By Jerold Levoritz
Yes, parents own their children. Anyone who says differently does not understand anything at all. “He who pays the piper calls the tune”—and children are purchased at the cost of the parents’ living standards. They are like buying an expensive painting to be looked after and cared-for for generations. The idea that women’s labor pains can be disregarded as worthless contributions to the state is ridiculous. That the purchase of a home and an apparently infinite number of toys and games is not considered an investment is outlandish. Who pays these parents to carry these creatures around on their backs? Who compensates them for rising in the middle of the night to comfort the hungry criers?
Listen to the complainers who support abortion, and you will learn the truth. Children are a burden, gladly suffered by some and hated by others. The lost education, the lost liberty, the lost vacations, the lost second home, the lost uninterrupted evenings with Netflix are all the prices parents pay. There are those of us who gladly suffer the conflicts we have with our spouses over raising children as we look for the best paths for them in life. We suffer the lost yacht or rowboat to send our offspring to the best colleges or summer camps or buy them a new shirt.
We note, as well, that in these post-modern times, marriages are more likely to fail in the face of a child’s death due to sickness or accident. This observation clarifies their importance as the glue between people who spent their time, energy, and money to raise them, but whose efforts failed due only to bad luck. The loss is intolerable, the suffering for nothing, the expenses down the drain. Even unsuccessful children, who don’t live up to parental expectations, are better than death since hope is still available—perhaps in the form of grandchildren.
Any play by the government for rights in the nation’s children can only be successful if the government pays for all these real and intangible expenses. In theory, parents who live comfortably only because welfare payments for their children provide an income will be more compliant. In fact, though, those parents who do receive welfare payments will still be unhappy with government overreach.
The state is and always has been a poor substitute for the mother or father who is asleep in the next room. Officialdom will never be there to comfort the crying child. Let us not take an efficient system of raising physically and mentally healthy children and sour the milk that feeds them by adding politics to their diet.
There is one more crucial aspect to be understood about parent-child relations. These relations are delicately balanced and can be spun out of control by people who are intrinsically stupid. This stupidity is part of our existential dilemma and is present in all our activities because no one can foresee the future!
However, one thing we know with certainty is that reducing affectional bonding between people—a leftist revolutionary goal—is naïve. The Russian Revolution and its goal of eliminating the family produced consequences among the Russian people from which they continue to suffer to this very day.
Stalin was able to continue ruining families based on Lenin’s principles of state supremacy. Both men understood that, if the internal mechanisms of caring for a child are reduced or eliminated, anyone can come along and remove children from families if the price is high enough; that is, either enough money to compensate the parents or enough parental suffering to prevent their saving their children from the clutches of the state.
Once that happens— if affection is disdained and crushed— we no longer go to the wall for our children. That betrays the ideal of trust between parents and children. Trust as a concept held between people has been one of the miracles of civilization. As with most mammals, we have readily given our own lives to save our children. We have run back into burning houses to retrieve them or jumped into rivers to keep them from drowning. Do we wish these feelings to disappear from the world so the government can have better control of us?
So yes, parents do own their children. That’s because the most important understanding of the family is that it creates the future. That is the point of having children—to create the future. How much better to have this vision of the future take place in families that are truly invested in children and the future those children will have, rather than at the government level, which is invested only in itself.