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Monday, July 26, 2010
Time Magazine’s Bizarre Assault on Large Families
Not sure whether Americans are becoming more materialistic and self-absorbed? Look no further than Time Magazine’s recent carnival of narcissism and celebration of selfishness.
In a bizarre cover story entitled, “The Only Child: Debunking the Myths,” Lauren Sandler writes in personal terms of her and her husband’s decision to have only one child. G-d bless them. It’s a free country. Have however many children you wish or don’t wish. But Sandler is an evangelist with thinly disguised contempt for parents silly enough to ruin their finances – not to mention their lives – by being burdened by more than one offspring. Her twisted argument is that the purpose of having children is not a love of kids, or an appreciation for the beauty of life, but parental happiness. Too many kids involves a life of drudgery and expense that extinguishes parental joy. Kids get in the way of their parents tennis lessons and weekends in Paris.
Sandler is as anal as they come. ‘We’re pushing toilet training just to drop the cost of diapers — about $100 a month — from our monthly budget.’ Whoa. If you’re writing Time magazine cover stories, and your husband is also a professional with a separate income, you have only one child, and you can’t even afford diapers, then what are you blowing your money on?
Sandler then gets to the meat of her disturbing line of reasoning. “As parents, we tend to ask ourselves two questions when we talk with our partners about having more children. First, will it make our kid happier? And then, will it make us happier?” Really, I never had such a ridiculous conversation with my wife. Our decision to have nine children revolved around a simple love of kids. We love their cuteness, their playfulness, their gentleness, their innocence. Sandler’s conversations sounds more like two people buying a pet. “Perhaps the parakeet droppings will be too much for us to cope with and we ought to buy a plastic Chihuahua instead?”
If you’re having children for your own happiness, you will be a lifelong burden to them as parents. Rather, the happiness that our children bring to us is the natural and organic by-product of being a parent rather than the reason to become one.
But all this is just the appetizer for the main course of contempt Sandler will serve up for parents primitive enough to have more than one child. “University of Pennsylvania demography professor Samuel Preston,” she relates, “…told me the discovery that surprised him most was that parents felt so madly in love with their first child, they wanted a second. That’s an unusual finding.” To Sandler is it odd to find parents who actually enjoy raising their children.
But let’s not stop her when she’s on a roll. “Parents who intend to have only one say they can manage the drudgery with an eye on the light at the end of the tunnel. Beth Nixon, a Pennsylvania artist and mother of a 1-year-old, says she finds reassurance every day in the fact that “it’s not going to be an endless chain of need which is going to be fulfilled for years and years.” One can picture Sandler finding interviewees in “Narcissists Anonymous” for her piece. Let’s hope Ms. Nixon’s daughter never reads her mother’s loving comments.
But lest you conclude that to Sandler parenting is nothing but monotonous labor with few rewards, she shares how becoming a parent provided a golden epiphany. “I used to suspect that mothers who talked about their children with such unbridled wonder didn’t have much else going on in their lives. Then I had my daughter — and now I gush like the rest of them.” Oh, to be so enlightened, to come around to the idea, Lauren, that women who raise their children are not losers and airheads who get knocked up to fill the void in their lives. Lauren, you rock!
But lest we get too carried away with the pleasures of children, Sandler reminds us that “social scientists have surmised since the 1970s that singletons offer the rich experience of parenting without the consuming efforts that multiple children add: all the wonder and giggles and shampoo Mohawks but with leftover energy for sex, conversation, reading and so on.”
Are these the new standards for a Time magazine cover story?
For the record, I am a father of nine children. They are the best thing, aside from my wife, that ever happened to me. With them I have RV’d around all of North America. I have taken them to countless lectures, debates, museums, and of course, Synagogues. At our weekly Friday night Shabbat dinner we host people from every culture, religion, and nationality and have incredible giggles and conversations. The more children we have had the more blessing has come into our lives. And yes, parents with large families have active and fulfilling sex lives, as I discovered from interviewing hundreds for my best-sellers Kosher Sex, Kosher Adultery, and the Kosher Sutra. Where do you find the time for everything? With a large family you learn to economize both your resources and your time. Your heart expands and you develop healthier priorities. The older children help with the younger children and the family becomes a loving unit.
