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Jerome Kagan, a Harvard professor of developmental psychology, doubts that there is a generalized American antipathy toward children. Says he: "With the exception of the Japanese, American parents spend more money on books on child rearing, more time at lectures about children than any parents in the world—and it's been growing." Robert Coles, a child psychiatrist best known for his five-volume Children of Crisis, thinks that, if anything, children are unwholesomely overvalued by many parents: "They are the only thing the parents believe in. They don't believe in God, or in any kind of transcendence, and so they believe in their children. They are concerned with them almost in a religious way — which I think is unfortunate — as an extension of themselves. That is quite a burden for a child to experience. In that sense, it is not cruelty to children. It is paganism."
Almost no one can discuss children rationally; having children and raising them successfully is an essentially irrational act. It obeys a profound and sometimes self-punishing logic like salmon thrashing upriver to spawn, an impulse encoded in the race's will to go on. All kinds of aversions to and adorations of children occur simultaneously now. The young are battered and cherished, subjected to violent extremes of malnourishment and indulgence. Children are so swaddled in myth and delusion that Marian Wright Edelman, director of the Children's Defense Fund in Washington, argues that Americans should try not to posture about them but instead look hard at statistics: The U.S. has the 14th highest infant mortality rate in the world; 10 million U.S. children have no regular source of basic medical care; 600,000 teen-agers a year, most of them grotesquely unprepared for the experience, give birth to children.
Yet more American women than ever in history now have a choice about whether or not to give birth and how often. That is the most encouraging part of the new situation of children. Couples who wait to have children will probably be more mature in handling the ordeal of parenthood. Those who do not want children will not so often, as in the past, be forced to endure them. Very gradually, it may become more probable that those children who are born are also wanted.
The nation now seems to be achieving some new psychological equilibrium about families and children. The wild swoop from the excessively domestic '50s to the fierce social unbucklings of the '60s and early '70s left confusion and wreckage. A lot of menacing nonsense got flashed around and mingled with difficult truths. Generations bared their teeth at one another.
Parents discovered, as if for the first time, how much their children could hurt them; some of the apparent aversion to children is a leftover fear of that palpable, demonstrated, maddening power that the young possess. Today, many new parents start with the lowest expectations about having children — everyone has told them how sick the family is — and then awake in astonished delight to find that the experience is (or can be) wonderful. It is possible that the U.S., with its long history of elaborate delusions about children, is beginning to grow up on the subject. — Lance Morrow