2001-02-20 - 3:03:55 PM

Kipling and Parenthood

I'm hardly a Kipling scholar, and I actually dislike a lot of his work, but many of his poems really appeal to me. One of the hallmarks of his work is his view of civilization as a fragile enterprise, constantly threatened from within and without.

I tend to buy into that view. In fact, I think it applies on many different levels. In real life and fiction, we often see gifted people create remarkable things, which then fall apart when they're inherited by those who lack the genius of the original creators. I think the story of RMS Titanic is a good example of this problem. I also think this has happened to the USA, but no doubt many would disagree.

I've also come to believe that the process of raising children works this way. Parents can damage their children in a million subtle ways, most of which aren't apparent until far later. I think it's an inevitable consequence of the way we develop, actually. We begin to acquire our personalities and our neuroses long before we can say the words. Most of the time, when Liralyn has a temper tantrum, we can safely ignore it until she calms down. But we never know whether any given tantrum might be a symptom of some deep need that we're refusing to meet, leaving heinous scars that will cause her to screw up her life in umpteen years. And thus, despite our best efforts, we're doomed to fall short of perfection. And to top it all of, people tend to repeat their parents' mistakes when they raise their own kids.

Of course, we're intelligent beings. We can, to a great extent, fix our neuroses. Most of the people I know have gone through some serious changes between college and their late twenties as they overcame the various issues that they brought with them out of childhood.

The problem is that there's a relatively small time frame between those first signs of sanity and what the shrinks call "self-actualization", which start to hit around 25 or so, and the time when lots of people start thinking about having kids.

I think that we're all in a race, struggling to fix our own heads in time to treat our children sanely, hoping that the mistakes we're bound to make will scar them less than our parents scared us. I don't mean that as criticism of our parents- they ran the same race as best they could, too. All our progress as a species depends on raising each new generation to be a little saner than the last. Since we seem unable to avoid giving those future generations greater destructive power than we have, guarding their emotional health may be our only chance of saving the planet.

Now go away, it's time for your nap.

     Then, fretful, murmur not they gave
       So great a charge to keep,
     Nor dream that awestruck Time shall save
       Their labour while we sleep.
     Dear-bought and clear, a thousand year,
       Our fathers' title runs.
     Make we likewise their sacrifice,
       Defrauding not our sons.

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