may not, have elements of enduring spiritual attachment; but if it remains it exists not because of the physical bond between parent and child, but despite that fact and because of adult companionship.³

Certainly the parents can continue to cherish their children throughout life – the children owe nothing to the parents. The service which children can be expected to render to parents lies solely in their quality as cherished objects. Any other returns from them is without significance in the true scale of domestic values. It may happen that the rearing of a number of children turns out to be a profitable enterprise. The indigent old [p.183] mother who has worked all her life for her children may be given a comfortable place in her daughter’s home, thereby finding her reward. But any insurance company can offer a more attractive and less hazardous plan for assuring comfort in old age. And those parents who try to make a quick profit on the children – the mill pappies who regularly take the pay envelopes of their entire brood or the farmers who are always keeping the boy home from school – are not thereby maintaining a higher level of domestic life. There used to be current a joke about the farmer who complained, when his son ran away from home to go to school, “It’s downright stealin’; I raised that boy for my own use!”

The claim that the sacrifice of the parent imposes a debt upon the child is a ludicrous attempt to use a business-basis argument in a place where relationships are not on a business basis. The claim is bad enough in the case of an unwanted child. “Edward, my son, you cost me a lot of trouble. Mama and I were going to have a trip to Europe when you had to come along and spoil the whole plan. Won’t you help me in the shop this summer, so that we can make enough money to take the trip next year?” There is something in this presentation which appeals to an unspoiled sense of justice. If Edward is placed under an obligation to which he did not consent, he recognizes that his parents also were tricked by nature without their consent. There is some sense to the idea of a child’s obligation to his parents under these circumstances. But if Edward was planned for and hoped for and came in response to an ardent desire of his parents, there is a certain cheapness in imagining that he is bound by an obligation to which his parents had consented, but [p.184] he had not. Let Edward and his father plan their summer in a spirit of mutual consideration and affection. Theirs is a personal relationship of which the essence is sympathy; the fiction of a contract is woefully out of place. A business man who would try to establish an obligation in his favor by some comparable unilateral decision would be guilty of sharp practice. Parents who willfully beget a child with the idea that it will owe them something because of their part in bringing it into the world are like those canvassing agents who leave a vacuum cleaner on your doorstep and then try to make you pay for it. Children are not an investment, and cannot be expected to pay for themselves.

More subtle but almost as pernicious as the investment attitude toward children is the attitude of those who seek to achieve vicariously in their children a realization of the ambitions which their own lives did not fulfill. It is well enough to aid the child in any specific direction, but it is not fair to send him into the world charged with a specific duty inherited from his parents’ failure. Edna Ferber has a story of a mother who, because she had been thwarted in her girlhood ambition to go on the stage, forced a stage career upon her unwilling daughter, almost ruining the daughter’s happiness thereby. One can certainly take legitimate pride in any excellence which his children may display and in any success they may achieve. Their character and success may be a result of the parents’ careful artistry. However, the true artistry of parenthood requires that the children be regarded as ends in themselves, and not as means to the achievement of some other end. And this is a fair test of the legitimacy of the parent’s attitude: is he bringing up his chil[p.185]dren for some other purpose than their own welfare? If his object is to achieve some definite end through them, it is not a sound parental attitude.

And the children, regarded as ends-in-themselves, are in a sense ends that cannot be attained. The parent’s hand is withdrawn from a task hall done. The child may receive a sound body and know how to use it well, but this is only a beginning, a potentiality. Just as the very existence of children in a family is a contingency rather than an inevitable consequence of marriage, so in the development of the children through life they always present to the parent an aspect of possibility and hence of uncertainty. A picture can be painted, framed, and hung; a house can he designed, built, completed; but children and grandchildren are always reaching toward an unknown future and the stamp of finality is not set upon them. It is not good that the parent should see them reach the limit of their potentiality. The death of a child in the parent’s lifetime compels the parent to judge of that life as of a thing complete. However beautiful the life of the child may have been, however well-rounded his achievements, the closing out of his life has, from the parent’s standpoint, a tragic quality which is not present when the parent’s death is seen from the standpoint of the child. For one of the things we desire in children is that undetermined stake in the future, that lottery chance in Destiny, which permits us to make of our own flesh and blood the persons of a dream.

Those who are deciding whether to have children or not must search their minds deeply indeed. The sentimental authors whose very typewriters are tuned to the “patter of little feet” and who preach the gospel that [p.186] children are necessary in all lives and under all circumstances are quite out of touch with the realities. Children do not fit in the same way into every life plan, nor do they make an identical contribution to every family in which they appear. There are always advantages and disadvantages to be balanced against each other.

The value of children in the family, estimated in the scale of domestic values, depends first upon their quality as cherished objects as balanced against their quality as competitors and second upon their behavior as members of the family. This being their domestic value, it is fitting to consider further their value in terms of individual purpose, and their place in an individual’s life plan.

For children are, in one way, inadequate as an aim in life. For a certain period they can engage all our artistry and workmanship. There is not one of our capacities, from money-making to self-discipline, that cannot be drawn upon to contribute to their welfare. But then the time comes when the children recede from us half-finished. We can neither apply a whole life to them nor regard them as our finished and definite accomplishments

At the same time the satisfaction in creating a child, taken in all its implications, with the art that can go into directing his education and with the moral discipline of living to keep his respect, has a kind of original value which does not seem to be derived from anything else. The sophisticated man tends to lose touch with natural values. Even eating and drinking lose their physiological primacy in his mind, and tend to seem merely the parts of a social ritual. Children restore to a life some of its primal contact with the soil.

Name any other object of effort and art, and the skep[p.187]tical mind will pick its values to pieces and prove that it does not constitute an adequate purpose for a life. But in the creation of children there is a life-purpose which resists skeptical corrosion. For if the creation of a child is my purpose, then my object is not less real than myself, and is more lasting than any other object I might achieve. Time mocks the vanity of those who seek permanence in anything but life. Stone cities bury themselves in their own debris, the cultivated lands sink beneath the sea, the language of the song dies and is forgotten with the song itself. But something of the self of every parent carries on into the future.

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