Children? Of Course! : Part 3

The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book: Twelve Steps to a Happy Marriage
by Various

(Page 10 of 16)

All the reasons for wanting the first child apply in the case of the second, and to them are added more. What was in the first instance simply a hope and a vague if powerful urge has now grown into a conscious desire, based on the self-knowledge and experience gained from loving and looking after the first child. We have had a real taste of the joys of home and family building, and now nothing short of economic catastrophe is likely to stop us from building higher. I assume, of course, that the mother did not encounter any severe difficulties in giving birth to her first child. If she was in good medical hands, she probably did not, though certain unusual formations of the pelvis may have made her labor longer than usual. I do not say more painful, because medical science has found ways of minimizing the pains of childbirth. Even if it was found necessary to deliver the first child by Caesarean operation, a woman in normal health can without danger bear at least two children by this method. And at the very least a family should include two children.

Quite apart from the parents' natural desire to go on expressing their mutual love by building a full-voiced home on the foundations laid by the first child, it soon becomes apparent that this first child, for the sake of its own social and moral development, needs a little brother or sister. It needs companionship. It needs to share its toys and its parents. Otherwise it will tend to grow self-centered. By being too much with grown-ups it may become moody and negative.

After the question, "Can you afford it?" - and I sincerely hope you can - the next question facing the mother who wants a second child is, "When can I bear it with the maximum amount of benefit to it, to my first child, and to myself?" Clearly, if it is to be a playmate for the first child, you will want to have it as soon as possible. But, in fairness to both the mother and the child-to-be, there should elapse a period of about two years between the birth of the first and the conception of the second offspring. Less time than that will seldom allow the mother, who put so much of her best blood and bone into building and nursing the first baby, to recover fully her maximal physical health and strength. All authorities are agreed on this point. There may be exceptions, of course, and there are always mothers who, by reason of having married late, perhaps, are anxious to have as many babies as quickly as possible. But most women neither can nor will nor should produce children in this fashion. There is too much risk of weakening the mother's body and of begetting poor stock.

Later children may be spaced to suit the desires of the parents, a recovery period of two years or more always being allowed the mother. But will there be any later children? Dr. Ellsworth Huntington in his contribution to this volume has told us that most of us who are not shiftless and incompetent, on one hand, or wealthy and well-established, on the other, belong to a group in which the average number of children, including those who die young, is fewer than three. Dr. Huntington rightly deplores this "rapid fall of the birthrate, especially among intelligent, far sighted, industrious, progressive people whose ideals of family life are high." The trouble with a family of fewer than three is that it cannot be counted on to project very far into the future those sound souls, that good biological inheritance, which the parents flatter themselves are so definitely worth preserving. A family of two or even three children will not, on the average, produce two who, by becoming parents, may be thought of as replacing their father and mother. Thus a family of fewer than four children may be said to be dying out. This is a sorry state of things for those parents who, as I said above, like to think of themselves as affecting the destinies of the race by transmitting their best characteristics from generation to generation.

When intelligent people are forced to limit their families to one or two children by lack of money, it is a great pity. There is a great abundance of good things in America, but we do not seem to be able to get these things distributed in such a way as to do the most good. We are all working for a better world, but are we working hard enough? I sometimes think that we are not working so hard as we might, because our stake in that better scheme of things is not large enough. If we dared to have three or four children, with all the sacrifices implied, I wonder whether this fact would not sharpen our scent on the trail of the better America.

Lord Bacon said that those who have children have given hostages to fortune. But I am inclined to think that those who have made large and important bargains with chance are just those who will move heaven and earth to guard against mischance. One aspect of the better America, proposed by the American Eugenic Society, will perhaps be the adoption of a sliding-wage scale, characterized by a rise in pay upon marriage and with the arrival of each successive child.

That thoughtful people of our time, whether rich or not, will soon return to having families as large as our grandparents' is extremely unlikely. To bear ten or fifteen children would probably kill most modern women or so completely wear them out that the remnant of their lives would not be worth living. And families of this size would similarly exhaust even unusually large pocket-books, leaving most fathers insolvent. Though it is probably true, as economists say, that our land and its resources, if more equitably distributed and scientifically exploited, are capable of supporting many more millions of Americans than at present, there seems to be no good reason for stepping up the modern middle-class family beyond four or five children.

The reader will notice that I have been going on the assumption that people can have children, and fine specimens at that, to order - when and as they please. This is to a large extent true. The key to the mystery is the doctor. Modern medical schools and modern law have entrusted into his hands not only the physical but the mental well-being of his patients. The tight interlocking of the body and spirit has been everywhere recognized, and the impossibility, in many illnesses, of healing one without treating the other. Positive well-being in the body, so important for the begetting of strong children, is practically inconceivable apart from positive happiness in the mind.

Thus it has become a prime tenet of eugenics that babies must not be conceived under conditions of excessive mental worry or strain. Children begotten in deprivation or the fear that they are going to lower the whole family's standard of living to a painful pinch are not going to have much chance, even while in the womb, to turn out fit and strong. Judicious limitation of birth for reasons of health, the whole health of the parents, in behalf of the best possible grade of offspring has therefore become a routine part of the physician's service to his patients. Every married couple should put themselves in the hands of a physician whom they respect and admire, making him an indispensable third partner to their family planning. This crucial role of the doctor in eugenics is one of the few really deeply encouraging signs of our times.

Garden City Publishing Co. reprint edition, 1949, by special arrangement with Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Copyright, 1938, by PRENTICE-HALL, INC.