Sir, — We are all in Mary Eberstadt’s debt. Her essay “Home-Alone America” (June/July 2001) on the ramifications of the absent parent is as needed as it is well written and documented. So many of my working-class students at suny College at Buffalo believe their time is better spent collecting the pieces for what are increasingly flimsy diplomas than in being with the vulnerable young they are mothers or fathers to. Few voices, they tell me with some bewilderment, suggest otherwise. I now have this wonderfully researched analysis to show them.
Katharine Daly
Buffalo, N.Y.
Sir, — Mary Eberstadt concludes with an important insight: In view of modern mothers’ eager abandonment of their own children, the “presumed place [of maternal instinct] in the firmament of other human impulses and desires may be less fixed than has been commonly supposed.”
As a mother at home and one who writes frequently about the pandemonium of modern attempts at socialization, I think Eberstadt’s insight can be taken one step beyond. A society breeds the sort of mother it requires, as indeed it tends to modify every other sort of “worker” to fill its ranks. In turn these mothers rear children with socially desirable characteristics. In imperial England and nineteenth-century America, where our current (outmoded) notions of the nature of motherhood arose and became fixed, the sort of person desired was reverent, conscientious, generally idealistic, respectful of authority yet with a strong independent streak, self-disciplined, and hard-working.
In contrasting these traits with those of typical modern Americans, it is clear that what has really changed is the sort of individual that society now demands. The teenage killers and suicides may represent the extreme “collateral damage” of this process, but the basic type — soulless, callous, profoundly demoralized yet bristling with “attitude,” depraved in taste, cynical, unmotivated, antisocial, stupefied by materialism — is the same across the board. This type is well suited to a world without borders — without the borders of family bond, religious belief, sovereign nationality, regional pride, or specific historical memory, without the borders that protect the human being from “mass” annihilation. This type may go on the occasional killing spree or commit suicide in impressive numbers — but so what? Who really cares? Just pass more laws, prescribe more pills, and suspend more civil liberties.
Another form we can observe of the new rejection/abandonment model of motherhood is a dramatic decrease in tenderness toward children, even the very smallest. Babies are held (when held at all) in a haphazard, careless, contemptuous fashion; toddlers who can scarcely stay on their feet are made to stagger at parents’ heels across busy crosswalks and through banging doors; children are heard begging and crying and finally wailing hours at a time for an unforthcoming response; and so on. Tenderness, as we very well know, is what gentles us and makes us human. It works on animals, too; called “taming” or “petting,” tender loving treatment can render even cats almost heartbreakingly human.
The abandonment of our children, then, is deliberate, and designed, however unconsciously, to prepare them for a dehumanized mass society where shriveled, darkened inner selves make bearable an outer reality stripped of freedom and meaning. It follows that rearing your children with soul and tenderness is one of the most revolutionary acts anyone can perform.
Marian Kester Coombs
Crofton, Md.
Sir, — Mary Eberstadt writes wistfully on the crisis of families from a mother-centered perspective typical of academia, one that is part of the problem instead of part of the solution. She is certainly correct that there is a “cultural code of silence” on issues raised by the movement of mothers into the workplace in the last 30 to 50 years, but she herself is curiously silent on the equally important issue of a previous movement of fathers into the workplace in the last few centuries, as mankind (particularly in the West) shifted from a family-centered Agricultural Age to an Industrial Age where most of the “work” of mankind was concentrated in factories and offices. What we have been witnessing in family policy in the past 30 to 50 years is mostly the effect of a shift to a post-Industrial Age, in which women are equally qualified for most jobs, as artificial energy sources increasingly replace the need for human muscle-power in providing for the material needs of mankind.
In this light, the deepest force driving the crisis of families is not cultural evolution or minor technical advances like the birth-control pill, but the laws of free-market economics. As for the pill, mankind has known about and practiced various forms of birth-control since the dawn of human history. The pill may be convenient and relatively safe, but abstinence remains the best form of birth control ever devised. Abstinence is also the basis of stable families and a core issue of morality, a common sense observation on which Eberstadt is also curiously silent. Eberstadt dances around this issue in expressions of concern about unsupervised latch-key children experimenting with sex and the influence of pornography on the internet. The whole point of her article is concern about the need of children for adult guidance, but she herself is unwilling to stake any claim to the moral authority that is the only possible justification for adult guidance of children.
