What About The Kids?
It’s only reasonable to wonder about the ultimate effect of these new styles of marriage on the offspring of those marriages. A great many questions present themselves. Is it good or bad to grow up with a father and two mothers? What happens when children find out that their parents are swingers? Or should the fact be kept from them in the first place?
In almost all instances, persons enthusiastic about their particular form of marriage will argue that their children will be at worst unaffected, at best favorably affected, by the manner in which they have structured their particular relationship. And in almost all instances I suspect that they are less free from anxiety on this point than they prefer to let on — whether to me, to each other, or to themselves. No previous generation has recognized as thoroughly as the present one the extent to which family relationships influence the development of personality. The importance of providing the best possible atmosphere for children is a serious concern of every responsible parent, and even in the most conventional household one finds parents anxious that they may not be doing the right thing. Because no one seems to know what the right thing might be, and everyone can point to children from seemingly ideal backgrounds who have become criminals, drug addicts, psychotics, or whatever. Given this combination of great concern and great uncertainty, one can hardly expect parents with radical life styles to be supremely confident.
It would be easy enough to cite a variety of cases showing how children from an unconventional marriage turned out badly, and demonstrating inferentially how the structure of the parental marriage might be blamed for the results. It would be no more difficult to do the opposite, holding up presumably well-adjusted children and crediting their soundness to the honesty and courage their parents have shown in marching to a different drummer. Finally, I could present examples to prove both sides, which would make me appear either a man of balanced judgment or a wishy-washy milksop, as you prefer.
Instead, I’m going to pass on the question.
I think it’s unanswerable at the present time, on a par with inquiring into the possible long-term effects of a drug that came onto the market only a year ago.
I suspect that the idealism inherent in a large portion of permissive marriages and plural marriages could have a very beneficial effect upon children, if only because the heightened importance attached to making the marriage itself a vital and honest relationship would likely carry over into the performance of parental functions. I also suspect that the lack of stability of so many of these marriages could have a distinctly bad effect. Children might grow up proud of their parents’ hipness and refusal to conform to societal norms; on the other hand, they might yearn to have been raised Like All the Other Kids.
There are certain childhood experiences which are readily associated with specific behavior patterns in adult life. As one example, sexual seduction by the father or a father figure before puberty is a background element in the history of a significant number of prostitutes, to the point where some sort of causal relationship is considered to exist. But, just as one need not have gone through this experience in order to become a prostitute, neither do all girls thus seduced wind up as prostitutes. Indeed, some actually wind up with no visible emotional scars whatsoever.
Another argument against trying to estimate the effects of unconventional marriage on children is that we do not yet know just how unconventional these relationships will seem a few years from now. Some swingers recently brushed aside the question with the suggestion that, by the time their children are old enough to know what’s happening, swinging will be accepted throughout society as normal and legitimate. This sounds like overstatement, but any examination of current social trends leads to the supposition that social attitudes will continue to increase in permissiveness for some time to come.
Some other thoughts on children might not be out of place here. Even as the structure of marriage is increasingly being altered, so is the relationship of marriage and child-raising coming to a point where it is no longer to be taken for granted.
Until very recently, the intentionally childless marriage was an unusual occurrence. And, until about as recently, it was virtually unheard of for a person to intentionally conceive and raise a child out of wedlock.
Admittedly, there has been no mass movement in the opposite direction. The great majority of couples who marry do so with the eventual plan of raising children. The great majority of single women continue to find the prospect of unmarried motherhood unattractive. But departures from both of these norms are being actively considered by a significant number of people, and actually undertaken by some of them.
Similar factors are responsible for both phenomena. The most obvious one is the extent to which childbirth has become voluntary. Improved contraceptive techniques, opportunities for sterilization, and the increasing availability and moral acceptability of abortion have made parenthood far more a matter of choice than it has ever been in the past.
Ecological considerations have lately led more and more people to view the childless marriage as not only possible but morally preferable. While the more vocal advocates of Zero Population Growth, like the loudest spokesmen for most causes, impress most people as monomaniacal and unrealistic. Young married couples are not often inclined to dismiss all of their arguments out of hand. I’m sure only a handful of couples fervently desire to reproduce themselves and deny themselves this satisfaction out of consideration for the planet’s welfare. But couples who would prefer not to have children anyway find it far easier to act on this preference. Not long ago a couple who remained intentionally childless was apt to be regarded as selfish for refusing to play their biological roles, even sinful for ignoring the divine injunction to be fruitful and multiply. Now the same couple is more likely to be considered selfless for subordinating their desires to the good of the world in general. Social pressures which might have made them act against their own deepest wishes no longer have much force.
It may seem paradoxical that single women are electing to have children at the same time that married women are electing not to. Again, the element of choice plays a part. The single woman who realizes her freedom to avoid conception or to abort an unintentionally conceived fetus realizes in turn her freedom not to avoid motherhood. I know two girls who had had several illegal abortions between them prior to the legalization of abortion in New York State; both found themselves pregnant again shortly after the change in the law, and both elected to have the children, a step neither had seriously considered before.
The alternative of abortion has the additional property of reducing the number of marriages which result from undesired pregnancies. A man is less likely to marry a woman out of a sense of noblesse oblige if he knows that she can easily and safely terminate the pregnancy. Here a young woman describes the thought processes involved in her decision to keep her child:
“He wasn’t interested in marriage, and I didn’t feel I could pressure him into it, or that it would be desirable to marry a man who didn’t want to marry me. And I had always thought abortion was all right, and I still think it’s morally right for other people, but I found that it was not something I could go through with. The same feeling of responsibility that kept me from having an abortion made it impossible for me to put the baby up for adoption. And when I had her, and she was so beautiful, I cried with joy knowing I had made the right decision.”