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Designer Genes and Disposable Dads

Well, I know it’s confusing. On Mother’s Day I gave you some thoughts about the current state of marriage in our culture and the absurdity of bringing church and state together to decide what may or may not qualify as true marriage. Here it is Father’s Day and you get a piece of Ancient Testimony that certainly seems to be about mothers, not fathers. What in tarnation is going on?

Actually, I picked the passage about the exchange of the babies (from II Kings 3) because it serves to illustrate an attitude toward children that parents are capable of taking no matter what their gender. The key character in the story is the mother whose child dies. She notices that there is another baby available, so she trades in her dead baby for the living one. It’s important to her to have a baby, to own a baby we might say, and she doesn’t much care where the baby comes from. Love for the baby doesn’t really come into it at all. This is proved when she says she would prefer to have the baby killed than to see it go back to the other mother. Wow! That’s so cold-blooded. But it is the logical end point of treating children as personal property. Meanwhile, the loving mother, the good mother, would much rather see another woman get her baby than to undergo the horror of seeing the child murdered.

My concern today is the increasing tendency in the culture to view children as property, which I do not think is putting the matter too strongly. It may not be that obvious that today’s parents often behave selfishly toward their children. On the surface it looks like parents are sacrificing for the sake of their children just as they always have. Indeed, we see more parental commitment to good child-rearing practice than we have ever seen before. On the surface it looks like things have never been better for middle-class children: their parents plan them carefully; they dote over them obsessively when they arrive; they read to them; they stimulate their early intellectual development; they provide a level of physical protection that was unheard-of in past generations. And, of course, when it comes time for formal education, parents have never been more willing to choose schools carefully, to pay attention to what the teachers are doing, to spend unlimited amounts to ensure that little Brad or little Brandi gets every advantage in life.

So why do I suggest that there could be something wrong with this picture? Because I think that while the line between loving and caring for one’s child and treating one’s child as a precious piece of property has always been extremely thin, today that line is practically invisible. And in an era of unlimited expectations, no one is talking about the extreme danger of crossing that line, of losing sight of that line and going way off the chart in the direction of loading impossible burdens on the children we do in fact love and care about.

I realize that middle-class parents ought to be invested in their children’s success. My own parents, way back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, never betrayed any anxiety about their children’s’ prospects; on the other hand, they did express some measure of relief when we came home with good report cards and high test scores. I think my folks were prepared to be the parents of average kids, but they also knew that above-average kids would have a better chance of making it in the wider world. Is there anything wrong with that? Of course not. The opposite would be wrong: parents who really don’t give a toot about their kids’ life chances are not the kind of parents anyone would choose to have.

The difference today, if I may say so, is that while my parents and parents like them would have been content to have average kids or even kids who were damaged in some way, many of today’s young parents are less prepared to accept such vagaries of child bearing. A second difference is that my parents and parents like them had no need to trade, as it were, on their children’s lives. Many of today’s competitive parents are shameless in their willingness to cash in on their investment right away; for them the point of parenting is not simply to secure the child’s happiness but also to achieve their own personal and career objectives via the medium of their children.

Both trends, both changes in attitudes toward parenting, are easily illustrated. I think many of you remember the sermon Patricia Williams preached for us on Martin Luther King Sunday a couple of years ago. She said that the next frontier of social and racial justice would have to do with the potential of science to allow prospective parents to select a child’s characteristics—literally to program the intelligence and good looks that will presumably ensure that golden child’s success. This is very different from using science to reduce the risk of there being some kind of horrible disfigurement or disability in a child. This not just about eliminating downside risk; this is about maximizing upside

opportunity. And if it sounds like business, well, it is business, isn’t it? That was the point Williams wanted to make in her sermon: the parents who are most likely to use the new technologies are high achievers with lots of assets who are accustomed to making good investment decisions. So why wouldn’t they use the same criteria as they approach the matter of parenting? Thus will the already advantaged child become even further advantaged. No longer will other kids be able to rag on rich kids who have everything except brains; from now on rich kids can be guaranteed to have it all—money, good looks, and the brains to get into Mommy and Daddy’s Ivy League school without having to resort to one of the reserved "legacy" slots. The new genetic upgrade techniques stand to give the expression "well-bred" a whole new meaning.

To illustrate the second trend in parenting—the shameless trading on the lives of one’s own children—let me simply refer to the way nearly all of the most exclusive private schools and preschools in here New York now cater to the high-flying parents’ desire to network and make connections by means of the school’s exclusiveness. There was a time not too long ago when the expected parental involvement in fundraising events etc. was really about keeping the school afloat financially. Tuition-paying parents who undertook to do these extra duties were sacrificing for the sake of a good education for their child. Now it’s sometimes still about that, but it is also about creating attractive social situations in which parents can see and be seen. In this new scenario the children become kind of a means to the end of their parents’ professional and social fulfillment.

