Chapter 9 - Husbands And Wives Become Parents

To one who reads the American literature on the family it is almost like revealing a secret to mention that husbands and wives become parents too. This is a facetious statement only if taken too literally. Actually there is a good deal of truth in it because the possibility and problems of parenthood have been rather neglected in books and articles used in education and preparation for marriage.

Only about one-seventh of the content of seventy-eight textbooks on marriage and the family, used in American colleges and universities, relate to children and parenthood, according to a study made by Dr. Albert H. Hobbs, of the University of Pennsylvania. Moreover, most of these relate to what he terms the negative aspects of parenthood, such as birth control, eugenics, and the like. Only 5 per cent of the 358 chapters in these books, he finds, are apportioned to a positive description of children and parenthood as factors in family relationships. In view of our earlier references to individualism, it might be added that this same survey shows an overwhelming emphasis in the literature on the development of personality as the basic function of the family, and personality maladjustments and tensions as the true causes of family disorganization.

A similar indictment is voiced by Carle C. Zimmerman, of Harvard University. In his book, Family and Civilization* he speaks of our atomistic family system, with its superficial, discernible values and its widespread inattention to parenthood. He emphasizes, too, as part of the general pattern, the revolts of youth against parents, thus making more difficult the problems of parenthood. And many an irritated father will appreciate his complaint that an economy that can make automobiles to stand the test of being driven over cliffs does not produce a child's tricycle that can be properly oiled.

Our whole culture is guilty of a certain detour around the subject of parenthood. The family, through all the ages, has been the vehicle for the perpetuation not only of humanity itself but also of its artifacts which we

• Published by Harper & Bros, in 1947.

call culture. Yet marriage clinics today deal only with husband-wife relationships. American business, which has engulfed so liberal a proportion of married women, considers parenthood an incident. Housing developments and rental offices often ignore children completely, or at best accept them as an afterthought or an irritating complication.

What makes omissions of these kinds all the more striking is the almost unanimous expression by young people of their desire, to have children. A number of questionnaire studies have been made of this, mostly among college men and women, and these show that it is the rare and exceptional person who does not express a desire to marry and have children. For example, a study of 364 students at a leading university showed only one who did not want a child, and this was a person with a particular research interest in a foreign country where conditions were quite perilous for child life. We cite these studies of student groups because college graduates show comparatively low birth rates, so that what is true of them would seem to be true, to the same extent or more, of non-college elements in the population.

For most persons who marry, this desire for children is fulfilled. A governmental study of differential fertility showed that six out of seven married women who were between forty-five and forty-nine years of age by 1940, and hence presumably past the childbearing age, had given birth to a child or children. The date is particularly significant because these women had passed through their childbearing years at a time when contraceptive sophistication had all the vogue of a new discovery, and was much emphasized as a form of adjustment to a changing society, including a world-wide depression. It may well be that women now completing the childbearing age will show a higher proportion of mothers.

Inadequate Emphasis Upon Parenthood

The main contention in this chapter is that our American domestic difficulties result in part from an inadequate emphasis before marriage upon probable parenthood, and a relative lack of stress upon and preparation for its responsibilities when it comes. We seem to assume constantly that marriage is for two (or really one plus one), and the complicating fact is that it is so—for a while. But for a while only. Then, normally, the term marriage gives way to that of the family, which is for three or more. So many, too many, of our young people, and we have shown how very young they are, stumble, as it were, upon parenthood, which is, after all, the core and essence of family life. It is only after parenthood has come that they "discover" that they have given, as a lifelong hostage, a part of themselves to another person and another family strain. Or it may be that not until their child appears as the living image of a father- or mother-in-law do they realize that they have established a biological union between two family strains instead of a mere personal and legal contract.

fane discovered this the hard way. She met John at a college prom. He danced divinely and had a good line of small talk. During his last year at college, he had Jane come for all the social functions. By graduation time they were engaged, and seven months later they were married in Jane's home town. It was the day before the wedding that Jane met her future father-in-law for the first time. The first feelings were those of disappointment and slight shock—that John should have a father like that. His features, unusual in certain respects, his carriage and manners, everything about him, called forth feelings of aversion in Jane. "Thank the Lord," she often thought in the succeeding months, "we don't live near John's folks." Two years after her marriage she gave birth to a son, with every feature that was peculiar to Jane's father-in-law. When they brought the baby to her after its birth, Jane turned her face to the wall and refused to eat for forty-eight hours. Shortly after she returned home from the hospital, Jane "went completely to pieces." The subsequent history of this case has not been a happy one.

