Soundings

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32975, 22 July 1972, Page 6

Soundings

by

DENIS McCAULEY

Although a storm of Women’s Lib. wrath will inevitably fall on anyone who criticises mothers of pre-school children who go out to work when economic necessity does not compel them to, there are still many ready to incur such wrath and argue that child care is not inherently boring and demanding, that it’s more creative than working in a factory or office, or even to carve a statue.

But for parents to have this high conception of their role, they have to believe they can shape their children’s future lives. Like an artist, they must have an image of what they’re trying to create; they must have goals and standards.

New Zealanders once had a clear set of values they believed in and tried to live by—thrift, self-discipline, hard work, a willingness to deny themselves comforts today for the sake of greater gains tomorrow, and a concern with material acquisition and social status. For various reasons many people have lost confidence in these values. Inflation has robbed thrift of all meaning. Half-repressed anxieties about nuclear warfare make sacrificing for the future seem less sensible. Prolonged affluence has taken the edge off the drive for material acquisition. Yet no new code has emerged to replace the old. The first evidence of the loss of confidence in traditional beliefs was the failure of many parents to transmit these beliefs to their children. While continuing to observe most of the old values themselves, they didn’t instil them in their children. They didn’t impose discipline, demand courtesy and obedience, insist on an education that imparted specific knowledge, or extol ambition and family pride. Instead, they adopted something like a referee’s attitude, as if their children were players in a game. They saw to it their children were fed, kept in good physical condition, and didn’t harm one another. Beyond blow-

ing the whistle to order the odd free kick, they adopted a live-and-let-live policy.

There’s no intellectual or moral challenge in this approach to parenthood. Any competent substitute, like a day-care centre, can wash and feed a child and see that it doesn’t come to any physical harm. Having no clear idea of what values they want to transmit or what goals they want their children to reach, many intelligent women have found motherhood just a boring set of repetitive tasks, and they’ve begun to flee from their children, to join the men in the “real” outside world. , So far this flight from children is a minority trend in our culture. But it is the function of advanced groups like the professional feminists to articulate what’s only implicit in the behaviour of a much larger group. That’s the inner logic of their downgrading of women’s biological role, their angry deprecation of motherhood, their insistence on every mother’s right to park her baby in a day-care centre and hurry off to work even when financial circumstances do not require her to. But to diminish the importance of motherhood and to deny its unique responsibilities is only to generate more guilt and confusion. Rather than exile the mother from the home, the effort should be to draw the father into it, and into a more active family role. After all, motherhood is only one half of parenthood, and the phenomenon of the fleeing father is probably as much to blame for the mother’s discontent as the banality of her child-care role. We can refuse to have children. But if we do have them, we can’t abidcate our role in shaping their future. We can’t evade a crisis in adult values by adopting a laissez-faire attitude towards the young. Our flight from our children is really a flight from ourselves and our moral confusion.