For Children, The Importance of Being Needed

So much of being a single mother is about feeling guilty - because your child doesn't have a dad at home; because you don't have as much money as two-parent families; because you think, perhaps, your child has been asked to grow up too soon. It's easy to fall in the trap of regretting you can't give your kids what you imagine to be the protected, carefree life of a two-parent family. Thanks to writer Michael Ventura, we have a few more arguments to help snap us out of this kind of thinking.

Ventura is a renowned writer and columnist for the Austin Chronicle. I recently stumbled upon an article of his that takes a historical look at how it came to be that all parents these days are caught in a trap of trying to make their children's lives utterly protected and carefree. Children, he argues forcefully, suffer for it.

Here's the gist: A hundred or so years ago, parents asked a lot of their children, Ventura writes. They expected them to understand they could easily lose a parent to illness; they probably asked their child to be ready to take over as the financial supporter of the family if this happened; they would very likely have asked children to understand that when they were old enough, they would be expected to contribute to the household income or, if on a farm, labour. The result of these expectations? "Children were needed. And the children knew it. And this gave them a gravitas, a maturity, and a sense of responsibility, scope, and depth virtually unknown to our youth today, not because our young people are less capable, but because we don't raise them like that anymore," writes Ventura.

Mature, responsible children with depth? Isn't that what we read all the parent books and go to all the parent meetings to bring about? Indeed, Ventura makes these observations while reviewing a book about the boom in "parent education" over the past century. He argues that parenting has become an issue because we no longer have children because we need them, we have children because we want them. And if you have children only because you want them, then your burden to provide them with and train them for a charmed life in which they can do whatever they want is vast and without precedent. Indeed, if you accept the logic, if you can't provide them with a perfect life, what right do you have to bring them into this world? As we all well know, lots of parents with lots of money and lots of time get hooked into this faulty logic and take on this imposible-to-achieve task.

Where does that leave single mothers? Ironically in the position of possibly being able to raise sturdier children than those raised in privileged, two-parent families.

"In this changed world, what are children for, and are they needed? Obviously, they're needed to carry on the species, but that's a collective, not necessarily a personal, necessity. Not as obvious to many, they're needed to pass on and extend the human heritage. But in most schools, and most families, that's not what or how they're taught. The intention is to teach them skills that will enable them to succeed. Succeed at what? 'At whatever they want,' is the generally accepted answer. That's not an intention or an answer to make anyone feel necessary, valuable, needed. It's nothing short of pathological how all the froth about self-worth and self-esteem overlooks this fact," he writes.

Ventura's article provides an excellent jumping-off point for rethinking the potential strengths and misconceived weaknesses of single mother families. Bottom line? Lose the guilt. You are more than likely not hurting your children by asking them to grow up a bit sooner than the children of two-parent families. You may actually be strengthening them in ways that you do not even know. And that, in the end, is a gift.

The article is called "Lost Generations; Does America know what to do with its children?" by Michael Ventura, and appears in the Sept/Oct. 2003 issue of Psychotherapy Networker. I found it at my local community health clinic.

Resilient Kid image courtesy Library of Congress