Children, Parents, Work, Guilt, Life....

I skate knowingly onto thin ice today in talking about marriage and children. Those who know me are already aware that I am childless, and that my only foray into matrimony was not a resounding success. I have though, watched the institutions of marriage and parenting from the sidelines for my adult life and have occasionally dipped my toes into the pool in relationships with women who already had children (including my engagement to the Kitten, who comes with two girls of her own). This article--and a conversation I had on the plane last night--have got me doing a lot of thinking about these great building blocks of the American way of life, and how they are under siege because of choices we are making every day.

Let's start with the conversation. As the plane filled with those joining up in Dallas (I was flying from BWI to Oklahoma City), one of the very last people to get on the plane was an attractive woman who looked to be not quite 30. Naturally, a cruel and ironic God chose to seat her next to me. I generally do not engage in conversation with strangers (see #8), but I tend to make exceptions in the case of attractive women. Actually, she apparently made an exception to her "no talking to lecherous looking older men rule", but I digress.

It turns out that this woman is a pharmaceutical rep who does a good bit of traveling throughout the innards of our great nation. (On a side note, I would wager that 5 of 10 attractive women you meet in airports and on planes are pharmaceutical reps. They seem to have cornered that market). She is the mother of two children, boys 1 and 3, and was married to a guy she deemed a "great father". During the course of our conversation, she began to tell me about how busy she and her husband were, each with jobs and parenting duties. She used the word "guilt" several times to describe the trades she has to make every day between time with her children, work, time with her husband and time for herself. She talked about how virtually every minute she is awake and not working is devoted to her children.

Again, I have observed the world she describes largely from without, much like the posture one takes while observing the big cat exhibition at the zoo. I respect their world, but I don't necessarily want to climb over the wall into the cage with them. In my time observing the phenomena she described, I have come to conclude two things: 1) that these harried, two working parent, shower attention and time on the Dauphins and Dauphines at night and weekends arrangements are bad for husbands and 2) that they are bad for children.

I have spent my entire adult life among adult men...at work and in recreation. And if there is one refrain I have heard more than any other from the husbands/fathers with whom I've associated, it is that "...I've lost my wife. She's a great Mother, but I don't have a wife anymore." These are the guys at the water cooler, at the cookout, along the sideline at the game. They are everywhere. Perhaps they are you. So I took the opportunity to talk to my attractive seatmate about this, wondering aloud (since we were so chummy and all) if she had heard or seen anything of this among her friends and relations. She admitted to it, fully. But her answer contained more honesty than I was perhaps ready to hear. She said, "well, that's just the way it is. Husbands have to get over the fact that it's not all about them. Things change when you have children." She wasn't saying it wistfully or regretfully; she seemed to say it with pride.

I was dumbfounded. There it was, the other guy's (girl's) playbook, right out there in the open like an old Brady Bunch episode. I wondered to myself how many guys would really...and I mean really...go for the whole act of fatherhood if they knew that this was the path. Stay with me here folks...I'm not trying to infer that having kids shouldn't or doesn't change a marriage. What I'm saying is that I think men wish that it changed things less. The men I talk to want to be fathers, they want to go to the school events, the tae-kwon-do sessions, they want to ensure their children have rich, interesting lives...but they also want to have a wife and partner and friend.

What I'm getting at here is that the two-income family has taken a recessive gene in women and made it a dominant one. Whereas the beauty and wonders of motherhood in a 1950's home provided the room and space to be both wife and mother, the rise of the working mother and our economy's reliance on the liquidity and productivity it provides has squeezed out the space available on the female hard drive for those functions associated with being a "wife". "Mother" is a role that will not be squeezed, as its biological strength and magnetism are well understood. Men however, seem not to have bought fully into this. There doesn't seem to be a diminished appetite among men for marriage, partnership, and all that comes with it. Either their hard drives are bigger (shocking!) or, the father functions are not quite as all encompassing (more likely).

I know this all sounds very pop-psychology, but that's the only psychology I know. I remember a few years ago, when I was getting serious about a girl who had a son, I asked my father what it took to be a good Dad. His answer was short, perfect, and obvious---"Love your wife". Make her and the relationship with her the center of your personal life. The rest will follow. This is the essence of my thinking here (sorry to have rambled so long)--that today's parents have largely forgotten who is the center of their lives. They have shifted (mostly women) that part of their available energy that was at one time devoted to the marriage to the new central focus of the American family, the children. And it is this focus that I believe is ultimately not good for the independence and character of the children it produces.

In a recent article in the Weekly Standard, Joseph Epstein wrote about this phenomenon in what my brother Tom calls "the most important article" he has read in some time.

The concentrated, relentless attention showered upon the children raised within this new, two working parent paradigm has created an entire generation of dependent, entitled children (and a concomitant legion of frustrated Dads/Fathers). The article cited earlier from AOL, in which employers are increasingly having to deal with the parents of employees, reflects this paradigm. Also, though I am rarely one to support the whining of modern educators, parents of these children can be particularly annoying to teachers trying to educate these ADD-addled children. The "attention deficit" isn't an inability of the child to pay attention, so much as it is a child's reaction to having a deficit of attention paid to him!

Which brings us back to the cute pharma-rep sitting next to me. By the end of the flight, I had extracted from her a promise to schedule a quarterly date night with her husband. One date every 90 days. She really wrestled with this. They had never had a babysitter before (who wasn't a visiting grandparent). She wasn't convinced it was even a worthwhile goal. One lousy night.

I'm not saying we should go back to the 50's and women shouldn't work. I think work outside the home is all things considered, a benefit. What I am advocating is more balance...don't worry so much about making sure Junior has an unending palate of activities laid out for him on the weekend. Don't give in to the pressure to be like the other Moms and Dads. Maybe we can turn the corner on this generation of entitled kids and frazzled parents if we just let kids be kids.

But then again what do I know. I'm a childless divorced guy.