Parenthood drives home the fact that one marries more than a man or a woman. One marries a blood stream, a group of kinsfolk, who have an equal stake in the child. It is our child, not my child. Parenthood means the biological yoking of two teams, however recalcitrant they may be.

How clear this all now becomes. How obvious is its meaning for courtship and mate selection. Your "divine" dancing partner is now the father of your child. Your cute "baby doll" is now a mother. The measuring sticks have changed, or at least new ones have appeared. Had they been foreseen or weighed?

How ridiculous that you had not seen your husband's or your wife's people until the day of the wedding! Perhaps you had not seen them even then. Why didn't someone tell us of these things, you ask. Think of all the years we spend in school, studying, reading books. You go back now to look at the books. No, there is little or nothing in them about all this. Is not this, too, a part of education for marriage and family living?

The relative lack of emphasis upon parenthood involves the whole question of what the purpose of education for marriage and family living should be. Should it deal primarily with topics and questions with which young people are concerned at the moment—such as dating, petting, premarital sex liberties, and the like—or should it strike more serious notes, dealing with ultimate problems and voicing the verdict of experience on matters which experience has shown to be of prior importance? Should preparation for marriage be designed to please the students by repeating current shibboleths or should it look ahead to such primary problems as those of parenthood?

Attitudes Toward Parenthood Are Complex

One of the pleasing fictions of our culture is that each child comes into the world as a bundle of joy to eagerly waiting married lovers, and that the mere fact of becoming parents confers all the insights and skills which parenthood demands. Obviously this is far from the truth. What does go to the heart of the matter are the attitudes of the couple toward the new arrival, whatever those attitudes may be. The importance of such attitudes for child development has long been recognized: our emphasis here is that they are equally significant for husband-and-wife relationships.

The attitude toward parenthood, like all attitudes, is very complex. It is important to stress this fact because much discussion of recent years, both in popular and so-called scientific circles, has assumed it to be a very simple thing. Thus one is told, in a sort of rubber-stamping, machine-classifying sort of way, that all children are either wanted or unwanted, just as though one's feelings about such an important thing as bringing another human being into the world could be neatly packaged in a single adjective. And the behavior problems of children are explained and disposed of with the short statement: "He was an unwanted child." We note a recent statement by Dr. Hilde Bruch, pediatrician and child psychiatrist, that in her many years of professional practice she has never met a mother whose attitude toward pregnancy could be summarized in a single word.

The attitude toward parenthood is a complex compounded out of many emotional ingredients. Its roots penetrate far back into the parents' own life experiences—their lives as children, the kind of parents they had, the whole range of their experiences and values. One's whole religious philosophy is involved, for, from the beginning, religion has assumed dominion over sex and reproduction. For many years these two were inseparable. It is only in recent years that contraceptive sophistication has added overtones of decision to the conditioning influence of other factors. In this, as in other connections, one's religious philosophy exists independent of church connections or overt confessions of faith. We recall, from one of our research projects, the case of a man, profane beyond most men, who spoke earnestly of man's duty to God, whose name he constantly took in vain, to "multiply and replenish the earth."

There seem to be marked differences in many cases between the attitudes toward parenthood of men and women. On the whole, men tend to be more practical, women to be more emotional. Men are concerned with the costs of parenthood—financial and otherwise; women are more optimistic, even when as practical, believing that they can manage somehow. Obviously there are exceptions to these general statements. In either event, it is important to remember that the attitude toward parenthood is an individual, not a family or group, matter. This fact, too, often seems to be lost in the easy assumptions about wanted or unwanted children.

The case of the Dantin family shows how different the attitude of the father and mother may be. Mr. and Mrs. Dantin were married when they were twenty-six and twenty-two years of age, respectively. They lived in an apartment in a large city. Mr. Dantin was employed in a highly remunerative job, Mrs. Dantin stayed at home and kept house. Their relations, including their sex life, were mutually satisfactory. After a time Mrs. Dantin began to talk about her loneliness and her wish to have a child. At first Mr. Dantin counseled delay. Later he indicated that children were a nuisance, too much of a responsibility, and most of them were "an ungrateful lot." Mrs. Dantin confided her disappointment to a friend, who suggested that she trick her husband into parenthood. "He'll love it after the baby is here," the friend declared. Mrs. Dantin followed this advice. From the beginning of her pregnancy her husband was not interested in the coming of the child, clearly showing a resentment at this intrusion upon their comfortable, carefree life. After the child was born he lost interest in his wife, too, and when the child was seven months old he deserted her. Some time afterward, he began living with a woman several years older than he who, it is reported, had had an operation which rendered her incapable of motherhood. For a time Mr. Dantin made occasional payments in support of his wife and child. Recently she secured a divorce and remarried.

