My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #2, July 19, 1999

POSEABLE DOLLS

So this is how it feels to be lonely.
This is how it feels to be small.
This is how it feels when your world means nothing at all.

Inspiral Carpets

There have been several stories in TV news magazines of late about children who have been stolen away by their fathers, and then re-kidnapped by their mothers, sometimes after many years have gone by.

The odd thing to me about these stories is that so frequently they are treated as stories about the rights of mothers. Reporters dwell sympathetically on the mothers' anguish at the loss of their children. If the father has changed his identity and hidden the children, or taken them to some repressive foreign country, where the mother has no rights, reporters are particularly outraged on their behalf -- of course the woman should do everything in her power to get her child back.

The assumption here seems to be that the children are stolen property.

But of course they are not. They are small, dependent people, whose trust in the people around them is being ruptured. What young children absolutely require for healthy development is love and stability, the assurance that their needs will be met on a regular basis by people who love them. They need to see those same people, every day. They need a regular schedule, and a familiar environment that they can learn to master. Children do not do well with transience.

Adults have a way of acting as if their own happiness is what matters most. We move freely in and out of relationships, walking out with astonishing insouciance when they stop giving us emotional support or pleasure, or when they start costing us too much effort to maintain. When children are involved, it is convenient to assume that what works to our advantage will automatically be good for them too. But parents should think very carefully indeed before they break up their children's world.

Sometimes, of course, we have no choice about uprooting our children, if the marriage is abusive, or a partner walks out, or the money runs out. But we need to understand that when we take young children away from familiar environments and people they love, we are doing damage.

Young children are me-centered, with no understanding of outside causes and effects, so if a greatly loved person disappears from their lives, they will blame themselves, decide that they must have been very bad indeed to make mommy or daddy abandon them. If kids have to learn an entirely new environment and schedule as well, they will be even more stressed and frightened -- they have lost their only sense of control over their world, which is knowing where things are and when things can be expected to happen.

If parents have to make such a break, they can compensate by spending a lot of time with the kids, re-establishing a familiar schedule and restoring a familiar environment. They can go out of their way to explain carefully, and repeatedly, why, through no fault of the child, they have had to move, why, through no fault of the child, the other parent is no longer part of their lives.

If parents are kind and wise, they won't vilify an absent parent -- children, who love and need both mother and father, will resent it. Kids don't care, or even want to know, that daddy is a lowdown two-timing skunk, or that mommy is a lush; those are YOUR problems, not theirs. All they know is that they just want mommy or daddy BACK.

Uprooting children once is bad enough. Doing it over and over again is hideously destructive. Children will adapt to their new environment, put down new roots, begin to trust the new people in their lives. When parents move restlessly from one relationship to another, or rekidnap a child the other parent has taken, they break their children's trust in the world yet again. Do this often enough, and they will not recover. They will become ungiving, suspicious adults who have difficulty with love and commitment.

It's bad enough that parents do this to their children, worse that society stands on the sidelines cheering them on in the name of parental love and property rights. Solomon knew better. When only one of the competing "mothers" offered to give up her right to the child rather than have Solomon split the child in half to divide between them, he knew she was the true mother, the one who cared more about the welfare of the child than her own rights.

For a society that claims to love children, we seem to have forgotten what it is like to be a child, helpless and terrified when people leave you and everything around you changes. We don't accept the fact that their needs trump ours because they cannot possibly take care of themselves. We have not created a community that honors their needs for continuity. We offer next to no social or economic support for stressed out dysfunctional families. And when families break down enough for social welfare organizations to step in, they do nothing to meet children's need for stability either, bouncing them from one foster family to another.

Many of us were required to take courses in high school that we have never used and will not use in any foreseeable universe. But most of us will have children. Might it not be helpful to demand that young adults learn, before they become parents, about the physical and emotional needs of children, and about the obligations they assume when they bring children, unasked, into the world? Would we not all gain if people come to realize that children are real people, not poseable dolls?

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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