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The much belabored and quite real self-absorption of the '70s implies, by definition, a corollary lack of interest in children. There are many forms of narcissism, of course; one of the lesser arguments of militant non-propagationists has been that children are an ego trip, begotten for the pleasure of watching one's own little clone toddle around. But today having children often seems to have been trivialized to the status of a life-style —and an unacceptable one. The obsession with being young and staying young has led to the phenomenon of almost permanently deferred adulthood. "I know 50-year-olds who are still kids," says Social Analyst Michael Novak. "They're in the playground of the world: single, unattached, self-fulfilling, self-centered. People are trying to make little Disney Worlds of detachment for themselves." For such people, parenthood is an intrusion of responsibility, of potential disappointment and, ultimately, of mortality. The kids are a memento mori.
It can be profoundly disturbing, in a narcissistic time, to have about us, yapping and demanding and growing relentlessly, the generation that is going to push us off the planet.
But behind these symptoms of distaste for children, many complicated mechanisms of change are working. It can be both inadequate and misleading to argue that the nation's adults have become less hospitable to children. In their history, Americans have passed through periods of appalling cruelty and stupidity toward children. To the early Calvinists, a child was a lump of pure depravity. In Massachusetts Bay Colony, it was against the law for children to play. Things were not much better after behavioral psychologists undertook to dictate the treatment of children. Dr. J.B. Watson, an earlier generation's Dr. Spock, insisted in 1928 that children must be treated with cold scientific detachment. "Never hug and kiss them," he advised.
All of that elaborate—and sometimes cruel—attention to the subject of children in the past presupposed one thing: their inevitability. The great changes in attitudes toward children today may revolve around three factors: 1) Whereas children in earlier, rural settings were economically valuable, needed for their labor, today they are a painfully expensive proposition (according to one estimate, the average middle-class family spends $100,000 to raise a child); 2) Children are no longer considered a necessary and inevitable part of marriage; and 3) For reasons of feminism and/or sheer economic need, more women than ever before are working. In fact, of those women who do have children, more than half have jobs outside the home. These developments have produced a very complicated series of readjustments, the social machine fine-tuning itself in hundreds of subtle ways.