parenting

I wonder if people consider the philosophical and moral implications of bringing up a child.

One of the most common arguments I've heard for having children is the continuation of the family line. If a family wants to extend their lineage, why not write a well-researched account of its oral history instead? I would imagine it would problematise and enrich notions of who is a Muslim, etc., who is an Indian, etc. which we need desperately. It would take away academic (and by extension class, caste, geography and gender) monopoly over who writes these histories, and what kind of histories are heard.

But I digress. Not everybody cares about knowledge monopolisation and that's okay.

Another argument is having someone to take care of you when you grow old. This is a justified anxiety since not many of us care to die alone and it's comforting to have someone with whom you have an intimately shared history with. I imagine the economics of raising a child take care, partly, of this requirement. I think we may have enough to provide for ourselves when we grow old, were we to not spend on raising children. Of course, emotionally we may choose the intimacy of having our own children to share our old age with, rather than friends or other relationships. But that is not reason enough to have children, since it doesn't account for the personal liberty of the child.

I also want to protest against the hypocrisy of this justification: a parent-child relationship is considered emotional, and is operationalised emotionally, but the justification (particularly this one) to have a child seems rather transactional. In this sense, rural families who decide to have children so that they can pitch in economically seems to me a more candid approach to having children, although it is equally unjustified for the same reason: children are not a means to an end, just as much as parents aren't.

A third argument is that children are a source of company in an otherwise lonely world, or relationship. Let's not consider the latter situation, since children are not a means to make a parent feel better about themselves or their relationship with their partner. To the justification that children are a source of emotional joy and security, it's harder to apply the utilitarian critique because theoretically, parents also lend emotional support and comfort to their children. But does this always happen?

The question now is: once I decide to become a parent, do I also think about how to become a good parent? (By 'good' I mean, a parent who is emotionally caring and looks at a child not just as a source of emotional solace but also as an individual with rights.)

To understand just how difficult parenting is, let's compare it with teaching. As a teacher it is possible to have access to resources, planned training; to have the luxury of experimentation and personal space while working with children. Teachers get paid, too. As a parent, on the other hand I have almost nothing except anecdotal advice from almost everybody, de-contextualised resources, discontinuous support and a stupendous invasion of my private and/or professional life. What kind of support, really, do parents have on how to raise a child? Why does our society not acknowledge this lack?

There are some people in this world who have really made a muck of being parents. Their children are trying their best to be well-adjusted despite their upbringing. Their parents, in turn are trying to cope with dark moments of feeling defeated and self-betrayed. Both children and their parents have to eventually find support systems elsewhere. This process is immensely difficult because of unnatural and unjustified expectations that society places on parenting and children's relationship with their parents.These expectations also make acknowledging this social failure almost impossible: bad parents are rare and their children have bad luck.

In fact, I think it's really hard to be a parent because although they are encouraged to be one, they are hardly given any pragmatic support once this irreversible deed has been accomplished. Parents are left stranded and unprepared to handle the enormity of laying foundational groundwork in a child's life, entirely on their own. Is it enough that women can fertilise eggs and lactate, that men can generate sperm, that they have a stable socio-economic arrangement, that they get along with each other? Where is the child in all of this biological and economic preparation?

Perhaps people who decide to be single parents have had the opportunity to think a little harder on the philosophical implications of bringing up a child, since it isn't a natural extension of their current state in life. It is not enough to think about the potential changes in one's personal life (given that that is also a crucial component of the decision-making process) simply because being a parent is not entirely about you.

We need to free parenting from its essentialist trappings. Being a parent is not natural, simply because procreation is. We need to think of it as a choice, as a role that people need support and preparation for.