Not all women welcome motherhood with open arms. The coming of a child, or the anticipation of it, tends to crystallize the prospective mother's attitude toward her biological destiny. There is this inescapable fact about parenthood—that the woman must harbor the seed as it develops into the child, give birth to it, and nourish it. Not all the men in the world can do this. This is the biological destiny of women; and there are women who love it, there are those who accept it, and there are those who resent it, some with apparently deep-seated feeling.

How much resentments of this kind are nourished by recent changes in the status of women is a pertinent question. Equality of opportunity in education, the increase in occupational opportunities, the possibility of satisfying careers of their own in the workaday world have become commonplace within the past generation or two. It would be to deny all effect of environmental pressures to say that these changes have had no meaning for women's attitude toward parenthood. Specific evidence supporting the effect of these changes appeared in a study of almost five hundred mothers, made some years ago by Evelyn M. Duvall, noted student of family life. The study revealed that mothers in groups where these factors were less operative showed a higher tendency to adhere to the traditional conceptions of motherhood than in the case of mothers in groups where a higher status of women had been attained.

It is the hard core of fact that an increasing number of women are more interested in other achievements than in motherhood. Or perhaps it would be safer to say that they are interested in so many more things than motherhood. Just how all this affects the contemporary male, especially in his hidden mental recesses, has received less attention. No matter what their show of acquiescence may be, the roots of male values are deeply imbedded in their racial past; and it must come to many a modern male that his wife, albeit a woman sweet and good and true, is not as interested in motherhood as his mother and his grandmother were.

The mental and nervous health of the person may have much to do with the attitude toward parenthood. It is a matter of constant surprise to see how seldom the findings on the extent, nature, and implications of mental and nervous ill-health are carried over and applied in certain other areas of human relationships. Yet it is obvious that the tendencies to worry, to be irritable, to be afraid, to be depressed, to feel insecure, to be overly sensitive, to daydream, to feel incompetent should come to a focus with the prospects and problems of parenthood. There is relatively little in the literature of family relations which bears upon the parental complex, if the phrase be permissible. One can be sure only of the great importance of the relationship between these two areas.

The very acceptance of the idea of parenthood seems to be a hurdle for some persons. This usually manifests itself with the coming of the first child. As we have seen this in our research work, the process is somewhat as follows. The young newlyweds begin their life together with a marked sense of release and fulfillment. One or both may be free of parental control for the first time. At last, they are on their own. They may be having their first satisfactory love and sex experience, both physically and psychically. Their personalities bloom, their egos expand. Then comes the discovery of pregnancy. It is a psychic shock.

There are those who cannot "take it." And, curiously enough, often it is the young husband, rather than the wife, who must bear the child. And, believe it or not, often he leaves his wife, somewhere around the third month of the pregnancy, and goes home to his mother. This is a type of deserter well known to family case workers who deal with desertion. Often the desertion is not intended to be final, as in the case of the Blacks.

Mr. and Mrs. Black were married at the ages of twenty-two and twenty, respectively. Both were employed, and continued to be so after their marriage. Mrs. Black had been secretary to a kindly old German executive since she was eighteen years old. A year and a half after their marriage, she told her husband of her unplanned pregnancy. He said little about it, but three months later he walked out on her and went home to live with his parents. Mrs. Black told her employer about her problem, and he agreed to help her. He arranged her work so that she was able to continue until the end of the eighth month. She was then given a leave of absence, and her employer went "security" for a loan from the company for which she worked. Six weeks after the baby was born, she returned to work, leaving the child in the care of an elderly woman who came to share her small apartment with her. Two months later her husband returned, and she took him in. Some months later she "told him off," packed his belongings, and sent them to his parents. She said she had lost respect for him and that she did not want to "share her bed" with a man whom "I can't respect."

