Children? Of Course! : Part 4

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

(Page 11 of 16)

The Woman Asks the Doctor, by Dr. Emil Novak of Johns Hopkins, gives some idea of the role the modern physician may play in helping parents plan the vigorous citizenry of the future. When the married lovers are ready to have their children, it is naturally with the woman that the doctor is most concerned, correcting structural or functional deviations or mild organic disease before the pregnancy has advanced too far, seeing to it that the glandular mechanisms do their important work, that nutritional intake is sufficient, that digestion is kept successfully functioning, that metabolic processes are raised to more than ordinary efficiency, and that the body is kept free from all toxins and infections. After the birth of the child the doctor will not only look after the child but also see to it that the mother suffers no adverse after-effects and is restored to her maximal health and efficiency as soon as possible, ready to bear her next healthy baby when the time shall come.

Should a baby be conceived unexpectedly, the doctor is often the best person to help the parents handle the untoward situation. He can give the mother's physical condition that special attention which it will probably need if she has borne another child quite recently. If the objection to the child arises from economic or psychologic unpreparedness, there is no one better fitted, possibly, than the modern physician for changing negative fear to positive desire. By the force of his own enthusiasm for new life, by his vision of the modern family, by a skillful combination of his common sense and psychiatric training, and by his ability to arrange fees within the range of his worried clients, he can usually turn the unplanned conception into a happy accident.

It is often to the physician, too, that the father must look for practical guidance and encouragement in those unforeseeable cases when the mother perishes in connection with childbirth. It is he who is in the best position to prevent the father from unconsciously attaching blame to the unoffending child and harboring an undefined resentment which may adversely affect both lives. The doctor can help the bereaved father to cling to his dream of family life, can assist him in building a happy home for his motherless child or children, or can advise him on problems which may arise out of finding a new mother for them.

Another important function of the physician is to give aid to couples who have difficulty in begetting children. The question of sterility comes up frequently in our time, especially among cultivated and intellectual people. Persistent failure to conceive we term absolute sterility; persistent failure to carry pregnancy to a successful end, we call relative sterility. The latter is an obstetric problem and can usually be dealt with successfully. So can the former in about forty percent of the cases. We must remember the rule formulated by Matthews Duncan, that the marriage of persons between twenty and thirty cannot be regarded as sterile until at least four years of normal, happy sexual intercourse have elapsed. I have known half a dozen instances in which a child was born after five, six, ten, and, in one case, fifteen years of complete failure to conceive. In these cases no special efforts were made by the couple to bring about conception.

Couples who wish to make special efforts should have complete physical examinations, both husband and wife, for though failure to conceive used to be attributed solely to the wife, we now know that in about thirty percent of cases it is the husband who is the cause. Many remediable physical conditions may be responsible for sterility, and the doctor, by correcting them, has a wonderful chance to contribute to human happiness. Many families feel the tragedy of not having children, and yet do not realize the need of finding out what the trouble is. They just drift along, assuming that nothing can be done, and often they could be made fertile. This subject is ably discussed in Human Sterility by Dr. Samuel R. Meaker of the Boston University School of Medicine.

When the doctor decides that there is practically no chance of a couple's having children of their own, their strong family urge may lead them to adopt some. They can find useful information in E. G. Gallagher's The Adopted Child. It often happens that people get as much satisfaction out of adopted children as they could have got out of their own, finding cause for pride, inspiration, and comfort in their unfolding toward maturity.

The question of whether we should adopt children when infants or later - at some age under six - is worth considering. It may seem at first glance that only infants raised from the cradle can really take the place of children of our own. While this is partly true, there are drawbacks to be considered. To begin with, the supply of infants for adoption is not by any means large enough to meet the demand. Second, more than half the number of small babies available are illegitimate, and one can often learn little about the parentage. Though various child-placing agencies find it difficult to allocate those children who do not become available for adoption till the age of three or four or later, there are many things to be said in favor of taking an older child. More often they are legitimate and more facts about their parentage can be ascertained; also, it is possible to apply intelligence tests which will disclose whether their intelligence is normal or above. Often those parents who want to adopt children tend to be intellectual, and will find greater happiness in - and give greater happiness to - a child who is of normal or superior intelligence.

You may object to the older child's early environment, thinking that it must have permanently injured even the fairest of capacities. But psychologists tell us that this is not really the case, and that the unhappy effects of poor environment during the first five years of a child's life can be removed, and the child reconditioned without too much trouble. Couples who are no longer young should, perhaps, adopt older children in order that they may stand in the most helpful age relation to them.

Children adopted as infants should always be told that they are not the flesh-and-bone children of the foster parents. This information, which is bound to come to them, will come with less shock from the parents themselves. At the age of five or six, when they first begin to be interested in where children come from, is a good time to tell them. It is agreed that the foster parents should use the word "chosen" rather than "adopted" - they chose their children out of all the thousands available, just as the foster father chose his wife, and the wife her husband.

This attitude toward the question makes for a feeling of family solidarity and loyalty no less profound than that between other parents and children. Everything must be done to prevent feelings of inferiority from growing out of the adoptive relationship: the children must never be reminded of the fact of adoption, the parents must not expect more gratitude from them than they would from offspring of their own, and they must never, never shout thanks to God, in a moment of anger, that the children are not really theirs. To do so is not to play the game. After all, under most state laws, children may be adopted on trial for a year. If the children are kept after that date, the parents bind themselves in law and in morality to bring them up exactly as if they were their own. I keep using the plural throughout this paragraph because I assume, of course, that you will adopt at least two children if it becomes necessary for you to plan in this way your version of a splendid American family - strong, loving, and creative of an ever finer future.

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