Parenting - The Irrational Vocation
By: Sam Vaknin
The advent of cloning, surrogate motherhood, and the donation of
gametes and sperm have shaken the traditional biological definition
of parenthood to its foundations. The social roles of parents have
similarly been recast by the decline of the nuclear family and the
surge of alternative household formats.
Why do people become parents in the first place?
Raising children comprises equal measures of satisfaction and
frustration. Parents often employ a psychological defense mechanism - known as "cognitive dissonance" - to suppress the negative aspects
of parenting and to deny the unpalatable fact that raising children
is time consuming, exhausting, and strains otherwise pleasurable and
tranquil relationships to their limits.
Not to mention the fact that the gestational mother
experiences "considerable discomfort, effort, and risk in the course
of pregnancy and childbirth" (Narayan, U., and J.J. Bartkowiak
(1999) Having and Raising Children: Unconventional Families, Hard
Choices, and the Social Good University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania
State University Press, Quoted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy).
Parenting is possibly an irrational vocation, but humanity keeps
breeding and procreating. It may well be the call of nature. All
living species reproduce and most of them parent. Is maternity (and
paternity) proof that, beneath the ephemeral veneer of civilization,
we are still merely a kind of beast, subject to the impulses and
hard-wired behavior that permeate the rest of the animal kingdom?
In his seminal tome, "The Selfish Gene", Richard Dawkins suggested
that we copulate in order to preserve our genetic material by
embedding it in the future gene pool. Survival itself - whether in
the form of DNA, or, on a higher-level, as a species - determines
our parenting instinct. Breeding and nurturing the young are mere
safe conduct mechanisms, handing the precious cargo of genetics down
generations of "organic containers".
Yet, surely, to ignore the epistemological and emotional realities
of parenthood is misleadingly reductionistic. Moreover, Dawkins
commits the scientific faux-pas of teleology. Nature has no
purpose "in mind", mainly because it has no mind. Things simply are,
period. That genes end up being forwarded in time does not entail
that Nature (or, for that matter, "God") planned it this way.
Arguments from design have long - and convincingly - been refuted by
countless philosophers.
Still, human beings do act intentionally. Back to square one: why
bring children to the world and burden ourselves with decades of
commitment to perfect strangers?
First hypothesis: offspring allow us to "delay" death. Our progeny
are the medium through which our genetic material is propagated and
immortalized. Additionally, by remembering us, our children "keep us
alive" after physical death.
These, of course, are self-delusional, self-serving, illusions.
Our genetic material gets diluted with time. While it constitutes
50% of the first generation - it amounts to a measly 6% three
generations later. If the everlastingness of one's unadulterated DNA
was the paramount concern - incest would have been the norm.
As for one's enduring memory - well, do you recall or can you name
your maternal or paternal great great grandfather? Of course you
can't. So much for that. Intellectual feats or architectural
monuments are far more potent mementos.
Still, we have been so well-indoctrinated that this misconception -
that children equal immortality - yields a baby boom in each post
war period. Having been existentially threatened, people multiply in
the vain belief that they thus best protect their genetic heritage
and their memory.
Let's study another explanation.
The utilitarian view is that one's offspring are an asset - kind of
pension plan and insurance policy rolled into one. Children are
still treated as a yielding property in many parts of the world.
They plough fields and do menial jobs very effectively.
People "hedge their bets" by bringing multiple copies of themselves
to the world. Indeed, as infant mortality plunges - in the better- educated, higher income parts of the world - so does fecundity.
In the Western world, though, children have long ceased to be a
profitable proposition. At present, they are more of an economic
drag and a liability. Many continue to live with their parents into
their thirties and consume the family's savings in college tuition,
sumptuous weddings, expensive divorces, and parasitic habits.
Alternatively, increasing mobility breaks families apart at an early
stage. Either way, children are not longer the founts of emotional
sustenance and monetary support they allegedly used to be.
How about this one then:
Procreation serves to preserve the cohesiveness of the family
nucleus. It further bonds father to mother and strengthens the ties
between siblings. Or is it the other way around and a cohesive and
warm family is conductive to reproduction?
Both statements, alas, are false.
Stable and functional families sport far fewer children than
abnormal or dysfunctional ones. Between one third and one half of
all children are born in single parent or in other non-traditional,
non-nuclear - typically poor and under-educated - households. In
such families children are mostly born unwanted and unwelcome - the
sad outcomes of accidents and mishaps, wrong fertility planning,
lust gone awry and misguided turns of events.
The more sexually active people are and the less safe their desirous
exploits - the more they are likely to end up with a bundle of joy
(the American saccharine expression for a newborn). Many children
are the results of sexual ignorance, bad timing, and a vigorous and
undisciplined sexual drive among teenagers, the poor, and the less
educated.
