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Time to Build Shelter
I hope the inspectors never come to my house. They would find us guilty of many years of blatantly unfocused play with daddy. And with mommy too, of course, but when our children were very young it was mostly daddy who stayed home with them. And he was actually better at playing in a creative but unfocused way with a two-year-old than I was. You don't have to pretend to be surprised at this.
It's taken us many years to get where we are with our kids. It's a long process, we're not out of the woods yet and I'm not going to talk about how we've raised our kids as if we did it in the definitive fashion, or as if their turning out well is a done thing. They seem practically perfect to me, but I'm not taking anything for granted until they too have made good on their implicit threat to grow up and lead lives of their own. To assume anything before that happens, it strikes me, is just asking for trouble.
There is a conviction circulating around various publications these days that it is harder to be a family than it used to be. Well, it's always the end of times, you know, human beings tend to see things in crisis terms. and I'm not sure that it is more difficult proposition to be a family on the north shore in the Chicago area in 1999 than it was to be a slave family on a southern plantation in 1840, or to be a settler-family on the great plains in 1870, or in Oklahoma in the dust bowl. The truth is it's always been hard to raise and care for children, and it always will be.
Expectations are different now from what they have been at any time in history. Over the last thirty years or so the expectations for standard of living have steadily climbed. I know that many baby-boomers have the impression that they are the first generation not to do better financially than their parents did, but somehow the ownership of multiple high-tech devices, several cars, and as many bathrooms as we have bedrooms has gotten swept in to our concept of a middle class standard of living, and that kind of expectation creep tends to get overlooked. So the number of things we think we need has changed. Another thing that has changed radically in the last thirty years is the expectation we have for the shape of women's lives. And hallelujia for that.
But one thing hasn't changed, and it won't change unless we evolve into a different sort of animal from the one we are. Human babies continue to be born helpless and dependent, in need of constant, intense care and nurturing for many years following their birth. The expectations that have changed have swept around this reality, often trying to depict it as something other than what it is. But children's needs don't change, and they can't. We need to be honest with ourselves and each other about that.
So what has happened and what are we supposed to do about it? That depends very much on who you ask. A recent edition of Inward Springs, the UU supported publication for liberal religious families was dedicated to the subject of Family First. If you look at the article there by Cornell West and Sylvia Ann Hewlett, what has happened is that our society has more and more developed into a society in which all parents work, whether because of the astronomical increase in housing costs among two-parent families, or because of the increase in the number of single-parent families, or merely because women are no longer willing to assume that their hard-won careers are optional.
Mary Pipher also has an entry in that edition of In UU Springs She speaks most directly to the kinds of issues that affect the typical family in this congregation. The chief such issue, of course, as I don't have to tell you, is lack of time. Pipher points out what we already know: Raising healthy children is a labor intensive operation. Contrary to the news from the broader culture, most of what children need, money cannot buy. Children need time and space, attention, affection, guidance, and conversation. They need sheltered places where they can be safe as they learn what they need to know to survive. They need jokes, play and touching. They need to have stories told to them by adults who know and love them in all their particularity and who have a real interest in their moral development.
The family is the shelter we build to provide these things for our children. Whether the family is made up of two biological parents and their children, or some other configuration, it must form a deliberate shelter to protect the children who have landed in its care. And to build that shelter requires time.
The subject of time in families can have a way of turning instantly polemical, and the polemic tends to center on the question of whether or not it is a good idea for mothers to go to work when their children are young. In that same issue of Inward Springs there are two articles, side by side, one of which is written by a mother who dreams of a motherhood that is not synonymous with self-immolation, one that accommodates the needs of the mother and child without sacrificing either." Right next to that article is one about a family that has chosen to live in Boise and home school. That author emphasizes that they have deliberately chosen to live a simple and inexpensive life so that they can be present for their children. They don't take vacations, don't wear expensive clothes, walk everywhere, and, of course, they live in Boise, where it is possible to do all this on one (no doubt sizeable) income and still own your own home.
The two articles both strike me as a little defensive, they describe opposite extremes and both, it seems to me, speak more out of the need of the parents to be justified than out of the actual needs of the children. If ever there were an issue to be decided on a case by case basis it is the one of parents working outside the home. Every decision must rest on its own facts: the age of the children; the economic needs of thefamily; the availability of affordable care and its quality; the long-term consequences of a break in career. Given many of these particularities, many of us have made a reasonable decision to work at some point before our children reach their eighteenth birthdays. But having made that reasonable decision, how do we build a family shelter in the hours which remain to us? Those of you who do not live in the two-parent/ biological children configuration, do not feel left out of this discussion. Alternative family structures probably need to be more deliberate about this, not less.
One social phenomenon which I know has grown over my own children's lives is the phenomenon of the fully structured childhood. The childhood so full of structured activities that there is scarcely any time left in the week for blatantly unfocused play with daddy. This is a phenomenon which is relatively recent and which affects the relatively affluent. In the new structures of home life, when we do come home from work, we often get immediately back into our cars and begin the evening-long round of child-toting. eating in the car, often scattering two parents and any number of kids over miles and hours of separate activities, and pushing all the unfinished business of personal lives into the few remaining uncluttered hours that remain on Saturday.