It may be that the traditions of academia properly emphasize “professional objectivity” over its antithesis of moral authority, but the fact remains that adults generally have more experience of life than children (most of it hard-learned). A cultural evolution that places barriers of time and distance between parents and their children can only impede transmission of hard-learned lessons of life to the next generation, and appears to be part of the process of breakdown of social order and a descent into barbarism that we are witnessing. If the cause of this process is primarily economic, guilt-tripping mothers to stay home with their children is unlikely to have significant impact on decisions mothers make.
But a more significant factor that Eberstadt’s analysis remains almost silent on is that the post-Industrial Age also offers opportunities for fathers to reengage with their children, as the drudgery and exhaustion of factory and office life are replaced by a decentralized economy of individual initiative, many of whose functions can be performed full- or part-time by computers from the home. While Eberstadt’s mother-centered analysis appears to be “progressive” in a certain sense, at its core lies the chauvinistic assumption that mothers are the primary source of civilizing effects on children. Her comments about “maternal instinct” indicate awareness that mothers have an important role to play here, but she appears oblivious to the possibility that fathers might have equal “paternal instincts.”
Indeed, in her comment about “problematic ‘male instinct’ ” and fatherhood as a “social construction” in the following passage, she is speaking about fathers almost as if they were aliens on this planet:
Much has been made, particularly in an era enamoured of evolutionary psychology and related reductionist theories, of the “social construction” of fatherhood — meaning the way in which cultural norms must step in to fill the gap between problematic “male instinct,” on the one hand, and what society believes to be proper paternal care of one’s offspring, on the other. Perhaps something unexpectedly profound has come to be taken for granted here.
In the view of the American Coalition of Fathers and Children, we don’t see any “problematic male instinct.” Most fathers are still doing what they have always done since the dawn of human history, going out into the world to bring home the bacon and protecting their families as best they can from the slings and arrows of fortune. If any problem exists, it is mostly in the minds of the radical feminist movement, with its glorification of women and paranoid disconnect from the ordinary reality of most men, as well is its disconnect from the ordinary reality of most women.
If any problems exist in potential malfunctions of “male instincts,” they are certainly no more severe than comparable malfunctions of “maternal instincts,” where mothers sometimes drown their children in bathtubs, or by driving into a lake. But fortunately the overwhelming majority of both mothers and fathers are not mentally ill, and these extremes don’t tell us much about ordinary reality for either gender.
The radical feminist movement is primarily an artifact of the Industrial Age, in which the demands of factory and office life separated fathers from their families for long periods of time, and broke channels of communication between mothers and fathers, as much as it broke channels of communication between fathers and their children. In the Agricultural Age that preceded the Industrial Age (and that still dominates most of the Second and Third Worlds), a mother knew perfectly where the father of her children was: out in the fields near home working to feed his family. The older children were out there, too, or home with their mother cooking and weaving. At times of high labor demand such as harvest, the whole family would be out in the fields together, including mothers and young children. The modern radical feminist movement was impossible in the Agricultural Age, because most women knew too much about the reality of the men in their lives to fall into the paranoid vilification of men. Even today, although most women (as well as most men) support equality for women in the workplace, most women (as well as most men) reject radical feminism as “going too far.”
Most men regard the claims of radical feminism with a kind of mild amusement, because they can’t believe that any intelligent person would take it seriously, and because they simply don’t have time to waste talking endlessly about the “oppression of women.” They are too busy working to support their families.
Meanwhile, an elephant is sitting on the table that Eberstadt fails to notice, namely that the most serious problem of latch-key children is not mother-absence, but father-absence. By far the greatest untapped resource for much needed increased contact between parents and their children is fathers. Until we grant fathers comparable rights to be in the family that we have granted to women in the workplace, we should not expect to see the current slide of Western culture reversed.
David A. Roberts
President
American Coalition for
Fathers and Children
Arnold, Md.
