Children and demographic imagination

More from the amazing Ms. Astyk, who has been thinking about the way we collectively imagine children determines the direction of our society. Excerpt:

The totalizing world view that accompanies industrial modernism says that children are fundamentally one thing, and one alone - they are an economic commodity, something that you have if you can afford them, something that small nuclear families are responsible for alone. They display your status in how they dress, what school you send them to, what activities they do, what college they get into, what sports they play, and they are increasingly, aware of their status a commodity and invested in it - that is, our children increasingly see themselves as here to shop.

One thing I think is always true about the nature of demographic imagination, that multiple perceptions can be simultaneously true. Thus, when I had my first child he was simultaneously my parents' first, blessed grandchild, another child added to the consumptive west's absorption of resources, revenge upon the Nazis who tried to exterminate my husband's family, a disabled child probably destined to consume more resources than he produces, a candidate for the 6 billionth person born on the planet (we crossed that threshold shortly before his birth - a little girl from India won the dubious prize), our adored and deeply desired son, a gift from G-d...and a host of other things. There is no point in trying to filter out which of these things is "true" - they are, for good or ill, all true in some ways, and through some lenses. And none of them is all the truth - but that doesn't mean we can full extricate these simultaneous perceptions. Industrial society, however, tells us constantly that there is only one meaning - that children exist in only one valence, as expressions of status, or at best, costs to us.

Nations, peoples, regions after all, have demographic imaginations as well, and they tend to try, with varying degrees of success, to superimpose them over the imaginings of smaller groups. The stories we tell ourselves personally and collectively shape our policies. The world we get if we see ourselves as a beleagured outpost of justice in a world surrounded by rapidly breeding barbarians is very different than the one we get if we see ourselves as integrated with the surrounding populations, able easily to sustain ourselves by opening our borders. A small indigenous people, or religious faith, losing its children to assimilation may be told that the world is overpopulated, and simultaneously and accurately experience themselves as dramatically underpopulated. Our military, economic and social priorities depend on population - both literally, and in our perceptions. Ultimately, our worldview about reproduction, population, biology matters in a whole host of ways. And on this subject, I think we have managed to get ourselves into a particularly troubling way of thinking about children - troubling no matter how you look at it. That is, we've transformed children from economic assets to burdens, from beings who are fundamentally productive to beings who are fundamentally consumptive of resources.

What do I mean by this? Historically, children have certainly had economic value - you could make the case that for most of human history, the one continuous reality was that families had a strong economic incentive to reproduce. It is worth noting that in most societies, the economic value of children was not the only or even primary rationale - that is, generally speaking, children were held to be a blessing and pleasure in their own right. Most religious cultures considered them a sacred blessing. You could make a case that the sacredness of reproduction was a later add-on to what was fundamentally an exploitative relationship, or you could argue that the perception of sacredness and blessedness preceeds and supplements the economic relationship - at least for today, I'll stay out of that one. But while children were always an economic asset, hope for the future, security in one's own age, someone to preserve assets for, they were rarely only that. [Emphasis mine -- RD]

Now my claim is not that most of us have ceased to view our children as a blessing - how could we, because we experience them that way (most days ;-)). But while we experience our children as blessings, industrial society is very clear that some children are, shall we say, more blessed than others.

Read the whole thing.