Part of what we are doing with all of these activities is deferring to the culture. We made a decision, for example, and it wasn't entirely a well-founded one, that it was no longer safe for children to play together in our local parks without the oversight of adults. We have also become more and more a people who defer to experts. We no longer raise children in generationally extended families, so instead of urning to parents and grandparents we turn for assistance to authors and professionals. No more do we feel quite comfortable with letting our children slop paint around on a piece of paper, when we could be providing art lessons, or with letting them toss a ball around the yard when they could be engaged in competitive league play. The reduction in available time has resulted in a sort of intensification in the manner in which what little time that remains gets spent.
It is a phenomenon which can be engaged in by those who have more money than time, and it travels together with an assumption that these intense and expert-filled experiences, along with affluence itself, are good for children.
If more income, by itself, were good for children, we would expect that effect to be particularly noticeable in the children of the poor. There is a newly published study out on this very question, called What Money Can't Buy. The author, Susan Mayer, a professor of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago is a long-time advocate of government income subsidies for poor children. When she began her studies she expected to find that higher income equals better outcomes for children. I think a lot of us would expect that too. We assume that our relative good fortune is to the benefit of our children.
But that is not what Ms. Mayer's research showed. She discovered, to her own surprise, that:
- whereas higher income yields better living conditions, better living conditions do not improve children's outcomes much .... Less serious material deprivations such as not owning a car or not eating out often seldom seems to leave permanent scars on children.
- Some child-specific possessions and activities, such as the number of books a child has and how often a child visits a museum, do influence how well children score on cognitive assessments. But parents' income is only weakly related to whether children have these amenities. This is probably because these items cost so little that their distribution depends more on parents' taste than on their income. Thus the amenities that are important to children's outcomes are weakly related to parents' income, whereas the amenities that are strongly related to parents' income are not very important to children's outcomes.
That is news which we more affluent dual-eamer parent couples might rather not hear. You mean, we might say, that we're working and providing all these lessons and camps. and the large house and the large yard, and it doesn't make as much difference in our children's lives as a book on the sofa? Mayer's research clearly points to exactly that conclusion.
I think that many of us would prefer to opt out of a lot of the structured activity we are providing for our kids, but we feel a certain obligation to offer our own children the best of what is being offered to their peers. There is, in our society. a great pressure to conform to the expectation that we will all raise our children like the Emanuel brothers or the children of the Kennedy clan. That pressure may be aggravated by the feeling that if we are working all day we must take the income we earn by doing so and spend it on things which benefit our children. Amenities, as Mayer terms them, which we think will make our children more successful. Except her research showed that more subtle things than affluence provided children with what they most need.
And that finding gives us permission to reconsider the level of structure which has quietly become normative for our children. This is no easy thing, I know. Parents who have opted out of the high structure know that trying to find an uncommitted playmate for your child gets harder and harder. You may find yourselves embracing the soccer or baseball routine only because that's where all your kids' friends are anyway, to say nothing of the children who sincerely thrive on all this busyness. But I must tell you that there is something about the totally structured childhood that worries me.
I worry about the child whose every waking moment is engaged in some adult-sponsored and -governed activity and whose every relationship with other children is competitive. What kind of adult will that child make? I wonder about his ability to form relationships on his own. I worry about his ability to make choices about how to spend his time. I worry about his capacity to be alone with himself. I suspect that when r country some day. I am, frankly, scared of him.
I want us to raise children who make up their own minds about things, and who have the capacity for introspection and solitude. I'm afraid that the lives we are creating for our children don't allow for much of this. And I wonder when they have time to discover their own tastes and interests when their every waking moment is constructed around pre-determined activities, activities which may be driven more by our own scheduling needs than by the needs of our children. This self-discovery and selfexploration takes down time, and I mean down time unenhanced by electrical or battery-operated devices. And for you to find out what they have discovered about themselves requires that you spend time with them. They will not learn to talk to you at the dinner table if you only find yourselves all together there once in a blue moon. Family dinner takes years of practice, and even then it's not always a pretty sight. But it all adds to the shelter you build.
To quote from Mary Pipher's article again: "Today family members are often living in the same house, but often they are not interacting. Interruptions and pressures keep people from spending time together and even from knowing each other..."
To be strong the Family must build walls that give the family definition, identity and power. These walls are built by making conscious choices about what will be accepted and rejected. They can be built in a variety of ways - by time, space, celebrations, stories, traditions, and connecting rituals.
The walls of the shelter, Pipher says, are built by making conscious choices about what will be accepted and what will be rejected. We all opt in to the existing structure of childrearing to some extent, but let's be conscious about it. Is the activity for your child or for your convenience? Are you offering it to encourage the development of an innate interest or because it seems to be the thing to do in the neighborhood?
Our children have a remarkable ability to forgive us all our shortcomings. They want to love us unconditionally, so I suppose they must be able to forgive a lot. Mine certainly do. They will, undoubtedly, looking back forgive the failure to provide a third instrument, a seventh language, another sport. Forgiving us for omitting the blatantly unfocused play may be harder, assuming we have even raised adults of sufficient imagination to conceive of such a thing as unsupervised play with no particular object. I hope, when we get there. that all of our children will be the kind of adults who know
how to spend time in delicious, self-propelled aimlessness. They will, if nothing else, be much more interesting people for us to know. Take the rest of the day, if at all possible, and give it to your children as the Valentine of unstructured time, please. And if the inspector from the Responsible Parenting League come by, tell him you can't possibly be disturbed. You're very busy building shelter. |
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