Sandler drones on about the high cost of ballet and piano lessons and how impossible it would be to afford it with a large family. But do children really need this robotic overprogramming more than nurturing relationships?
In her effort to prove how successful only children are, Sandler gushes over Franklin Roosevelt, Elvis Presley, and Lance Armstrong, which is curious because all three are famous for professional achievement and personal failure. Roosevelt forever lost the affection of his wife Eleanor when he had an affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer. Elvis famously could not sustain an intimate relationship and tragically died of a drug overdose, and Lance Armstrong seems challenged in the sphere of personal relationships as well. None of which means that this has anything to do with their having been only children, and indeed I know only children who are as well-adjusted, giving, and happy as any other children. It is to suggest that narcissists like Sandler have warped values where success is measured by money, fame, and power rather than loving relationships.
Want to know why Islam is taking over Europe and why Latinos are becoming such a political force in the United States? It’s because they love children and they are exploding demographically. In the summer of 2008 The New York Times Magazine published a cover story entitled ‘Disappearing Europe’ that explained that countries like France, Norway, and Russia had hit ‘lowest low fertility,’ having so few babies that they cannot replenish their numbers even in two generations. In the 1960’s, as Time itself notes, Europe constituted 20 percent of the world’s population. Today the number has fallen to under 10, despite massive efforts to boost births. How ironic that as the West has become richer and more capable of affording children it has lost its appetite for kids, believing instead that real happiness lies in a BMW or a Prada handbag.
In that sense, perhaps the most striking statement in Sandler’s cover story is this: “I, for one, was happy without siblings. A few ex-boyfriends aside, people seem to think I turned out just fine.” With values like these, I truly wonder.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach hosts ‘The Shmuley Show’ on WABC 770 AM in NYC and is founder of This World: The Values Network. He is the author, most recently, of “Renewal: A Guide to the Values-Filled Life.” Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley and on his website: http://www.shmuley.com.
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Monday, July 26, 2010
Grizzly Bear Mom
How does a person who “pushes diaper training” qualify as sane enough to be published in Time magazine? I thought that was one of the things parents did that screwed their child up. Her finding parents loving their first child so much they wanted more being unusual-from what planet did this woman come? I’m happy to read that Shmuley found parents of large families still had time for sex (and I hope every other reward of family) and developed healthier priorities than ballet and piano lessons. I’ve found most members of large families to be loving, well adjusted, and altruistic; probably because of the faith that is normally associated with them. After all we need more good people than “successes”. From what Shmuley wrote, Ms Sandler’s article (and Time Magazine’s opinion of large families) drips with contempt and doesn’t qualify as journalism, but as an editorial.
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Monday, July 26, 2010
Redhead Ghostvillager
How sad this makes me. Not being able to have children at all is difficult and I would have been thrilled to pieces to take any number - one or ten. If this journalist is thinking only of the financial drain a child is then perhaps she ought to look at the money she wastes on her own needs. I think of how parents did without during the Great Depression - I know of a family who’s father skipped many a meal so that his children could eat. My mother-in-law talks about her impoverished childhood. Her father died in 1924 and her mother worked any job she could just to keep the four children with her. My mother came from a family with ten surviving children and I loved to hear stories of how they managed to stretch money and never knew that they were poor because they had all they wanted in each other. And as for skipping all those planned activities, well…gee. I never had any organized activity or lessons for anything. We found our own way, scrambled to get a ball game going, rode bikes, or whatever fun we could figure out. Heaven forbid that a child today use their imagination to pretend something or that they sit and read or color. Or worse yet - learn to do what mom and dad does (cooking, home/car repairs etc.) and thereby bonding with each other and gaining life skills to boot. Poor Ms. Sandler. How empty her life must be. I think I’ll remember her in my prayers tonight. With such a little family, there’s probably no one to say any for her.
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Monday, July 26, 2010
JewishInsurgent
It makes me sad to hear that there are people out there who actually pine for the days when they no longer have a tea party with their daughter or hear their son say a new word for the first time. I wish these days could last forever. I wish I could have another 3, 4, 5 kids. Unfortunately I cannot afford the Yeshiva tuition, but I wish these days with my children would never end.
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Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Father2Five
Wow! After myself and my wife, there is no greater joy in life than my five kids! Even my screenname here refers to that. My children are truly my most valuable contribution to this world. I have not read this Time article, but it’s really odd to even think that something like this could be published! Parents of large familes should be proud!
