The Costs of Childhood

The evolutionary logic, and limits, of shrinking families

Another piece in a series about the role of love in American life.

Raising children has never been an entirely rational act. But there are few times when it has been less rational than the last century—a blip in the broader sweep of history. For most of recorded time, children have been economic assets in what was a domestic economy in the most literal sense of the term. Men and women labored side by side to sustain a household, and additions to their families constituted extra pairs of hands to make light work. That was never the only motive, of course. And at least in the short term, offspring represented a net loss of resources in terms of childbirth, infant care, and the reality that it would be years before children would—assuming they survived the ravages of childhood disease—become a net addition to the economic value of a household. And once they were a net gain, it would often only be a matter of time before sons would go off, or daughters would be married off, to found new households, even if some might stick around, or return to care for their parents in old age. All things considered, though, families were nevertheless a pretty good deal when compared to the alternative—in financial terms certainly, but social and emotional ones as well.

The coming of the Industrial Revolution changed this equation. The rise of machine manufacturing began to move the locus of work away from the home and toward the factory. This change, which was gradual, affected both men and women, though in the popular imagination, it was men who went to work while women stayed home. For a while, the economic logic of the growing family remained in place, since the wages of working children remained a mainstay of family budgets. But the ravages of the new order also provoked a reaction. One facet of this, of course, was the crusade against child labor, which gained traction and resulted in a series of reforms in the early twentieth century. Another was the invention of Victorian childhood, so starkly sentimental when compared with the far less romantic notion of children as miniature adults—though ones whose base impulses needed sharp discipline—that preceded it. Meanwhile, the growing spatial divide in working families promoted a vision of the home as hearth, and the celebration of what gender scholars described as a separate sphere ideology in which men came home to escape the ravages of work while women cared for them and their children in a shared domestic refuge. There was more than a little (male) fantasy in this vision of family life, of course. But it wasn’t entirely fabricated. In part, that’s because the material factors—never far from any of the others—contributed to it. Growing affluence made the aspiration of male breadwinner fathers and stay-at-home mothers seem increasingly plausible for growing numbers of middle-class Americans and those who longed for that status. Certainly my own mother, the daughter of an Italian immigrant taxi driver, aspired to become a housewife. She achieved it. My sister, who would have liked to follow in my mother’s footsteps, was denied this dream, increasingly viewed as illegitimate, by a changing economy and a changing gender ideology—one embraced by the men in her life—that insisted on her participation in the paid labor force.

Thanks to social welfare laws, universal public education through high school, and the invention of the new concept of adolescence, which stretched childhood out for ever-longer intervals, the experience of childhood was thoroughly transformed in the first half of the twentieth century. By the time this transformation was complete, children were no longer an economic asset. Instead, they became a huge drain on family resources. Not surprisingly, birth rates, which had declined steadily since the late eighteenth century, have dropped below replacement.

In some precincts of contemporary cultural discourse, this is regarded as a serious problem. Which it undoubtedly is when it comes to things like funding our Social Security system, among other forms of social welfare. There are also cultural issues that get raised when raising children is viewed as less of a national priority (as aging East Asian nations are experiencing with painful clarity). Some Americans, especially those on the left, would rather not have this conversation, since its implications may threaten cherished notions of personal autonomy that tend to go out the window when children enter the picture. But I suspect it will force its way to forefront of our discourse in the coming years. In any event, the Baby Boom of the mid-twentieth century, a byproduct of fantastic prosperity and the deprivation that preceded it, was the exception that proved the overall rule of population decline in the industrialized world in modern times.

 The American Dream, which has always been intergenerational—indeed, one crucial source of its longevity was a hope that the torch of unrealized dreams could be passed on to one’s progeny—reflected this change. As families shrank in size, growing resources were poured into fewer vessels. And those vessels became ever more precious. No longer was it merely sufficient to procure a secure home in a good school district. For members of the elite and would-be entrants through that portal, private schools, tutors, and the crush of college admissions increasingly defined the road to success in what became a domesticated arms race. Neighborhood games were replaced by play dates; Little Leagues gave way to travel teams; camps and lessons were ratcheted up in intensity and expense. These imperatives co-existed alongside—more like competed with—others. One, as discussed, was the occupational emancipation of women. Another involved growing affluence in some sectors of American society, coupled with a growing reality of national decline that eroded financial security in others.  All civilizations confront such tensions and struggle to find ways to square them. Eventually, they grow too acute, and internal or external pressures change the social equation. But at the turn of the twenty-first century, the center still held, even as there were searching questions about how much longer it could. This was the world in which I became a father.

Next: The Daddy Business