American Kids

David Carlin on our ongoing national suicide: out-of-wedlock births, abortion, low marriage rates, divorce, failing schools. One might believe Americans don’t really care about kids.

As an exercise in social clarity, let’s consider some of our prevailing ideas in America about children.

First, there is the idea that we should have only a few of them, if we have any at all: small families, not large families.  Much of America, especially liberal America, was shocked, I suspect, when at the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in early 2016 we heard, most of us for the first time, that he and his wife were the parents of nine children.  This is too many by present-day standards; far too many.

And how unsettling it must have been to liberals to think that a man who was that far out of what may be called the “reproductive mainstream” had been sitting for years on the nation’s highest court.  If he couldn’t control his philoprogenitive inclinations, small wonder he had rightwing judicial opinions.  If a man’s judgment is defective in one thing, it is likely to be defective in many things.

Second, there is the commonly accepted idea that if one is unhappy in one’s marriage, one should dissolve it. Even though this may greatly harm the children, which (of course) it usually does. And even though the traumatic effect of a divorce many echo throughout the lifetime of the kids, which it also often does.

A few decades ago it was often said that kids were better off when their unhappy parents divorced.  You don’t often hear this excuse nowadays; I guess everybody now realizes that, with exceptions here and there, kids are worse off when their parents divorce (there’s social science research to that effect, if anyone needs it).

Who was the naval commander who said, “Full speed ahead, and damn the torpedoes”?  Well, if you now get divorced you don’t tell yourself fairy tales about how this will be wonderful for the kids.  You just say, “Full speed ahead, and damn the kids.”  The happiness of kids is important, but the happiness of their parents is more important.  Kids should be willing to sacrifice a share of their happiness in order that Mom and Dad, exercising what the Declaration says is their God-given right, can engage in their own pursuit of happiness.

Click here to read the rest of Professor Carlin’s column . . .

David Carlin

David Carlin is professor of sociology and philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the author of The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America.

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