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Saturday, July 31, 2010
ForLiberty
Well said. I really appreciate this article. The time magazine article is rather sickening. Children are a blessing, but unfortunately they seem to be the only blessing we routinely refuse. Send some money or health our way, sure, another child, eh…maybe not. I have found it wonderfully inspiring to look throughout history’s example to see how so many of our greatest genius and leaders have come from large families and are in the birth order of say number 11 or number 14. What are we limiting when we use man’s wisdom to plan our families? Also, I appreciate in this article the attention to Islam’s alarming growth. We must open our eyes and take them off ourselves.
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Monday, August 02, 2010
Onamie
My question to you Rabbi Shmuley is why are you shocked? We live in a world where it’s all about me,me,me. There is no longer room for family, friends, and now even our children.
We no longer have a world where we uphold, tradition, character and honor. We live just to be “happy”. We no longer have a sense of duty or obligation, we are corrupted with superficial values and monatary gain (anything and everything to appease our senses).
In our world today children are just products (not a blessing from the almighty). They are viewed as merchandize or better yet accessories too today’s parents. -
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Mrs. W
I agree with most of what you write in this article. It is appalling what the priorities are, of the parents you quote.
HOWEVER, I have an issue with this sentence that you wrote in the article:
“Our decision to have nine children revolved around a simple love of kids.”As an Orthodox Jew, no doubt you are aware that the number of children you have was not merely “Our decision to have nine children”. Hashem is in charge of that, and the only things you could have done to influence the outcome of that are making “decisions” to impede conception, abort, or divorce, all C"V.
I, too, made a “decision” while in my late teens, to have many children. I married at 22. But I did not experience motherhood until 22 more years later, despite visits to many fertility experts, many tears, much prayer, and many other relevant efforts. Because I was so old when we were finally so blessed with our child, no additional babies were born to us.
Nevertheless, we consider ourselves so, so gebentsht, of course!
I am the mother of an only child, but not by choice. I didn’t read the Time article, but I saw the cover on the newsstand, and, to tell you the truth, I was kind of comforted by the blurb there, indicating that studies confirm that the old “spoiled” stereotypes are not necessarily true.
We make a super effort to not spoil our child, and have experienced many situations where, B"H, teachers, neighbors, and others tell us how “surprised and delighted” they are that our child is not selfish, immature, spoiled, or any of the other stereotypical negative attributes they expected.
Our child has a lot of prejudice to overcome every time a new adult comes into our child’s or our family’s life.
We are fond of reminding our child that the Frierdiker Rebbe—Lubavitch’s sixth Rebbe—was an only child.
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Saturday, August 28, 2010
Harper
I was an only child and my husband was raised separately from his sister. We both spent our childhoods longing for siblings. Perhaps it’s overcompensation, but we both want a large family (if we are blessed with one). While growing up as an “only” resulted in the stereotypical oldest child characteristics, only amplified (“oh, how mature you are for your age”), we both missed out on an important part of the family dynamic, and we reap the consequences of our parents’ choices today in our social lives and in our parenting learning curve. It’s harder to parent a toddler when you’ve never lived with one before—no matter how much babysitting experience you have.
Right now, we’re expecting number 2, who will arrive in the same month our first turns two. I’m so glad that they will be close together in age, as they will be able to be playmates sooner!
Honestly, I don’t understand people who complain about the expense of childrearing—especially of those still in diapers. There are so many ways to cut expenses and so many expenses that are truly unnecessary! Frankly, our budget has hardly changed from when it was just the two of us. Of course it will increase as our son (and the new one) get older and their needs become more complex, but it’s nothing overwhelming. And, for the record, we are a very low-income family at the moment.
I have learned so much already from spending time with my son, and I look forward to learning more both from the new little one and from watching my son interact with his sibling—something I never got to learn about firsthand. I can’t imagine choosing to waste all that learning from these past two years (and a pregnancy) by not having more. And, barring any serious health difficulties, I can’t imagine ever wanting to say “my childbearing years are done.”
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Wednesday, December 29, 2010
mcaleese4prug
well -done, thank you for this article, well-written admission essay and positive!
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Tuesday, March 15, 2011
jajtso
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