For Love or Money
As my children age, I’m giving more thought to how I want to advise them on the next stages of their lives. (My oldest children are in elementary school.) My conflict is quite simple really. On the one hand, I want them to be open to love and family formation well before thirty. On the other hand, I want them to have graduate degrees and be secure in their ability to provide for their families. All I need is a third option here, and I could say pick any two of three, as goes any number of things in life. Like any good father, I don’t want my children to needlessly suffer, but the nature of life is that of suffering.
So why on earth would I want my children to marry before they can provide everything for their own children? There are a number of reasons, and I’m sure validating my own choice to marry at 21 is subtly one of them. More seriously, one is better equipped to handle the toils of parenthood when one is young rather than 40. While time doesn’t ever seem to be in abundance, it does seem to correlate somewhat with income. In other words, the tradeoff for spending more time with one’s children versus the money one could be making working is less steep in one’s youth than it is during one’s prime earning years. It is much easier to walk away from $10 an hour than it is from $30 an hour. There are certainly examples of high income women – I’ll use the generality since fewer than 5% of stay at home parents are men – foregoing income to raise children, but they are exceptions. Even the alleged income security that waiting supposedly gives still results in over half of two parent families being dual income and over half of those households have both parents working full-time.
Then there is the not so insignificant matter of being able to have children. I have heard way too many tales of couples trying to get pregnant near 30 who have needed to involve a doctor. The plan of go to school, get a job, get married, be successful, and have kids is wonderful on paper. In practice, it rarely works that way. The child part of the equation is easy enough to understand. The get married part of the equation can be complicated too. Most folks that get married do so because they want to raise children. Needless to say, if that is a high priority for you, you are more likely to dismiss impediments that other people see, like questions of beauty or money. As one ages, finding a partner that wants to have children and wants to get married becomes harder, because many of the people who desired to do so have already done so. Think of it like a game of musical chairs where no one told any of the participants that they had to sit down when the music stopped and no one started the music. The ones left standing are the ones that didn’t give a lot of thought to what they were going to do if they wanted to sit.
This point seems as good of a point as any to throw in the but. Self denial isn’t the easiest thing in the world. But compared to denying your children, it is real simple. Yes, millionaires have rough days, but their day-to-day existence isn’t relatable in that nature to the poor. Certainly the millionaire doesn’t get everything he wants, but the poor don’t get most of the things they want. In this country, the number of single people in poverty is pretty low. They tend to be disabled, either via mental illness or physical impediment, or elderly. In the broader society, the difference between poverty and making it tends to be the presence of children. A family of four is under the poverty line at $22,050 or less in household income. That is a fulltime job at $11 an hour. Many social welfare programs have eligibility at 200% of the FPL. For a family of four, that is $44,100, or $22 an hour. $44, 389 is the median national household income.
While it would be nice if turning off the cable and the cell phone would change this, it isn’t the case. Children are a luxury good in this society. The libertarians have assured me that the free market will solve all of this, but it seems like the free market has already done so. The solution has been for children to be luxury goods. I hate to be so cynical with my children. This society is going to become awfully interesting as the only people having children are those that don’t care about their economic well-being, those for whom children came so late in life that they praise God that they could just have one (or two) or those for whom money will have to make up the difference for time unable to be spent. Perhaps we can build the walls higher around the gated communities so that we don’t have to contemplate this stuff. It is very difficult to have family values when money is your god.
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On the one hand, I want them to be open to love and family formation well before thirty. On the other hand, I want them to have graduate degrees and be secure in their ability to provide for their families.
Why do you even think about your children’s adult lives in this way?
Hopefully, when the time comes, you’ll have learned to let go and they will be leading their own lives, without the shadow of what Daddy wants controlling them.
Why do you even think about your children’s adult lives in this way?
Because I want what’s best for them. The rest of society has given thought for what is best for my children and has acted accordingly. I am doing likewise.
Hopefully, when the time comes, you’ll have learned to let go and they will be leading their own lives, without the shadow of what Daddy wants controlling them.
That is why consideration of the matter is given now.
It is very difficult to have family values when your god is money. It is also very difficult to have anything in its proper relationship when even very good things are your god. For when we put anything first that is not God, we make a god of it. There are those that make self or money their god. There are those that make very good things such as their children, family, healing or justice their god. In the end, if we do not begin in God and seek in all things the end of God in all we do, then dissatisfaction arises.
This from Fr. Delp:
“It is hard enough to meet the ordinary hazards incidental to every existence; but the Godless person has no defenses and is delivered up, bound and disarmed. Left to cope with them in this defenseless fashion he falls back on the excuse that fate is against him and the world is all wrong. He is a failure and it takes very little to keep him bogged down in depression and despair. The world becomes a cheerless place, not worth living in, although there seems no way out of it. There is only one remedy for such a state; each person must return to God, listen to his inner voice, consciously make contact with him. The great conversion will invariably win a blessing, one which will make our wilderness blossom. A surrender without reserve is essential; then “these things” are given back to us. Our eyes are opened and acquire a new perception. His earth regains its fruitfulness under the healing streams, which strengthen us for our appointed tasks and give us mastery as they carry the ship of our life on its way.”
M.Z.:
I have no doubt you want what’s best for your children, but I am not so sanguine about “the rest of society.” For example, producers of breakfast cereal commercials might delude themselves into believing their profession does “what’s best for the children” by introducing them to the panoply of choices available when selecting a nutritious breakfast.
Even when motives are sincere, wanting what’s best for someone else, even our children, isn’t always the same as doing (or just as often not-doing) what’s best for someone else.
When children are young, parents know better than their children what’s best just about all the time. As children get older, they gradually develop their own sense of who they are, and how they relate to their families and the rest of creation. As that happens, even parents know less and less what’s “best” for their children. And that’s where parents’ spiritual development becomes critical to the children’s development.
Nothing makes you grow up like becoming a parent. From Kahlil Gibran:
I have seen various forms of parent and child interaction. Given the wealth of our society, the norm has been for children to become untethered from their parents. In Italy, it isn’t unusual for 25-year-old men to be living with their mothers. In Greece, familial relations run pretty deep. The historical norm is for the parent to be fairly active in their children’s lives for most of their lives. I think we as a society will be moving back to that norm.