The Three Guilts of Raising Children
Parenting observations on why we have kids in the first place.
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…
