A friend of mine who's a relatively new parent was complaining to me the other day that his life often feels confined these days to nothing more than "roaming and rotting." His one-year-old son—who has recently acquired the ability to walk—wakes up early and toddles off on a series of perambulations around the house. The rest of my friend's day is then made up of following along behind him to make sure he doesn't hit his head on any table corners, chew on any electrical cords, swallow any choking hazards, etc. (that's the "roaming" part); or else sitting with him in a play pen while my friend tries to keep both his own brain and a one-year-old occupied (that's the "rotting").
My friend obviously felt guilty even uttering a word of complaint about this; but I could relate perfectly well to what he was describing. Anyone who's provided any care of young children for extended periods of time—whether of relatives or their own kids, or as part of their jobs—will be familiar with the distinct boredom and misery it often entails. It's one of the few activities in adult life that requires both constant, laser-focused attention (to ensure the child's safety), but also a lack of serious mental stimulation. No one's going into a "flow" state from the sort of focus that childcare calls forth. The result is often a vague sense of mental vegetation instead. "Rotting" is a good word for it.
Yet, people often feel ashamed to own up to these feelings, and become convinced that they must simply be doing it wrong. They are sure other parents do not have the same problems. I always think back in this context to a few lines from the poet Hugh MacDiarmid that describe the plight of the distracted parent. They seem to me inarguably accurate in describing a certain mood that occasionally comes to any adult providing childcare—and yet, they simultaneously strike me as so shocking and taboo that I get a frisson of forbidden truth merely from reading them; and almost hesitate to quote them here: "I love my little son, and yet [...] I was impatient of his squalid little needs, [...] And longed for my wide range of interests again[.]"
Of course, some other adults are convinced that if you feel this way, you are doing it wrong (which certainly doesn't help the guilt feelings). I was talking to another friend about all this (who does not have kids of his own, by the way), and he was perfectly ready with advice: "he shouldn't be hovering over his son, anyway," my other friend said. I pointed out to him the world of hazards that an ordinary house contains, and which could cause a one-year-old's death or serious injury if the parent looks away for a moment. "That's why he should baby-proof the house," my other friend said.
I then pointed out that it's impossible to anticipate every possible danger—that children are endlessly inventive in finding ways to test the limits of safety. "That's just paranoia," my friend said. I then countered that many threats to children's safety may indeed be low-probability—but the stakes of getting it wrong that one time out of a hundred are extremely high. I gave my friend some examples of terrifying incidents involving hazards to children which—if an adult caregiver had not been present and observing at the time—would have resulted in irreversible harm or even death.
But what my friend wants to avoid in childcare, he says, is the role of the nag. He doesn't want his future kids to grow up hearing his voice in their heads always as one of restraint.
And yet, my other friend—the one with the one-year-old—would counter that there are innumerable situations in everyday living in which the answer to a toddler has to be no. The world is full of things that young children want to investigate but cannot do so safely. (I will be forever haunted by the passage in Mike Gold's memoir in which his young sister slipped out of their New York tenement for a moment and ended up beneath the wheels of a milk truck.)
It seemed to me more and more, as I thought about this, that both of my friends had a point. And I was reminded suddenly of a Bertrand Russell essay I'd been reading the other day about "Architecture and Social Questions." On the one hand, Russell finds something lamentable for both parent and child in the situation of one always trailing after the other and telling them not to touch this or that. But Russell also acknowledges—to my other friend's point—that such constant nagging is necessary to ensure the child's safety in the cramped single-family homes many new parents inhabit.
It is thus the architecture that surrounds us, rather than our individual choices and preferences as parents, that accounts for that "atmosphere of constant querulous prohibition" that often surrounds young children. Instead of simply urging new parents to stop saying "no" all the time—when "no" is often essential to preserve a child's health and safety—we should pursue structural solutions, Russell argued, that make it necessary less often to say "no." In our architecture, "generally," Russell writes, "there should be the utmost possible avoidance of those things that make it necessary to say 'don't' to children."
I was fascinated, in reading this essay, to see the degree of Russell's interest in the details of childcare—as well as his empathy for the plight of primary caregivers—which was of course highly unusual in a man of his generation. He also avoids the extremes of either sentimentality or dystopian coldness that often characterized rival speculations on this topic in his era. On the one hand, he makes it possible to admit that all parents of young children—whether men or women—at times find childcare something other than a blessing. "Even the most affectionate adult," he writes, "is bound to find children trying if there is never a moment's rest from their clamorous demands for attention."
This is what gives us permission to allow in those forbidden thoughts quoted from Hugh MacDiarmid above.
At the same time, Russell was not among the early twentieth-century socialists who saw the answer to this problem in the complete dismantling of family life. Instead, he maintained that family life would be enriched by creating more structures in which children could play safely away from their parents—thereby giving the adults an occasional break. As evidence that this could work, he pointed to the fact that fathers under the existing social arrangement often played more and had more "quality time" with their children than their mothers did—precisely because they were away from the children for part of the day.
Mothers, by contrast, as primary caregivers, had to spend so much of their time warding off dangers to the children that they had little capacity left over for friendliness and affection.
This same dynamic obviously persists today in the widespread perception among children that dad is the "fun" parent, whereas mom is the "worrier" and the nag. The reasons for this imbalance are structural rather than personal. Dad is not more fun because he is a more affectionate and entertaining person. He is more fun because he often gets to be away from the children for part of the day, and can neglect any attention to or responsibility for their immediate safety (which is often delegated to female caregivers). Dad, therefore, often doesn't have to be the voice saying "no" to everything. He doesn't become associated with that "atmosphere of constant querulous prohibition" that Russell wrote about.
When fathers do end up playing that role in a given family dynamic, they immediately have the same problems mothers faced for millennia. They end up "roaming and rotting," as my friend put it. They end up, like MacDiarmid, "longing" for their "wide range of interests again."
Whereas if both parents could catch a break for some hours of the day from superintending their children and being responsible for their immediate safety, both could be the "fun" parent again, who were associated with something other than nagging and prohibition in their child's eyes. "They would see each other in the morning and evening, long enough for affection, but not long enough for frayed nerves. Mothers who are with their children all day long hardly ever have time to play with them," Russell writes, "[....] But at the end of a day spent apart, both mother and children would feel more affection than is possible when they are cooped up together all day. [...] What is good in family life would survive, without what is worrying and destructive of affection."
The practical realism of this, combined with its warm human sympathy and decency, is immensely refreshing—and could go a long way to easing some of that burden of guilt so many new parents seem to feel in admitting that—as much as they love their children—the constant care and supervision they require is an enormous burden. And having eased the sense of shame surrounding the topic, we could begin to seek structural and society-wide solutions—rather than blaming parents for a supposed dearth of affection or for in some way or another "doing it wrong."
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