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6. The Generative Family
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139 A SECOND WAY TO consider some of the practical implications of childism is to think about the ethical dimensions of life in families. Of course, discussion of children has historically included families centrally. From the point of view of childhood , it is clearly important for human beings to take part in close kin networks. The birth of each new person in the world is, in a way, the rebirth of family: a bodily bond to a mother and father, an emotional and economic bond to a household , a genetic bond to a larger ancestry, and a cultural bond to a kin group. In all its great variety of historical forms, the family as a social institution has in part existed to protect, support, and nurture children. However, it is precisely because of this obvious interconnection of families and children that a childist approach to families becomes problematic. For it means that today’s ethical assumptions about family life—about its meanings, purposes, and obligations—are that much more profoundly mired in fixed historical assumptions. If, as we have found, these assumptions are less than fully child-centered, then the close association of families with children paradoxically makes it more difficult to think about families in a more child-inclusive way. The situation is much like that for women, for whom assumptions about historical connections to family life have also often proven marginalizing of women’s actual experiences. But since children are perhaps more dependent on families than anyone else—while at the same generally less able to mount their own critiques of them—a more fully child-centered ethics of family life requires especially creative new thinking. The need for fresh perspectives is also suggested by the highly contentious nature of family life in most contemporary societies. Many of the deep moral divisions within countries and across the globe concern issues of child-rearing, family values, gender relations, marriage, and connections between home and society. The problem is sometimes described as a “culture war” between those wishing to emChapter 6 The Generative Family brace new family forms and those seeking a return to old ones. Family ethics raises a whole hive of issues connected with gender, economics, culture, and morality. However, as I will endeavor to show in this chapter, the problem as usually understood does not pay sufficient attention to children. This is especially the case in the United States, on which this chapter will focus. Just as with human rights, human families have not been conceptualized along sufficiently child-centered lines, either historically or today—indeed, in some ways, less so today than before. In reality, contemporary debates about families tend to revolve around the problems and experiences of adults: how to parent, balancing home and work, gender disparities between mothers and fathers, the changing meaning of marriage, the legitimacy of same-sex marriage, new methods of assisted reproduction, the passing on of traditional values, and so on. These issues are related to children, but chiefly from the point of view of adults. If family ethics has only recently been shaped from the perspectives of women, even less so has it responded to the agency and experiences of children. From a childist point of view, the ethical purpose of families is not sharing values , personal development, or self-sacrifice. For children and adults both, it is the most immediate arena in which to create meaning with others. To describe this family ethics, I borrow a term from Erik Erikson: namely, generativity. But I use it in a somewhat different way. Generativity should refer to both adults’ and children ’s dynamic and decentering creativity of close, interdependent worlds. Adults are generatively responsible for broadening the generative responsibility of children . Children in turn are generatively responsible for widening in generative responsibility toward family members and others in society. The well-being of children meets the obligations of adults and the interests of society in the fundamental family aim of expanding the circle of human responsiveness. WHY THE CULTURE WARS? Many ethicists in the United States today dismiss family issues as matters of merely private concern. Families have retreated in the popular imagination, especially but not only in developed societies, into an increasingly small world of the home.1 From this point of view, family is an ethical subject only for traditionalists and selfrighteous moralizers. Or, at most, family ethics must be left to the moral worlds of diverse cultures. But in fact, as we have seen, philosophical and religious...