Politicizing Parenthood

Virginia Postrel from the October 2000 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Politicizing parenthood reduces our ability both to accommodate differences and to benefit from them. By announcing that society has decided on one best way to live, it creates winners and losers, citizens who matter and those who don’t.

The great insight of classical liberalism was that government neutrality in matters of faith and conscience would foster social peace. The same is true of parenthood, which is equally personal and thus equally explosive. Allowing people the freedom to make varied arrangements–from family-friendly workplaces to (currently illegal) child-free apartment buildings–won’t eliminate all conflicts. But it gives people fewer causes for grievance and more ways to alleviate life’s stresses.

Society needs both parents and nonparents, both the work party and the home party. While raising children is the most important work most people will do, not everyone is cut out for parenthood. And, as many a childless teacher has proved, raising kids is not the only important contribution a person can make to their future. The children who are "our future" will inherit a world created not just by parental devotion but by the sort of zealous, focused endeavors that can preclude good parenting.

As Francis Bacon observed four centuries ago, "The perpetuity by generation is common to beasts; but memory, merit, and noble works are proper to men. And surely a man shall see the noblest works and foundations have proceeded from childless men, which have sought to express the images of their minds, where those of their bodies have failed. So the care of posterity is most in them that have no posterity."

Bacon, writing under the rule of the Virgin Queen, leaned too far toward the party of work. The republican Constitution that seeks to "secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity" does not play such favorites. Neither should those who govern under it.