There are, of course, many other kinds of response to the "shock" of the first pregnancy. The child may be wanted by both parents, and there is only the impact of the responsibilities that loom ahead. Adjustment to these may in turn take many forms, some a bit humorous. The senior author is not likely to forget the day when he rode in the automobile of a young couple. A slight break in the road loomed ahead. The young husband put on the brakes with a sudden energy that almost sent both front-seat riders through the windshield. Why the cause for the sharp stop? It was because of the "condition" of his wife. "We are going to have a baby." "Oh, how nice," his elderly friend replied. "And when is the baby coming?" The date he mentioned was eight months in the future! This young man, ultimately the father of two, had two "nervous breakdowns" en route. We hasten to add that most responses to the responsibilities of parenthood are more moderate in degree as well as in kind.

There are other cases where the child may come too soon and break in upon a carefree, happy time together. Many young couples who want children find that they have a way of arriving somewhat sooner than originally planned; others, who perhaps had not given the matter much thought, find themselves confronted with it while still in the honeymoon stage. These situations are important, for emotional preparation for parenthood has as much importance as, if not more than, other kinds.

In still other instances, the married pair may not have made a satisfactory adjustment in marriage, so that the birth of a child means a permanent commitment to a contract which one or both are not yet ready to accept. There is this important element in the attitude of the parent, and particularly of the mother, that it reflects the relationship of one parent to the other. A striking illustration, in reverse of the attitude of reluctance just cited, consists of the cases where the children are born as a kind of experiment in a strained marriage relation. "I thought that a child might bring us closer together." Experiments of this kind are often unsuccessful, and the children which result are the chief victims.

There is a time element in all this, as attitudes change in the course of married life. The first child may be wanted, coming after a period of happiness between the parents. By the time a second or third child arrives, disillusionment may have come to one or both of the partners. Often husbands and wives arrive at the various stages in the course of changing attitudes at different times, so that children are accepted by one as a compromise to the wishes of the other.

The attitude toward parenthood is influenced in large measure by the attitude toward responsibility. Talk about having children is easy, and sounds exciting. "Oh, I'd like to have at least seven children," says the starry-eyed prospective bride. "And some of the cards announcing the happy event are so cute looking." But child-rearing means responsibilities that are enormous, and endless. Moreover, there is much in contemporary life to accentuate these responsibilities. One factor is the increasing prevalence of the immediate family as the functioning unit in our society. This normally means the biological unit of father, mother, and children, living by itself. Moreover, the mobility of our population means that they are probably living at some distance from their kinsfolk. Whatever else may be said about this arrangement, it does mean increased responsibility for the young parents, particularly the mother. There is no extended family group to pool its knowledge for their benefit. Ralph and Frances were both reared in New Jersey, where their two family groups still reside. But Ralph decided that the aircraft industry on the Pacific Coast offered him his best opportunities, so it is there that they live and where their two children were born. They are strictly on their own, far away from kinsfolk. The increasing emphasis on the scientific rearing of children has its meaning, too. Frances is rearing her children by the book and the pediatrician, not by family tradition. These demands are exacting and precise, and cannot but result in increased responsibilities for the parent.

The coming of children brings many changes in family life. "What did we ever do before the children came?" Innumerable parents have said this to each other in the past, and as many will do so in the years to come. Children add a new dimension to family life, as well as to the personality of the parents. One can easily agree with Paul Popenoe, well-known marriage counselor, that the person who is single is only one-third alive; if married, he is two-thirds alive; and if married with children, he is fully alive.

Suppose we consider more specifically what the coming of children involves. It means, first of all, that the center of family life shifts from the parent or parents to the child. There is a new pivot around which the life of the family turns. It is like the advent of a new sun in the solar system. The family becomes child-centered.

One result of this is that the pattern of affectional distribution within the family changes. This is particularly true of the affectional display of the mother, and the better the mother, the more true this is apt to be. The relationship of husband and wife changes. One evidence of this is that they begin calling each other mother and daddy. Many young couples who have not yet become parents think this is a silly practice and loudly proclaim they are never going to do it.*

Here is one of the points where the attitude toward parenthood becomes important for marital relations. How well does the parent adjust to the new competitor for attention and affection, and to all the changes in family life that are involved?

Many parents find it difficult to do this. Husbands, in particular, may come to resent the absorption of their wives with the new arrival. We have seen many examples of this among the young men who have passed through our university classes. Often these husbands were "big wheels" while they were on the campus. The girls they married—and this may explain in part why they married them—appreciated their importance and "made over them." Dorothy just doted on Jack, the campus idol, and after they were married she was constantly fussing over him, working hard at trying to please this big, popular, handsome husband of hers. Now she has twin girls, and "Jack is proving very difficult." Jack says, "Dorothy has become more and more indifferent to me. In the last two weeks, she has denied sex relations three times. She never used to be that way." The big campus wheel now must take minor billing in the family scene, and he finds it hard to take. So it is his wife who is at fault. Thus we humans rationalize.

