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

vol. 1, #31, April, 1996

WHY KIDS

A generation X friend of mine asked me recently if I was surprised that so many of his generation had decided that they didn't want to have children. I told him that I wasn't exactly surprised--I do understand how scary the idea of being totally responsible for someone else's well-being can be. But I was really sad for them, because of what they would miss out on.

We know all about what we do for children. Maybe we're not as aware, though, of what children do for us.

For starters, kids are really good for your ego. They give us absolute, unquestioning, adoring love. Babies are totally needy, totally dependent, totally reliant on our care, and this breeds a love more passionate than any other you will ever experience. Do you think you're plain, or even homely? It doesn't matter; your baby thinks you're the most beautiful thing in the world. Do you feel like a hanger on in a world of far-more-popular people? It doesn't matter; your kid would rather have you than Cindy Crawford or Tom Cruise. Do you feel kind of dumb, kind of incompetent? It doesn't matter; your kid thinks you're God. (Granted, this won't last into adolescence--but only because even God wouldn't be able to live up to the kind of faith she has in you.)

But the flip side of that is that, because they're totally needy, we have to become better people to take care of them. I remember my 30th birthday, a day when I was alone with my 4-week-old son. I had a fever, headache, chills, and cramps, and I was throwing up every hour on the hour. And my baby had colic. Since I was the only grownup in sight, it didn't matter how I felt; I HAD to be the caretaker. I HAD to cuddle him, sing to him, coo at him (between trips to the bathroom).

Children turn us into grownups, teach us to put our own selfish wants on hold while we tend to their needs, and they make us better people. They make us connect, not just with them, but with other adults, as we try to make the world an easier place for them to grow up in. Children turn us from rootless, feckless egotists into members of a community. In short, children make it necessary to create civilization.

This is the scary part, I think, for generation X. If children force you to become grownups, doesn't that force you to give up your own childhood?

And the answer to that is, "No, not really."

Suppose you had a delightful childhood. Maybe you can remember, like I do, the warmth of sitting in your mother's lap and being read to. Or maybe you remember fondly evenings playing cutthroat games of Monopoly and cards with your family, or family sings, or trips where your parents set you to playing word games to keep you kids from killing each other.

In this case, you can recapture these moments by sharing the experiences with your own child. Reading to your kid is a chance to be enchanted all over again by the books you grew up on. As you repeat these experiences with your kid, you are turning pleasure into tradition, memories into family folklore.

Of course, if you had a really scary, unpleasant childhood, you're going to be at least a little bit jealous of your kid--he is going to have a chance to have a childhood when you never really did. You'll have to be a grownup without ever having had the fun of being a kid first. But even here, you have a chance to create for your kid the kind of childhood you wished you had, and share it with him.

Another thing children teach us is to cherish the present moment. Young children live in a world unmediated by words or abstractions. We have learned to look at a patch of flowers, assign a name to them, and let it go at that; kids can spend hours studying those flowers, looking at their colors and shapes and textures, tasting them, touching them, tickling themselves with them, playing with them. If we take the time, we can experience those flowers along with her. It's no fun to go to the circus as a grownup unless you take along a kid whose eyes you can watch it through.

Kids embarrass grownups by living in a world of absolutes. Things are either fair or not fair--and kids are passionate about unfairness. People are either nice or mean. Things are either right or wrong, good or bad.

We grownups have learned that life is not that simple, that, in the words of Dorothy Parker, "good and bad are mingled in a crazy plaid." We've learned to compromise, to live with a certain amount of unfairness, to accept some unacceptable things. We've learned how to say "Thou shalt not kill" while sending kids off to war.

Kids remind us that maybe we compromised a little too easily. In the words of the Railyway Children, we "must protect this urgency/make a promise you won't tell/too many sides confuse the right..." Their urgency, the passion of their beliefs, the energy they throw into righting wrongs, are our most valuable national resource.

Children are pure question-asking machines. Once they get beyond the "why is the sky blue" sort of questions, they get to the "why is the world arranged like that" sort of questions, like why are people mean to each other? (Found a good answer for that one yet? I haven't.)

As we grow up, we all arrive at answers we can live with--and then we can turn off our minds. But if we really listen to our kids, we replace our comfortable answers with their questions, and turn our brains back on again. They say you get more conservative as you get older. But if you listen to your children, you're going to get more radical, because you're going to be as dissatisfied with your old answers as they are.

Generation Xers love their freedom, and they know that they'll have to give up a lot for their kids. If we have to choose between our kids' braces and going to London, our kids will end up with straight teeth. And people who'd rather write the great American novel are writing advertising copy for toothpaste instead, to keep the kids in clothes and shoes. But our kids aren't afraid to dream big dreams, and they're not ready to settle for ordinary; they remind us that we need not give up on our implausible dreams either. After all, when they're grown up, it still won't be too late to seek the newer world they remind us is out there.

And then there's the end result you get for your trouble: you've produced, if you're lucky, a brand new, decent, responsible, loving human being, surely the finest work of art our species can produce. If you've done your job right, you're going to like this person, and learn from her. After years of you telling him what to read, he's going to be telling you what to read. As our world goes beyond our technological understanding, these brand new grownups are going to explain it to us.

But I guess I haven't mentioned their real secret weapon. Kids are funny. They think strange things and say stranger things, do preposterous things, and see the world in a naive, cock-eyed way. Half the reason I hardly ever hit my kid was that every time I really wanted to clobber him, he would say something that cracked me up. For day to day entertainment, there's nothing quite like having kids around.

So, to my generation X friends, I say, I hope you change your mind. But if you don't, I hope, for your sake, you at least get to have someone else's kids in your life to make you human.

My Word's Worth Archive

Current column

Marylaine.com/ home to all my other writing

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.

I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them . If you want to be notified when a new one is up, send me an e-mail and include "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.