Taking Responsibility for Children

THREE: Children, Caregivers, Friends

47 x THREE Children,Caregivers, Friends AMY MULLIN This essay will compare friendships between morally competent adults with relations between young children and their caregivers. By “young children,” I mean those of preschool age. My arguments are positioned with respect to a debate within feminist theory over the relevance of the mothering relation for thinking about the ethical nature of other human relationships. I distinguish my view both from those who claim that the caregiver–child relation should have a privileged role and from those who argue that this relation serves best as a point of contrast to caring relations between adults, rather than a paradigm for them. A comparison of the caregiver–child relationship and caring relationships between adults reveals both continuity and difference. An overly sharp distinction between them distracts us from the possibilities for mutuality and reciprocity in relations between caregivers and young children. It makes it difficult for us to understand how children can make the transition from one type of relationship to the other as they mature, and can mask the extent to which degrees of dependence and even occasional paternalism may exist appropriately within some friendships. In the next section, I discuss feminist debates over whether or not mothering should serve as a model for other caring relations. Feminist Debates about Mothering Can relationships between caregivers and young children serve as an ethical model for other caring relationships? Feminist theorists disagree. Jean Elshtain, Virginia Held, Paul Lauritzen, Nel Noddings, Sara Ruddick, Caroline Whitbeck, and Cynthia Willett either state or imply that the mother– child relation can serve as a valuable model for other sorts of ethical relationships .1 What do we mean by speaking of the mother–child relation? Mothers continue to care for and think about their children when those children reach adulthood and beyond. Yet maternal care for a baby and that for a middle-aged son going through a divorce would have little in common. Those who speak of the mother–child relation almost always intend the term to describe relations between mothers and their young dependent children. They speak of children being dependent on their mothers for their preservation, growth, and social acceptability, and they do not describe these children as being greatly influenced by others, such as teachers . This suggests that the children they have in mind are young, generally younger than school age. Many of these theorists, including Held and Ruddick , believe that both men and women may “mother” a child, although more women than men currently mother. Despite intending the term “mothering” to be gender-neutral, many feminists use words more typically associated with women in order to reflect the fact that throughout history , and still today, women have performed the bulk of this work. I turn now to claims made for the paradigmatic status of this relation. Virginia Held writes that if we are to understand human relationships we must replace “the paradigm of economic man with the paradigm of mother and child.”2 Cynthia Willett writes that relationships between mothers and young children are important for developing ethical theories because: “From the standpoint of the mother–child relation, we can address the major concern of contemporary ethics, namely the possibilities of a prosocial desire.”3 Paul Lauritzen claims that the intellectual and emotional skills required for rearing children can serve as a model for a feminist ethic of care and compassion.4 Nel Noddings uses the relation between a mother and her child as an example of natural caring, and as a model for a feminist ethic of caring.5 Sometimes the paradigmatic status of this relation is implied rather than explicit. Lorraine Code observes that neither Whitbeck nor Ruddick explicitly claim that the mothering relation is paradigmatic: “But the generalizability claims that they make carry paradigmatic implications.”6 48 AMY MULLIN Those theorists who claim or suggest that the mother–child relationship carries paradigmatic implications tend not to explore issues of the continuities between the mother–child relation and other ethically significant personal relationships in detail. For instance, in Held’s contrast between the mother–child relation and contractual relationships, she does not consider where we might place friendships. Friendships clearly line up alongside the mother–child relationship in comparison to contractual relations in that the former are paradigmatically both caring and non-contractual . However, to the extent that friendships involve reciprocity of exchange of goods and services, as...