From: rstevew@deeptht.armory.com (Richard Steven Walz)
Newsgroups: alt.polyamory,alt.romance,soc.singles,alt.sex,alt.pagan
Subject: Re: raising children
Date: 10 Nov 92 09:16:38 GMT
Organization: The Armory


I think that anyone who has raised a child knows that a second parent
is not just some kind of faceless breadwinner. If that were the case,
then most people would have little or no relationship with their
father, and for many if not most of us, that just isn't true. If you
were fortunate enough to be one of the two-thirds that experienced
their father coming home and paying some attention to their child or
children, even if it is just or mostly on weekends, or if he drove you
to school or home long enough to talk to you, then you know what I
mean.

The writer who left the first inane fundy diatribe about family does
need to have his/her/its butt kicked around the block, but that
doesn't mean that anyone raising a child doesn't wish hope and pray
that someone would come into their lives to share the task and help
give encouragement and love to their child.

And while it's nice to dream pie in the sky visions of people
organizing into extended family groups, I'm not sure that would make
it quite either. Every child wants more than just one person they can
relate to, even if those persons are not their genetic parent. A child
is made aware of the impermanence of life and how easy it can be to
lose the only person who cares for them if they have only one person.
Many a child has asked the question, "What would happen to me if you
died?" of their parent. If they have more than one close parenting
person who is sworn to love them at all costs then they feel a greater
security. The extended family group or tribe might not meet the need
of a child if they are foisted off on someone who the child has not
known well or related to before. It seems that no matter how much good
such tribal groups might be for adults and children at some level,
that there is simply nothing that replaces the child's closest parent
figures. And I think that the child would feel insecure with only one.
I know I would. Tribal members might be interesting to an older child
and a great resource as they come into their own, but the young child
needs a more personal touch, I will dare to wager. They need someone
"just for them". They need another person at least who is virtually as
close as that primary person, and a third if they are truly fortunate.
More is better up to a point. But the very young child usually needs
the stability of just a couple or a few people the child can call
"mine!". Without more than one, I think the child experiences too much
fear. They can imagine loss and terror, they are not stupid.

Independent and enterprising? Single-parent children? Like hell they
are. They tend to either be more shy and insecure or else boisterous
and potentially a behavior problem. It is clear that they don't get
the interaction they deserve. And they wind up being latch-key
children who come back to a house, not a home. Even at age ten my son
confessed that the time he spent at home alone was the scariest time
he recalls from his young life. And he only spent about an hour before
both of us were home. We placed him in daycare just for the hour after
school before we could get to him AT HIS REQUEST! A child who has had
their sense of security strained at an early age does not grow up
stronger and more enterprising, unless those are euphemisms for
neurotic acting out. Perhaps that is what drives the capitalist
system. Perhaps people who are terrified make better workers who won't
complain and who will eat shit for their job. They probably grow up
like the last generation of oldsters from the depression, with a need
to amass wealth and no ability to enjoy it. How many of them died and
left it to their widows, died at a relatively young age. Nietsche
might have said that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but
I think he was full of shit. Strong children who can withstand stress
are those who have not had to before and have an emotional reserve of
strength waiting untapped. Those who have had to look whipped before
they start, they look old in their eyes before they are much beyond
youth.

And what a cute crack about sexual abuse being reduced by not having a
father in the home, when we are finding in the most recent studies
that sexual abuse is more and more looking like a behavior that both
sexes have indulged in. The curves of occurence are growing closer
together asymptotically as the new findings come in, the experts say.
Well, so much for the myth of uncontrollable male lust that does us
all a disservice, men AND women. 

Blessed is the child who knows who loved and wanted him or her before
they were born. More blessed is the child who has their eggs in more
than one person's basket emotionally. Ask yourself, would you like to
have been raised in a single-parent family or a multiple parent
family? I'm sure that forced relationships don't work, but I also know
that today's spoiled western human gives up at any hint that they are
not as blissful as they imagine they might be with someone else. And
then I remember all the divorced people I know who say that their
marriage wasn't the best, but that they didn't know that being alone
would be worse. That's the kicker. And you can't know till you've
already been an ass and blown it. Don't stay together if you are going
to fight or pout or act childish. Just stop fighting and pouting and
acting childish! Assholes.
- Steve


-- 
* Richard STEVEn Walz   rstevew@deeptht.armory.com   (408) 429-1200  *
* 515 Maple Street #1   * Without safe and free abortion women are   *
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* Real Men would never accept organ-slavery and will protect Women.  *
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