Still, there is no denying that most people want their kids and love
them. They are attached to them and experience grief and bereavement
when they die, depart, or are sick. Most parents find parenthood
emotionally fulfilling, happiness-inducing, and highly satisfying.
This pertains even to unplanned and initially unwanted new arrivals.
Could this be the missing link? Do fatherhood and motherhood revolve
around self-gratification? Does it all boil down to the pleasure
principle?
Childrearing may, indeed, be habit forming. Nine months of pregnancy
and a host of social positive reinforcements and expectations
condition the parents to do the job. Still, a living tot is nothing
like the abstract concept. Babies cry, soil themselves and their
environment, stink, and severely disrupt the lives of their parents.
Nothing too enticing here.
One's spawns are a risky venture. So many things can and do go
wrong. So few expectations, wishes, and dreams are realized. So much
pain is inflicted on the parents. And then the child runs off and
his procreators are left to face the "empty nest". The
emotional "returns" on a child are rarely commensurate with the
magnitude of the investment.
If you eliminate the impossible, what is left - however improbable -
must be the truth. People multiply because it provides them with
narcissistic supply.
A Narcissist is a person who projects a (false) image unto others
and uses the interest this generates to regulate a labile and
grandiose sense of self-worth. The reactions garnered by the
narcissist - attention, unconditional acceptance, adulation,
admiration, affirmation - are collectively known as "narcissistic
supply". The narcissist objectifies people and treats them as mere
instruments of gratification.
Infants go through a phase of unbridled fantasy, tyrannical
behavior, and perceived omnipotence. An adult narcissist, in other
words, is still stuck in his "terrible twos" and is possessed with
the emotional maturity of a toddler. To some degree, we are all
narcissists. Yet, as we grow, we learn to empathize and to love
ourselves and others.
This edifice of maturity is severely tested by newfound parenthood.
Babies evokes in the parent the most primordial drives, protective,
animalistic instincts, the desire to merge with the newborn and a
sense of terror generated by such a desire (a fear of vanishing and
of being assimilated). Neonates engender in their parents an
emotional regression.
The parents find themselves revisiting their own childhood even as
they are caring for the newborn. The crumbling of decades and layers
of personal growth is accompanied by a resurgence of the
aforementioned early infancy narcissistic defenses. Parents -
especially new ones - are gradually transformed into narcissists by
this encounter and find in their children the perfect sources of
narcissistic supply, euphemistically known as love. Really it is a
form of symbiotic codependence of both parties.
Even the most balanced, most mature, most psychodynamically stable
of parents finds such a flood of narcissistic supply irresistible
and addictive. It enhances his or her self-confidence, buttresses
self esteem, regulates the sense of self-worth, and projects a
complimentary image of the parent to himself or herself.
It fast becomes indispensable, especially in the emotionally
vulnerable position in which the parent finds herself, with the
reawakening and repetition of all the unresolved conflicts that she
had with her own parents.
If this theory is true, if breeding is merely about securing prime
quality narcissistic supply, then the higher the self confidence,
the self esteem, the self worth of the parent, the clearer and more
realistic his self image, and the more abundant his other sources of
narcissistic supply - the fewer children he will have. These
predictions are borne out by reality.
The higher the education and the income of adults - and,
consequently, the firmer their sense of self worth - the fewer
children they have. Children are perceived as counter-productive:
not only is their output (narcissistic supply) redundant, they
hinder the parent's professional and pecuniary progress.
The more children people can economically afford - the fewer they
have. This gives the lie to the Selfish Gene hypothesis. The more
educated they are, the more they know about the world and about
themselves, the less they seek to procreate. The more advanced the
civilization, the more efforts it invests in preventing the birth of
children. Contraceptives, family planning, and abortions are typical
of affluent, well informed societies.
The more plentiful the narcissistic supply afforded by other
sources - the lesser the emphasis on breeding. Freud described the
mechanism of sublimation: the sex drive, the Eros (libido), can
be "converted", "sublimated" into other activities. All the
sublimatory channels - politics and art, for instance - are
narcissistic and yield narcissistic supply. They render children
superfluous. Creative people have fewer children than the average or
none at all. This is because they are narcissistically self
sufficient.
The key to our determination to have children is our wish to
experience the same unconditional love that we received from our
mothers, this intoxicating feeling of being adored without caveats,
for what we are, with no limits, reservations, or calculations. This
is the most powerful, crystallized form of narcissistic supply. It
nourishes our self-love, self worth and self-confidence. It infuses
us with feelings of omnipotence and omniscience. In these, and other
respects, parenthood is a return to infancy.
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