I have some younger friends who are by no means in the high-flying set, but who wanted to find a good preschool for their little boy. So they went to a kind of preview evening at one of the better schools, where they were completely horrified by the behavior of another couple. They observed this other couple urging their toddler to come over and punch my friends’ toddler in the stomach, thus making him cry and carry on in an unattractive way. Do you get the picture? This awful thing was done so that my friends’ kid would be marked as a troublesome kid, a whiner, and so that the aggressive kid’s chances of getting into the school would be notched up by just that much. Nice, huh? And I’m sure the parents who told their kid to punch the other kid thought that they were doing him a favor—giving him a leg up on life. So it goes today.

I believe that the growing tendency to be over invested in one’s children and to treat children as living projections of one’s own competitive needs is rooted in general confusion about what constitutes the good life. We often hear this cultural condition described as consumerism, but that’s really too thin a description for what is involved.

The wonderfully astute sociologist Zygmunt Bauman observes that the one thing we are not able to choose in the consumerist paradise is the luxury of not choosing at all. Not to stay in the race, not to self improve at a furious pace, not to aspire to have or to achieve something better—better clothes, a better face, a better apartment, a better job, a better lover, a better child—not to aspire in this way is the one thing today that can define you as a bad person, a truly irresponsible person. It’s our job to be all that we can be, to put boundless energy into the endless work of self-creation. There is no stopping point any more, no reference point or norm for the good-enough life. In the old days, for example, we could settle for good health, whereas today the model is total fitness, which means of course that we’ll never be good enough. If I have just five ounces of body fat it’s my job to get down to two ounces if I want to be really fit. Etc. As Bauman points out, the total freedom to be all we can be turns out to be extremely oppressive; having all this responsibility for self creation on our shoulders is like being asked to make bricks without straw. You recall that when the Israelites complained about this and said it couldn’t be done, their overseers, said "But you are lazy! You are lazy!" For us it’s the little overseers in our heads, the little Martha Stewart implants, who keep telling us, "You are lazy! You are lazy!" when we slacken a bit in the endless quest for self-improvement.

This is the cultural setting in which we must all work out our own salvation. And in facing it we often bring our children into the process without meaning to harm them—but harming them just the same. Children are just amazingly alert to the hidden cues we give, the hidden anxieties we feel. Every nuance, every inward thought can be absorbed and encoded into a child’s consciousness. When parents obsess over a child’s future, or when they trade on a child’s success, just what kind of message is the child getting? From the overly obsessive parent, the message is that world can’t be trusted, that the task in life is less about receiving or expecting good things but about seizing them by main force. And from the trading parent, the message is the horrible one that other persons are to be treated as means rather than ends…and that it’s even OK to do this to one’s own children.

Communities of faith are communities that ought to help us gain critical distance on the project of limitless self-creation and help us see how futile and how ridiculous this project really is. What are we doing here in church? Why are we here? That’s always a good question to ask. I am reasonably sure that one of the things we are doing is standing apart from a culture where everything is for sale and where we are never good enough for the voice inside our head. One of the things we are doing here is unlearning unlovely habits and unworthy thoughts as we learn instead to welcome all sorts and conditions of people including our own less-than-perfect selves.

Old Paul Tillich is very much out of fashion these days, but I find it helpful to remember his 1950s way of formulating the core of the gospel for people had outgrown the blood sacrifice idea of atonement. "You are accepted" was Tillich’s updating of the old, old story of God’s love for us. You are accepted not because you are necessarily acceptable: not because you have passed all the tests and performed your project of self-creation at an unheard-of level of virtuosity. No, you are accepted—I am accepted—we are accepted because God loves us unconditionally.

Discovering what grace means is the strongest antidote I can think of to the sickness of puffing along in a race that can’t be won, of struggling day after day to prove ourselves. To all of you, and especially to those who are parents, I say: Give yourself permission to be less than perfect…learn to bask just a little bit in a love you didn’t earn and couldn’t earn if you tried. Then teach your children well. Help them to care less about getting and spending and about getting ahead—and care more about giving and sharing and exploring with no thought of whether or how this might advantage them. Teach them about grace by showing them how grace calms and restores your own soul.

Good parenting has never been harder than in this ghastly era of brutal self-improvement and limitless comparison to people who are better and more successful than we ourselves are. But guess what? Our conviction that all these other people are better is nothing but a gigantic optical illusion. From a true perspective, which is to say from a divine perspective, all of us humans are amusingly undeveloped. But it doesn’t matter, because we’re all dearly loved just the same. Amen.

Ancient Testimony: from II Kings 3