The Three Guilts of Raising Children

Parenting observations on why we have kids in the first place.

Graphic by author

Most of history did not care about being a good parent. The opposite may be true, however: that the emphasis was on being a good child. There are the cliches of children being the equivalent of farmhands or dowry incentives. This is not a general absolute, but the reality remains that children had just as much of an economic and sociologic purpose as a relational one.

In brief, the history of parenting was concerned with creating children that can assist communal survival, live up to expectations, and produce value. It sounds pithy, but it is worth noting that survival was at stake. So, you punished errors, got them married, and guided them into a skill or trade that continued the legacy after your short life expectancy. The family was an economy — a household that depended on one another in order to continue. The point was the advantage each added to the home.

This all changed in what is referred to as the romantic age (at least in the technologically advanced and dominant civilizations of that time). I do sometimes wonder what would happen if we psychoanalyzed a 12th-century descendant of a peasant farmer. Would they be proliferated with trauma? Would they adamantly express how their parents never loved them? I bet not. These realities were not even considerations in such times of history.

I’m not claiming that expressing love to one’s children is bad or that such an individual’s probable trauma was satisfactory; or that this household experience was good. I just think it is worth noting that parenting has changed and our modern sentiments are actually quite new. They also aren’t always better.

Yet, the perception shifted and as the industrial era blossomed, children became something special. They were precious. No longer were they simply fit to work the land, they were valuable in and of themselves. However, while more primitive parenting practices were rife with objectification and, potentially, mental harm, the modern version of parenting has its own objectification that can be problematic, too.

All of that to say, for the first time as a sociological whole, parenting became about guiding children to fulfill their meaning and…