Joiner Flourishing Pathway Blog Five - Obligations to Children

In the blog exploring JFP Principle 2 - Nurturing – I outlined the neuroscience showing the importance of responsive parenting which enables a child to develop secure attachment. I also outlined why childcare is not a good alternative for infants because it can compromise their long-term wellbeing, and I’ve argued that mothers represent the best carers of their children for at least the first 18 months of life – now I suggest is a good juncture to look at what our obligations are to our infants, and in the next blog I explore JFP Principle 6 - the obligations we have to ourselves. Philosophers have devoted some time to discussing our obligations to children and ourselves (autonomy), so I think it offers a good platform from which to discuss this issue.

Parents would generally agree they have a moral obligation to supply their children with adequate care, nourishment and warmth. Most parents in Australia, for instance, attend clinics and medical appointments which measure the growth and physical development of their children, taking advice to change dietary, sleep regimes, or review parenting practices according to medical and health care advice. Most spend time displaying love to their children through cuddling, reading, playing, and just hanging out together. Most also monitor their children’s food choices and intakes, provide guidance on social rules, encourage the playing of sport to name but a few of the many options parents will employ to support their children’s wellbeing. Some will pay for expensive private school education, private tuition, and non-government health care in the belief that this is in the best interests of their children – others may be ideologically and financially opposed to such choices. Despite the options we have before us however, it is not easy to determine the exact limits to what parents ought to provide.

Philosopher David Archard (2010) argues parents have a basic responsibility to their children simply through the unassuming act of ‘causing a child to exist’ and as children are unable to act unaided, they naturally require the assistance of others (p. 105). Or in the words of Jeffrey Blustein (1982) ‘the needs of children are natural needs in that they lack certain goods because of natural deficiencies, cognitive and emotional’, and therefore these needs, are ‘deserving of consideration’ (p. 116).

Archard (2015) also advises that we have a ‘duty to ensure that any child born has the reasonable prospect of enjoying a minimally decent life’ (p. 168). To this end Archard (2015) asks two key questions ‘How must the parent choose for his child?’ and ‘What is the scope and content of this perfect obligation a parent owes her child, and to which corresponds a child’s right?’ (p. 169).

Archard turns to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN CRC) to help clarify these questions. However, he and Blustein say that the UN CRC, requires too much of parents as it states that the ‘best interests’ of the child will be the basic concern of parents or legal guardians (p. 169). Archard argues that this principle implies that ‘parents and the state shall do what in fact is the very best for each and every child’ (p. 169), stating this is overly demanding of parents. Archard (2015) argues children ‘do not have a right to the best upbringing’, … but do have a right to receive the conditions that will ‘ensure the conditions of their development’ (pp. 169-170).

I argue to ensure children receive the conditions which will ensure their development is equivalent to providing the best possible upbringing. If we agree that the attributes of flourishers are intrinsically linked to their development (for which I will provide evidence in a future blog exploring JFP Principle Blog 8 - Flourishing), then attributes such as our emotional regulation, sociable nature, and altruistic thinking, for instance, ought to be provided through the kind of parenting that will best support this development. The reason Archard (2015) argues for the distinction is that he is concerned that in providing the best parenting, parents will be required to give too much of themselves.

Such an idea takes us to the heart of the conflict within this project. Where is the critical point at which parents give so much to their children that they are essentially neglecting their own needs? While it is hard to know what precisely Blustein and Archard are envisaging when they express the concern that parents may compromise their own lives in favour of their children’s lives one imagines they may be referring to what money can buy - paying for private school education and causing the parent not to be able to afford a holiday for themselves, for instance.

Such a scenario may require parents who want the very best for their child, to pay for such education, possibly leaving both parents working long hours, and leaving little time for their own needs. However it may be argued that paying for a private school for instance does not enhance a child's development and is therefore unnecessary. When the primary need to enhance a child's development is loving and responsive care it is hard to imagine a scenario which will require too much from the parent. Afterall, in having children we are already obligated to adequately feed, clothe, and medically look after children. We are also obligated to arrange for them to be transported daily to attend school. Archard and Blustein appear to believe that satisfying children’s needs is often oppositional to satisfying parental needs; a view I do not share.

Another philosopher Michael Austin (2007), has an opinion closer to my own. He suggests that the best way to ‘capture the moral dimension of the parent-child relationship’ is to think in terms of the concept of stewardship (p. 109). A steward, Austin states, ‘is someone who has been entrusted with something of great value that does not, strictly speaking, belong to the steward’ (p. 7). Such an attitude is suggestive of a respectful position, where the item, or in this case a small, vulnerable child, is treated with great care and high regard, as I have advocated. There is a second reason, Austin (2007) asserts, parents need to approach their children with an attitude of stewardship, that ‘the quality of child-rearing will have a deep impact on who a child will become, and who a child becomes impacts society as the child enters fully into that society’ (p. 111), and any failures in following through on that obligation are ‘seriously wrong’ and result in failing as stewards (p. 112).

We fail as stewards, as parents and as a society, when we do not provide children with the kind of development that will enable them to flourish. Indeed, I suggest we should not just want children to flourish, but we have a moral obligation to provide them with the conditions that to the best of the parent's ability will enable them to flourish. Society also has an obligation to provide parents with the skills and support that will enable them to fulfil this obligation

And when parents understand where and how happiness and wellbeing is gleaned, it becomes clear that their own interests complement those of their children – a notion that I will explain when exploring JFP Blog 16 - Family. So far, however, the problem Archard and Blustein set out is an ‘us and them’ scenario, viewing children as entirely separate entities from those of their parents.

Archard and Blustein’s thinking (along with much of society) have been directed by their acceptance of a liberalist notion (discussed in JFP Blog 9 exploring liberalism), which we are first and foremost independent beings – that we are separate, self-driven, isolated persons who should strive to be independent. This notion is fundamentally flawed. Human beings can only act independently when they are surrounded by a healthy society of others working collaboratively. Nothing we buy, make, or do is done without the input of a myriad of others. Even if we make our own bread, we are dependent on countless others growing, grinding, and transporting the wheat, making the tin or the bread maker, etcetera. Human beings have only ever lived in cooperation with many others. The mis- step we have taken in Western countries has been to fail to see that we are interdependent beings. This has damaged our perception, including that our children are separate from us.

What ultimately matters, and what supports the good development of children, is loving care in relationship with one another, not giving and receiving in separation from one another. ‘Best’ simply requires parents to love, support, and nurture their offspring toward fulfilling who they are, while at the same time taking care of themselves.

The bottom line is that parenting does require a change in attitude of parents, an attitude different from that held pre-children. As author Anne Alstott (2004) says, ‘Parenthood brings new experiences but also new responsibilities: a parent is no longer quite the author of her own life’ (p. 3) and I agree. Parents need to adjust from the freedoms of their childless lives to the responsibilities of a life where at least one tiny, defenceless child, depends wholly on them for not only its survival but also its wellbeing. It requires adjustment so that we can integrate the needs of another with the needs of our own.

Bibliography

Alstott, A 2004, No Exit: What parents owe their children and what society owes parents, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Archard, D 2010, 'The Obligations and Responsibilities of Parenthood', in D Archard & D Benatar (eds), Procreation and Parenthood: The ethics of bearing and rearing children, Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 103-127, via Philosopher's Index.

—— 2015, Children: Rights and childhood, Routledge, London.

Austin, MW 2007, Conceptions of Parenthood: ethics and the family, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., Hampshire, England.

Blustein, J 1982, Parents and children: The ethics of the family, Oxford University Press New York.