MC #7 – Raising Children [3 pages]

Raising children is a biological and existential purpose of marriage. 

A “biological purpose” is the outcomes or results of biological operations.

The outcome of most marriages includes the children they produce, which the species needs to continue.

Some portion of every culture’s resources and operations revolves around the delivery and coordination of care to raise children.

Societies depend upon the production of children who are educated to contribute to that society’s continued existence.

In other words, no matter where we look at human biological operations, they include supporting people’s capacities to raise their children.

An “existential purpose” is the outcomes or results that people say give meaning and worth to their lives.

When people’s existential purposes are unfulfilled, or betrayed, people feel as if their life has no point, no meaning or no worth. 

This mood is called “existential despair” and it lurks on the horizons of every individual’s life and every marriage’s existence just waiting for spouses to forget or fail to think and act in ways that make their life meaningful and worthwhile from their point of view.

Raising children is an “existential purpose” for most married couples.  Having and raising children is part of their existence that if not cared for satisfactorily throws their marriage into a meaningless domain where only “existential despair” waits.

Of course, given our biological organization and structure, and our “biological purposes”, this is no surprise,

… except to the married couples who have given it no thought

… and who betray the meaning of their lives and marriages, and their children, too, as a consequence.

Our communities and cultures are all organized around fulfilling these biological and existential purposes.  Like sex, raising children is confusing because it is both ontogenic and phylogenic. 

This is because we don’t need children for any practical reason as individuals, which is a very new cultural development, but our species does. 

Historically and culturally, raising children was an investment in an asset parents could use for their retirement.

That is, people had children to support them in their old age by working on the farm for them or hunting for them.

Only in very recent times, and only in the industrialized world, societies have become wealthy enough to enable couples to make enough money to avoid being forced to rely on their children for care during their old age.

Now, children are no longer assets for parents’ old age.  They are liabilities, which means couples now need to determine how many children they can afford, rather than having as many as they need to support them when they are old.

Families, communities and cultures are manifestations of our efforts and drives to raise our children on behalf of our society and our species. 

Most of our concernful activity as individuals, or spouses, is organized around our individual concerns.  But having children is only necessary for our species to survive.  We will survive without children, although we may not be fulfilled biologically.  We may experience this psychologically or existentially.

As members of our species with a long genetic history, we embody a biological drive to produce children.  Wanting them is not our “choice”, which makes how we feel about having them or not having them something we have to deal with whether we want to or not.

We experience great satisfaction from their presence and our care of them.  Raising children can be a very satisfying part of our Work of Art in Progress as an ambitious couple. 

The point here is that having children, and the entire array of concerns and practices we need in order to fulfill our desire to do so, can be understood more fully when we include the biological purpose. 

Our capacity to observe the world and design powerful practices for fulfilling our ambitions is enhanced when we can fully accept all of the biological structures and the drives they generate for producing and raising children.

Not only do we need a man and a woman to conceive a child, we need the power of both of them working together to take the best care of their children during their extended childhood. 

In addition to the parents, we need an extended family of other adults and children working together, whether they know it or not, for the sake of everyone. 

If we are lucky enough to live in a country as developed as ours, we are even more fortunate.  The configuration of power around us enables us to care for our children and fulfill our ambitions.

If we do not prepare ourselves to act for the sake of raising our children, we and our children will suffer.  Raising children is fundamental to the concerns of an Ambitious Marriage.  Raising children is a locus of concerns for thinking, designing action, living in a community, education and action.  Our clarity and competence with these concerns is a great virtue of an Ambitious Marriage.  It is a source of tremendous power and dignity in our communities.