Parenthood

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PARENTHOOD

Throughout history, pregnancy and parenthood were uncontrollable hazards of life for sexually active women. This changed from the 1960s onwards, as the contraceptive revolution allowed sexual activity to be divorced from reproduction. For women, the most important technical innovation of the twentieth century was the contraceptive revolution: the development of coitus-independent and reliable methods of contraception that can be controlled, or chosen, by women themselves. The three principal methods are the contraceptive pill, the IUD or coil, and sterilization. These modern methods of contraception give women control over their own fertility. For the first time in history, parenthood became a voluntary act, rather than the inevitable outcome of marriage. In countries where women can choose if, and when, to become parents, fertility levels have declined sharply, making it clear that the high fertility levels observed in the past were not entirely chosen, even if accepted by couples.

Social Impact of the Contraceptive Revolution

The contraceptive revolution produced two social developments in modern societies: the rise of voluntary childlessness, and the polarization of lifestyles between couples with and without children. In the past, childlessness was generally due to infertility of one or both partners, and childless couples were pitied. Childless women were often stigmatized as social and physical failures, or as unnatural. In countries where the contraceptive revolution has been fully implemented, voluntary childlessness typically rises to around 20 percent of the adult population. People in this group have a distinctive lifestyle, focused on careers, leisure, and intensive consumption. In contrast, couples with children invest a substantial proportion of their resources in the education and socialization of their offspring. Smaller numbers of children mean that greater effort is put into the care and education of each child. The total volume of parenting work thus grows even though the number of children per family declines. In countries where child mortality remains high, parents have less incentive to invest substantial resources in any individual child. Public concern over child labor, child abuse, and children's education are characteristic of societies where family sizes and child mortality are low.

Economics of Parenthood

The nature of parenting changes as the economic relationship between parents and offspring changes. In less developed countries, children are important contributors of labor to the family enterprise, or they contribute earnings from independent jobs, from an early age. Parents also rely on their offspring for financial and social support when they become infirm or old. In effect, the family provides mutual welfare services, and within-family transfers between generations are balanced. Parenting is thus an economic investment with a clear long-term benefit. In modern societies, the principal within-family income transfer is from the older generation to the younger generation, from parents to their offspring, so that children become consumption goods. It is in this sense that having children becomes a lifestyle choice in modern societies, rather than being an absolute necessity for parents' own survival.

The cost of children, as consumption goods, rises steadily as their dependence on their parents is extended beyond early adolescence–initially to late adolescence, then into early adulthood, then into prime adult age, due to the gradual prolongation of full-time education. In 1999 the average age of leaving the parental home in the European Union was 23 for women and 25 for men. However it was markedly higher in southern Europe: 27 for women and 30 for men in Italy, 28 for women and 29 for men in Spain. In prosperous modern societies, parenting is no longer concentrated exclusively on the early years of a child's life.

Parenting Work

Throughout history, mothers have always worked. Survival depended on it. The non-working wife (or concubine) in a single-earner family has always been an indicator of prosperity and higher social status, in all societies. For most women, productive and remunerative work had to be combined with childcare and other family work. For the space of less than 100 years, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women were "domesticated": western European and north American societies promoted the idea of the single earner model of the family as the ideal to aim for in all social classes. Many achieved the goal of one full-time homemaker, for at least part of the family life-cycle. By the end of the twentieth century, women had returned to the labor market in most modern societies, and the dual-earner family was being re-established as the dominant pattern. Nonetheless, mothers retain a much greater attachment to their children, especially during early childhood, which some claim to be the result of evolutionary development rather than the childbearing process.

The majority of mothers in modern societies thus reduce their involvement in paid work when their children are very young. Some women abandon their jobs to become full-time mothers and homemakers on a permanent basis. Sociologist Catherine Hakim (2000) estimates this choice is made by one-fifth of all adult women. Another minority (about one-fifth) contracts out virtually all parenting work–either to state nurseries and schools, or to private nannies and boarding schools. Most women are able to combine childcare with some type of involvement in paid work. The most popular arrangement is the part-time job, which leaves plenty of time for parenting and family work. Seasonal work, term-time work, and temporary jobs are also used to fit paid work around mothers' parenting responsibilities. In countries where part-time jobs are in short supply (such as the United States and southern Europe), mothers are obliged to choose between a full-time job and no paid work at all. Mothers who choose full-time jobs then complain about their "double shift" as sociologist Arlie Hochschild (1990) described it.

In modern societies, many parenting activities are transferred from families to the state. The most obvious example is the formal education and socialization of children. In many countries, the state also provides informal socialization, through clubs and associations, free or subsidised sporting facilities, and cultural activities. The one enduring and irreplaceable contribution of parents seems to be the emotional and social development of young children. Children deprived of one or both parents are more likely to develop antisocial attitudes and behaviors, and be less successful in adult life. There is, apparently, no substitute for parental love and care in the early years. In the early twenty-first century, this seems to be the permanent obstacle to the mass-production of humans outside the family envisaged by Aldous Huxley in his classic novel Brave New World.