Many men find it difficult to understand all the things a woman must do in caring for a child. Thornton Wilder has written that the rearing of children is "more exasperating than bivouacking among the gnats of the Egyptian desert." Even more difficult is it to appreciate the depletion of nervous energy that results. Thus many a husband is prone to see only the lessened attention "the little woman" gives to him, her lessened response to his sexual advances, the lessened ardor of her interest in what he is doing. He does not realize that when he is telling her about how he told off the boss that day, or what his golf score was, she is thinking of when the baby's formula needs to be changed, and whether Junior has clean socks for school tomorrow. And if she doesn't, who will?

* All of them do, after the baby comes.

To step aside from the center of the family stage and give way, even to one's own child, is a test which some men, and women too, cannot meet. What, then, results? Apparently family desertion rather than divorce is a frequently found reaction. We have examined in some detail the record over a period of years of desertion and nonsupport cases that come before the courts in one of our large cities. The following significant facts seem quite clear. First, the couples involved were married when they were quite young—one-half and more under twenty-one. This is markedly younger than was true in similar cases a generation ago. Second, they had been married but a few years—four years, on the average. Third, three out of every four couples have had a child or children. The most frequently found deserter is a young husband, usually in his early twenties, married about two years, and the father of one child.

Are such cases difficult to understand after one notes the contemporary emphases in the marriage and family literature upon a Hollywood kind of romance, individual happiness, sexual satisfaction, personality development, and the lack of emphasis upon parenthood and its responsibilities? Consider now a modern parable about a sower who has been out sowing and is surprised because there sprouted what he had sown and there did not sprout what he had not sown.

There is a curiously strange lack of emphasis in our popular thinking upon the thrill and romance of child-rearing which the modern sciences have revealed. At least five sciences combine to emphasize the plasticity of human nature, showing how from the beginning of life the child's original responses are modified by the conditions under which it is reared, and how this is a continuing process, so that the personality patterns of the growing child are constantly in process of formation and modification.

Of the five sciences referred to above, one group consists of psychologists, men like Pavlov, Krasnogorski, Watson, and others, who have shown the tremendous possibilities in conditioning behavior responses throughout the range of organic life. Second have been the psychiatrists, whose experiences and studies have led them to stress the effects in later life of the early conditioning of the child. Some of them have contented themselves with emphasizing the role of infantile and preschool experience; some have gone so far as to focus attention upon the effects of the prenatal environment. Third have been the conclusions of the cultural anthropologists, whose comparative studies of people in different parts of the world have shown how diverse cultural systems produce different personality traits and types. Fourth are the sociologists, whose contemporary studies of the effects of group life and subcultures have led them to look upon personality as but the subjective side of these two sets of influences. The self is but a reflection of the social situations through which a person Jives. Finally, as if to complement all the work of these four sciences, have been the revisions of the role of heredity, made by contemporary biologists. Not that the biologists have depreciated the importance of heredity; rather have they been making greater allowance for the possibilities of human development within the limitations which nature imposes.

It is true that many of our attempts at corrective work with delinquents, mental patients, and other groups are based on the principle of the plasticity of nature. Similarly, authoritarian states have exploited it in their collective programs and attempts at individual brain-washing. But of enthusiasm for it in child-rearing as a family value, there is relatively little. Educational programs for women detour around it. Women's colleges show amazingly little adaptation of their curricula to the rendezvous of their students with nature. This seems like sheer pity and the failure to grasp a truly great opportunity.

We return to the basic problem of social values. If what we want to do is to educate women to enter the labor market and compete with men, then their role of motherhood must suffer, except perhaps in the case of a relatively few exceptional women. If we stress marriage as a way of legalizing sexual relations or as a vehicle for individual development and happiness, then we must not be surprised when young husbands will love and run.

Children can make, or unmake, a happy marriage. The choice turns on the attitude of the parents, more specifically on the things they want from life. If they really want children, if they consider parenthood a privilege, then they will be disposed to make the adjustments and sacrifices that go with them. This means more than being willing to have children— a child or two, perhaps, because everyone else in the block has one. The parenthood we have in mind is part of the larger pattern of familism, which thinks about life and faces it in terms of building one's own form of group life. It is a group rather than an individual way of thought and system of values.

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