Children: Burden or Delight?

Yesterday I wrote on one of my other blogs about a book I have been reading called Smoke on the Mountain, by Joy Davidman, wife of C. S. Lewis in his later years.  The book is a review of the Ten Commandments and how we deal with them in a modern age.  Today I read the chapter on "Honor Thy Father and Mother."  Joy did spend the beginning talking about honoring parents, especially as they get older.  She moves on, however, to discuss children.  She looks back at the time of the Old Testament when clan leaders (like Abraham) were fathers with power over their children. She also discusses the fact that the entire clan needed the father, but also children in order to function.  She compares this to how children are treated today:

"[T]o the clan, children were an inestimable asset. Nowadays we take it for granted that our young are a financial burden, but in Old Testament days they were a form of wealth and power. Job's large family is listed with his flocks and herds among the signs of his prosperity. In that world a man was not fully a man till he begot a son, a sterile woman was considered accursed, and children were the very meaning of life. How little Job would have understood the view of some 'enlightened moderns' that children are an interference with one's own life!

Thus even a selfish father could be trusted to look after his young fairly well-according to his lights-for his own sake, as a modern woman tends her washing-machine or a modern man his car. And if people were to survive at all, either as individuals or as families, they must be taught to honour their parents with unquestioning loyalty and obedience.

Contrast this patriarchal world with the civilization of imperial Rome! By the time of Saint Paul, the Mediterranean basin was overpopulated: desperate methods of preventing childbearing had come into fashion: family life was rapidly breaking down. The satires of Juvenal show us a society whose vices are horribly familiar. It was no longer possible to take it for granted that parents meant well. When Paul, in the Epistle to the Ephesians, restated the Fifth Commandment, he thought it advisable to add, 'And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath'!

If we are to make sense of the Commandment today, we must begin with Paul's addition. For there is no denying that our society often sins against the children. Everybody today Fascists and Communists and all of us in-between-will agree that family life is indispensable to human health and happiness. Yet we find ourselves accepting conditions that make war on the family. The lands behind the Iron Curtain deliberately weaken family ties in their schools, lest loyalty to parents should conflict with devotion to the sacred State. A century ago, houses were twelve-room affairs designed to hold grandparents and maiden aunts and uncles, as well as parents and children; today they are usually cramped little flats and cottages, and we feel lucky to get those. We can hardly do much about honouring Father and Mother if there's no room for them in the inn.

No doubt the breakdown of family ties which so alarms the modern world is largely the result of industrialism. For in an industrial world the family ceases to be economically efficient; it is no longer a way of making money. In place of the home workshop we have factory and supermarket and office. Once there were a hundred kinds of shared creation that bound parents and children together; spinning, weaving, clothing the household and making its furniture, brewing beer, and curing meatall these in addition to the particular trade in which the family specialized. The old taught and governed the young; the young honoured the old for their knowledge and at the same time learned to respect themselves as responsible and useful members of a household. But all this creative work has now been taken away and parcelled out among the men who serve the Machine. Housework today has been reduced to a dull and crude sort of labour, tiring but unrewarding, which bores the average housewife so much that she has to listen to the radio to take her mind off it. What sort of rich human experience can a child get on such terms?

Only on our farms are children still really valuable workers, and perhaps that is why the old-fashioned, closely knit family survives on our farms more than elsewhere. As for the city crowd-well, the family may still be necessary to happiness, but it's only a nuisance to the purse, and people easily come to believe, in a satirist's phrase: 'What good is happiness? You can't buy money with it'!... 

There is no real need for defeatism about the family. We might very well, if we would, manage to reconcile the happy family with the industrial system: we could disperse our industries, spread out our homes in garden towns, say no to everything that denies a child freedom of motion and the companionship of his parents. Clear heads among us do this for themselves-there are plenty of 'child-centred homes' even today. What stops the rest of us? An airy nothing, a climate of opinion, a complacent belief that things are all right as they are, that civilization and progress consist in having the State do as much as possible and the home as little as possible-in short, that the less family life we have, the better."

I found Joys tracing of the state of children today enlightening.  Children used to be needed in the family.  They had a part to play, a part in the family's whole business.  They saw their older relatives daily because they often lived with them.  They had a deep sense of family.  But when machines took over jobs, parents had to find other work and children were not needed anymore.  This is when they began to be described as financial burdens. Joy says it like this: "For all this we may offer the excuse of economic compulsion. We have created machines; machines have replaced human labour; a new pair of hands, therefore, is not an asset but a liability."  Children did nothing but add to a family's expenses and so began to be treated as such.  Joy does note farther on in this chapter that this did make children pursued out of love.  People chose to have children to love them and not just because they would be workers.  Still, she recognizez that the idea of children as an integral part of the family was lost and gradually their care and training removed from parents and given to the State.  After all, the parents had jobs to pursue out of the home and no time for the children.  Better the State watch over them.

Joy gives a resolution to this: "The ideal solution, of course, would be to remake our jerrybuilt, precarious society into a sound and safe one. But, let's admit it, we don't know how; and if we knew, we have not the power; and if we had the power, as long as we are sinners we should lack the love. There is only one thing a man can really remake-himself-and that only with the aid of God's grace. Laws and organizations and schools are good things, crèches and social services and youth groups may be admirable things. Yet-a reminder obvious, trite, but necessary-none of them can replace the love and guidance of father and mother. Our problem, then, pending reconstruction of the world, is to reconstruct our own lives so that we give our children as much warmth and attention and time and teaching as the present world will allow...Most of all, let us remind the innumerable people who don't seem to know it that begetting and rearing a family are far more real and rewarding than making and spending money."

I definitely see the attitude in America that children are a burden, that it is paramount to serve money and not the family.  She is right that history has lulled us into the idea that it is good to give our children into the hands of someone else, whether State or something else, and get them away from us so we can pursue our own endeavors, make more money to satisfy our wants.  Our children are no longer part of our endeavors--they are a nuisance there.  I do not fault us so much as our technological world.  We have conveniences a plenty, but there is a tradeoff--we lose family togetherness.  I like that Joy doesn't see that we can't recover the family.  We can say no to those things that destroy family companionship.  I do think, however, we have to be intentional in this or it will not happen.  I have seen many parents in my time lamenting when their children as adults throw them and their principles off.  Yet I know many of those parents spent little time with their children and what time spent with them was in arguing and complaining rather than in loving and guiding in warmth.

Joy's words have caused me to think about the structure of my own home.  Does it bring Alexis into it?  Is she part of the working household?  Does she know what it means to be a Norris?  What are Norrises?  How do they act and why?  By watching me does she learn that things and money and my hobbies are more important than time with her?  Has she learned from me that serving myself is better than serving others?  Some good thoughts to consider.