Who Should Be Raising the Kids?

With the Selfish ‘70s and Indulgent ‘80s behind us, there’s some indication that society has already shifted gears and plunged into what might be termed the Nurturing ‘90s.

That’s suggested by a growing societal fixation on children and child rearing, as reflected in a recent spate of articles in mainstream magazines.

But parents should be warned. The current crop of magazine articles acknowledge that modern parents are exhausted, guilt-ridden and confused. They then yank out from under them what small comforts parents have.

In particular, the articles, written by men and women alike, challenge the notion of “quality time” and ask whether society can afford to turn its future over to child care.

Let’s start with the cover story in February’s Atlantic Monthly. If you accept the basic premise of “Becoming Attached--What Children Need,” the piece unwittingly adds strength to other articles now on the newsstands.

The article by Robert Karen is another of the New Yorker-length biographies The Atlantic has been publishing, in this case a profile of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, pioneers in the emerging field of psychology known as “attachment theory.”

At its crux, the article argues that infants must be in almost constant interaction with their “primary care-giver” to develop into secure, mentally healthy adults. Or, as the author simplifies: “The only thing your child needs in order to thrive emotionally is your emotional availability and responsiveness . . . you just have to be there, in both senses of the phrase.”

Common-sensical though that contention may sound, those are fightin’ words in an era when both parents often work outside the home.

To understand society’s current child-rearing dilemma, it’s necessary to put things in historical perspective.

As social critic Charles N. Siegel writes in the Winter New Perspectives Quarterly: “Imagine how sorry people would have been in 1906 or 1946 for a family that was so poor that one parent could not afford to take off a few years from work to raise the kids before they started school.”

Back then, Americans looked ahead to a post-scarcity era of shorter work weeks and more leisure time, Siegel writes. But now, “while most of us have two cars, a VCR and a kitchen full of appliances, few of us have time left for raising children.”

Siegel’s piece is one of more than a dozen in a stunningly comprehensive New Perspectives package titled: “Prodigal Parents, Family vs. the 80-Hour Work Week.” As Siegel sees it, the way we now raise or fail to raise our children results from the same compulsion for economic growth that has caused the environmental crisis.

Yet, while we “are now coming to grips with the ecological limits to growth, we still haven’t grasped that there are also moral and psychological costs of economic expansion.”

The conventional liberal approaches to dealing with the problem, such as Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis’ proposed $2.5-billion funding of day-care centers, complete with a federal “administrator for child care,” will lead, Siegel believes, to the Brave New World of government-raised kids that Aldous Huxley envisioned.

Which is not to suggest that the present reality is cheery.

Look, for instance, at some statistics New Perspectives’ editors arranged in a Harper’s Index-like chart or the writers in the magazine--ranging from Angela Davis to Sandra Day O’Connor--sprinkled into their pieces:

* The fastest growing segment of the work force is now mothers with preschool children.

* Sixty-six percent of all 3-year-olds’ mothers worked outside the home in 1987.

* Eighty-three percent of working women are torn by the conflict between demands of their jobs and the desire to do a better job with their children

* Ninety percent of teachers say that lack of parental supervision is a problem in their classrooms.

* U.S. families with incomes in the top 30% claim half of government child-care credits; those in the bottom 30% claim only 3%.

* France provides 16 weeks of fully paid maternity leave, Germany 14; the United States provides none.

In several of the New Perspectives articles, authors argue that a functioning family is necessary to instill in a child a sense of values, conscience and a capacity for intimate adult relationships.

None argues for a return to an idealized family, in which the father disciplines and the mother nurtures. But author Christopher Lasch, for one, does contend that male and female parents together must wrest primary responsibility to discipline, educate and nurture children away from day-care centers, schools and psychologists who have graciously accepted all the power handed them.

Children who grow up without parents to nurture and guide them are “amoral, bitter, aggressive people,” Lasch writes, pointing to studies such as Bruno Bettleheim’s investigation of children raised on an Israeli kibbutz.

“With no sense of connection to anything except the next consumer product that comes along, people who had no parents when they were children will be easily tempted by drugs, celebrity fixation and the solidarity of authoritarian cults and movements.”

Of course, our culture’s apparently growing concern about children doesn’t necessarily mean that we have become less selfish or indulgent. In many cases, isn’t it just that we’re sick of the crack-addicted kids from bad homes who keep invading our personal space to steal our Rolexes?

This fits into the “kids as capital” perspective. As social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead puts it: “Today’s children . . . will determine when we can retire, how well we can live in retirement, how generous our health insurance will be, how strong our social safety net, how orderly our society . . . how successfully we compete in the global economy.”

Such “invest in youth” thinking “gives the tough-minded, 55-year-old CEO a reason to ‘care’ about the 8-year-old Hispanic schoolgirl,” Whitehead writes. But she also warns that we should be concerned about this pragmatic approach. For one thing, it makes us look at our most vulnerable citizens as commodities; that may reinforce the mentality that would support the sort of industrial child-rearing Huxley predicted.

So who will raise the kids?

This, of course, leads to even thornier levels of debate. Felice Schwartz, author of the incendiary “mommy track” article in Harvard Business Review, states unequivocally: “If a woman really wants to make it to the highest levels of the corporation, then she cannot be a primary player in her children’s lives.”

Yet it is a sad fact that 20 years into the feminist revolution, discussion of parenting almost always focuses on mothers. As one New Perspectives analyst puts it: “Woman have grown up to be exactly the kinds of parents they wanted their children’s fathers to be.”

In a sure-to-be-controversial history and critique of the National Organization for Women in February Lear’s, Margaret Carlson voices a view that seems to be building acceptance.

“Women will never thrive in a sex-blind marketplace that fails to recognize that the job of nurturing the next generation must be rewarded,” she writes. “Pure equality is not much help to the woman who is sure she is going to lose her job and certainly a promotion if her child catches one more cold.”

Taken as a whole, the articles in The Atlantic, New Perspectives and Lear’s would seem to lead back to the sort of traditional child-care solutions that conservatives and religious fundamentalists have been suggesting since Gloria Steinem first said, “I either give birth to someone else or I give birth to myself.”

In fact, though, they lead in a new directions. The researchers profiled in The Atlantic, and several writers for New Perspectives, argue that a revolution of sorts is needed to transform the way our society views child rearing.

As these thinkers see it, the solution must go far beyond tax credits for child care and better early education. Instead, we must set as our goal the creation of an economy that somehow--through flextime, telecommuting, family-oriented tax credits or other means--allows the mother and the father (and, presumably, homosexual couples and other nontraditional parents) to spend more time at home with their children.

Whether such a sweeping shift in values is possible or not is debatable. Meantime, for expediency’s sake, modern parents may wish to skip the aforementioned articles altogether and pick up the Feb. 7 issue of the New York publication 7 Days.

Its cover story outlines the array of expensive programs and specialists available to busy yuppie parents who worry that their offspring may be growing up without values and would like to buy them a conscience.

The piece is titled: “Is Your Kid a Creep?”