Fuchsman and the Retreat from Marriage and (response article)

To a great extent, Professor Fuchsman’s paper confirms so much of what we know impressionistically from living in contemporary American society. When current and former students occasionally stop in my office to show off their babies and young children, I’ve learned to inquire not about their husband, but about the child’s father—unless it is already quite clear that this is another case of single parenting. I have quite a fondness for babies and find the image of a newborn at the mother’s breast to be one of the most beautiful sights. However, I live in a society with a decreasing

Page 290

number of babies born to the middle and upper classes, which are failing to reproduce themselves. Among my former students, who were raised overwhelmingly in the suburbs, there is a reluctance to bring new life into this world, which I regret, because most would make good parents.

This brings to the fore the issue of why population is decreasing in the developed world despite considerable efforts by many governments to nurture and reward parenthood through programs of childcare, parental leave, support for early childhood education, and tax credits. The reasons for this decline relate to issues of the spread of birth control, children as old age insurance, the economic and emotional costs of childrearing, fear of commitment, the decline of the ideals of marriage and sex restricted to marriage, changing values, and unrealistic expectations regarding marriage and childrearing.

For responsible human beings, parenthood represents an enormous and lifelong commitment that many avoid for the gratification of the individual rather than the group. Children are simply no longer the economic asset they were on the farm and, with the development of great geographical mobility and the welfare state, there is less of a sense that the enormous investment childrearing requires in our society will pay off in care-giving to the parents in old age. The ideal of sex restricted to marriage, a powerful force (although never close to a reality), has had a greatly diminished sway over the youth of the country since the 1960s. The system of social conformity pushing people into marriage, including the hypocrisy of the sexual double standard, has mostly broken down. The ideals of parenthood, as opposed to the reality, discourage some from this endeavor. In my courses, “Childhood and Youth in History,” and “Psychohistory,” so many of my students have the fantasy of being either perfect parents or evil, child-abusive ones. This “all good, all bad” parental fantasy puts such an enormous burden on them that it is little wonder that so many avoid bringing children into the world. A highly humanistic couple at a major university comes to mind: they would make wonderful parents, but have opted not to have children for fear that the would-be father might turn out to be an abuser, as his foreign-born and raised father has been to his mother. Childrearing and parenting are always a

Page 291

work in progress in which there is no such thing as perfection. “All good, all bad” thinking is quite detrimental to the actual raising of children because it creates unrealistic expectations, but every individual and generation must struggle with different aspects of the parenting process. In recent years, the desire of homosexuals to marry and raise children has been a countercurrent to the general trend. It is of great interest, but it is not frequent enough to change the pattern described above.

As Professor Fuchsman points out, many Americans have given up on marriage even after bringing children into the world. Fortunately for our species, most people still are having children, although in diminished numbers.

Families are emotional hothouses. Raising children, with or without the bonds of marriage, usually brings to consciousness unresolved issues from the childhoods of the parents, conflicting ideals of childhood, and impulses within themselves that parents would rather not face or even know about. Children are inclined to act out parental conflicts and disclaimed emotions. Child and family therapists are familiar with the phenomenon of successfully treating one problem child only to have the role of the “family problem” assumed by a younger child. The impulse of some contemporary parents to want to abdicate their ultimate responsibility within the family by being “just friends” with their children can leave the children without the boundaries which protect them from the dangerous temptations of modern life, such as drugs.

Returning to Professor Fuchsman, the commitment of a scholar to his subject is an important issue. Throughout his career he has had an intense interest in the issues of childrearing, marriage and the family, leading him to research them intensely. His research, focusing on the modern family, has been enriched by his teaching of adult students, primarily online. As they dialogue on familial issues and write about them in their thought and research papers, they bring to his attention the tremendous permutations of the contemporary family in a very real, human way.

My admiration for the author of this symposium paper does not keep me from having differences in my approach to materials and of opinion. As a psychohistorian and editor, I prefer to focus

Page 292

on case studies that present specific human examples of the real-life dilemmas confronting children, parents, grandparents, and members of blended families, rather than focusing, as Fuchsman does, on statistics and academic psychological, sociological, and interdisciplinary studies. I was impressed by his erudition but also frustrated by the absence of a sense of real-life people amidst the many quotes from leading authorities and his numerous statistics. His approach to providing the basic scholarly data has great merit, but we also need far more psychological and psychodynamic concepts, as well as case studies. Had he drawn on his deep knowledge of Freud and psychoanalysis, his paper would have been further enriched.

Page 293