The Dividends of Childhood

On loving legacies in the lives of families

This is the final piece in a series about love in American life. I hope you’ve liked them. —Jim

Children are the great insurance policy of the American Dream.  You embark on your journey with hope and anxiety, charting a course by making a mental map that has lots of gaps in it. Inevitably, you experience setbacks—or you begin to realize that you’re behind the pace you need to maintain to make it where you want to go. In any case, there comes a point when you see that you’re either never going to get there, or you get there and realize there isn’t really any there to get to, in at least some sense. You come to understand that the Dream alone is not enough to live on. Or, more accurately, the Dream alone is not enough to live with. You’ve got to have other people in your life. There are any number of ways to do that; it’s good to have more than one. A lifelong companion is one. Communities of various kinds are another. But your offspring are your safest best bet for a legacy.

Sometimes children are a dream in their own right, as they were for my wife. They were for my own mother as well, desperate to escape a difficult family life and eager to start over. In other cases, children are the repositories for hopes that can’t realistically be viewed as attainable in a single lifetime. For centuries of American history, the classic archetypal example is that of immigrants who toil in the hope that their children will have a better life, variously construed. This sense of selflessness can be very powerful, and history is replete with examples of achievement fueled by parental hopes. (It’s also replete with examples of children haunted or oppressed by the sheer force of those hopes.) There is great relief to be had in deferring your expectations for another generation. It’s one of the best strategies for getting up on the morning ever devised.

For many of us, though, children are only one prong of an investment strategy that constitutes the portfolio of our lives. As I suggested earlier, this may be less a matter of selfishness than necessity in a modern economy and society geared toward paid employment, even if most parents think in terms of jobs rather than careers. We’d like to believe there’s no inevitable conflict between chasing our bliss and raising our children. Indeed, we can plausibly tell ourselves that it’s good for our kids to see us working productively and hopefully toward our goals. In so doing we provide them with scripts they can use to cast themselves in their own dramas, revising those scripts but retaining the energy and optimism of parental drafts.

Many of us would also like to believe that it’s also good for our kids that we not get overinvested in their futures. They’ll grow up and want to strike out on their own. They are not going to want (and, odds are, they’re not going to allow) you to loom over them, and they’ll feel better believing that your welfare isn’t dependent on them. If you have a life, they’ll have a better one. And maybe they’ll feel less fatigued when you falter and can really use their help.

That’s what I told myself, anyway, for years. And that’s what I silently told my wife, for years, as I trudged off to my space, literal and figurative, to keep working on that next book I believed would be my breakthrough. She lacked that hard shell of selfish protectiveness that I had, and was more likely to spend her whatever free time she may have had in coming up with ways to make other peoples’ lives better (a tendency that my daughter has absorbed most thoroughly, and an indication to me that old gender habits die hard across generations, though I also think there’s some genetic wiring involved). Over time, my family accepted what was essentially my form of internal regulation, in part because indulging it allowed me function more easily as a husband and father. My children had no choice; my wife had long since made hers; I tried to honor the terms of a contract I had largely written. I believe, on balance, that I have. (More or less. Kinda. Sort of.) Though I also recognize—and recognize that you recognize—that the rest of my family may see things differently.  

In recent days, I find myself fastening on to an idea that never really occurred to me when I was fretting over jumping into the fatherhood business—and panicking over how deeply I was getting enmeshed in it: that having lots of kids could actually benefit me. That the dividend was not a matter of basking in my children’s reflected light as they grew up—and, hopefully, their loving and cherishing each other—but that I might simply enjoy the pleasure of their company (and maybe even their companions; if I can savor my new daughter-in-law half as much as I’ve loved my mother- and father-in-law, I will be a very lucky man). To some extent, this would be a matter of percentages in terms of who stays around, who stays out of trouble, and so forth. But having more people could end up meaning more joy. In the twenty-first century, grandchildren have become a widespread second chance. I find myself beginning to look forward to that, even as I have a hard time imagining that I will ever want to slow down.

My children are grown now. There was a time in their adolescence when I joked about how happy I was at the prospect of getting out of what I called the daddy business, by which I meant the combination of paperwork, logistics, and expense that are now the prerequisites for American childhood, pretty much for every child. I looked forward to the day when my kids would assume management for their lives themselves. To some extent, that has happened, although it’s also true that American childhoods are now of unprecedented duration—the growth life of expectancy in the last century has seemed to lengthen youth no less than senescence.

The job is never quite over. As I know countless parents will testify, there is a uniquely painful anxiety in watching children suffer, acutely aware of your inability to heal the maladies that afflict them even as the need to provide reassurance overrides indulging your own doubts and fears.

There is also a necessary and comforting existentialism of ordinary days—the press of now elbowing aside beautiful plans and monstrous fears. Love sustains dreams; it sustains our will to survive them. It’s the most powerful, if finite, human thing in the world.