It's important to understand that what
I am going to discuss is derived from a North American Indigenous
world view. More specifically, a Mohawk world view, admittedly
subject to the unavoidable influence of the Western society which has
colonized the Mohawk along with every other indigenous group on the
continent. This means there are going to be some inevitable
dissonances between what I speak of as normal and what is accepted as
normal by those with the Western, Colonist world view.
Modern American Society's war on our
children starts long before they are even born. Various factors have
combined to create a status quo
in which couples feel compelled to bring children into a family in
which both parents are working outside the home. In such couples,
career success is often a higher priority than a successful family.
For some this is because they have been convinced that to properly
raise and provide for children, they must have successful careers in
order to provide the “good things” in life.
For middle class
and lower income families, the pressure to adopt a “working
parents” model is almost insurmountable. For some people, it is the
siren's song of material possessions: we are indoctrinated into the
idea that our happiness depends on better houses, cars, clothes,
appliances etc. For others, the “good life” is out of reach and
both parents must work simply to provide basic necessities. In either
case, it has become not just normal for both parents to work outside
the home, it's developed into something of a sociological imperative.
Many years ago,
then First Lady Hilary Clinton raised the ire of many
conservative-minded people with a comment about how she could have
stayed home and baked cookies, but decided to pursue a career
instead. The implication of her words were that women who chose to
focus their efforts on raising children and providing a good
household for their husbands were somehow inferior to women who
pursued a career.
While this may
seem like a feminist position, I view it as just the opposite:
this attitude of career being superior to raising children is imposed
upon women and society by patriarchy. It's stating quite plainly that
“man's work” (managing a bank or fighting fires or being a
surgeon) is of more intrinsic value than nurturing children. This is
not to say I don't think women should have the right to pursue any
career they want, and earn equal pay for equal work. Rather, it is
pointing out that a patriarchal-influenced set of values has been
imposed upon what sort of work a woman does to be considered a
success.
The result is that
during the most important period of our children's lives, they are
handed over to day care workers and schools for 50% or more of their
waking hours.
It's ironic that
in many wealthy families where the woman has no pressure to pursue a
career outside the home, she does stay at home, yet hires a nanny or
au pair to care for her own children. As such, the mother
becomes an adjunct to her own role as
mother/nurturer/comforter/educator. This isn't the case with all
wealthy people, of course, but it is considered a normal family
situation by those who do engage in this practice out of choice,
rather than necessity.
All this is not to
say that the situation regarding working mothers is the sole
shortcoming of modern family structures. The role of fathers or other
male figures in a child's life has also been dramatically altered in
the past couple of centuries.
For the first
hundred years or so of U.S. history, the majority of families worked
farms, crafts shops, small stores or other means of support which
allowed the family to remain together the majority of time. Fathers
worked within the homestead, or close by. At an early age children
became involved in the family trade, as it was expected they would at
some point inherit and sustain the family farm or business. As such,
children had a great deal more contact with their fathers than is the
case for most today. Not only that, but the contact with their
fathers was directly involved in teaching and demonstrating to the
children skills needed to prosper in life.
As well as having
more contact with fathers, and that contact being in a cooperative,
instructional context, grandparents often shared the homestead and so
were directly involved in the process of raising children. In some
cases, aunts and uncles who shared in maintaining the family farm or
business also contributed to raising children. The result was that
most children had several adults who shared in raising them, and
served as a variety of role models for the children to learn from and
develop life long skills and habits (both good and bad).
Even when children
were sent to schools, the scheduling of classes revolved around
tending the farm, or helping to work the shop or store. It was
understood that a school education was an adjunct to what the
children learned at home, not a replacement or substitute for it. It
was also intended to offer opportunities for vocations apart from
working the family business. Not all businesses lent themselves to
being inherited by more than one child. Also, it was simply a matter
of social fairness to facilitate a person choosing to become a doctor
or teacher or accountant rather than a farmer or cooper.
In the U.S. the
combination of immigration and the Industrial Revolution led to
drastic changes in the family structure. For various reasons, people
chose to work in factors or related vocations rather than farms or
family businesses. Cities grew to the point where eventually the
urban population exceeded the non-urban population for the first time
in history. To support a growing population that did not provide
itself with food and other goods directly, industries were created
and expanded. This accelerated the loss of self-sufficiency which
contributed directly to the drastic changes in family structure.
Coupled with these
natural changes to the socio-economic structure in the U.S. (the
shift from rural, agrarian based economy to urban, industrial based
economy) was a determined effort by those same industries to create a
“Consumerist Society” in which a growing emphasis was placed on
materialism as a source of happiness and proof of success. The image
of the Ideal American Family came to involve houses, clothes, cars,
and other “stuff” that was much more than a family actually
needed to flourish in life. As the relationships within the family
began to suffer due to less time spent functioning as a family,
consumerist goals were set in place to fill the “contentment gap”.
It's difficult enough to maintain an optimal family structure when a father may be forced to spend the majority of his children's waking hours at his job. It becomes even more problematic if the mother, too, is in the same situation. As noted earlier, in a growing number of situations, this is not by choice of the parents, but by necessity. Still, we also need to consider how many working mothers do so not because their families can't have a decent life without the second income, but merely because the mother has been conditioned by society to think that being a stay-at-home mom is somehow failing to find fulfillment as a human being. Both parents need to consider whether their individual career pursuits are going to be worth the potential costs to raising their children (assuming they have thought through the idea that raising children is not for their own fulfillment as parents alone, but more on that in Part 2).
All of which
brought us to the place in history where our society treats children
as objects of affection, potential consumers and exploitable
resources, but rarely as the young human beings they actually are. As
a society we have been conditioned to think that it is normal for the
average child to have spent a third of his life under the direct
supervision and nurture of strangers, non-family members who may or
may not share the same spiritual, moral and ethical views as the
family. We have even created a situation in which teachers or social
workers can use their own subjective views of what
constitutes a “stable family environment” to determine if a child
is at risk.
By creating a
socio-economic structure in which a majority of parents are forced to
work outside the home, thus spending less time with their children
than they should, we have brought about a mixed blessing. Yes, we
have achieved unprecedented economic growth and opportunity. Children
who might otherwise have not considered pursuing certain careers do
so thanks to experiences in the educational system. Yet the price we
pay for these successes is a growth in dysfunctional families as well
as adults who have a skewed understanding of parenting as well as
values that don't necessarily correlate to raising future generations
to be wholly functioning human beings.
Next: War on Our Children, Part 2: Little Grown Ups
