Although it’s
obvious all kids have 2 parents, not all parents stick around for the longterm,
or with each other. Of course, it’s better when they dote on each other, rather
than arguing and fighting. And sometimes it’s better to have one good caring parent
than 2 who are making each other worse. As they say, the devil’s in the
details.
But I’ve never
understood why the political conversation about kids and parents and family
values always stops with the patriarchal nuclear pair bond. Why aren’t we also
talking about the grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and any shirt-tail
relatives who happen to be in the neighborhood.?
More love and
support from more people is bound to help any kid’s emotional and physical
health and well-being, and counteract negative factors such as parental
desertion, parental death, bullying, and disability.
Of course, in our
hyper-mobile era, both nuclear and extended families are very often
over-extended. Not only do many live far apart, many of them are also commuting
long distances to low-paid jobs they hate. And when that doesn’t pan out, they
get to sleep on the sidewalks. Not a good way to raise the next generation of
workers needed to compete with China and pay for my pension.
Lately I have been
thinking that there’s yet another layer to really understanding and explaining
the value of families for kids, whether preborn or postborn. And that layer has
something to do with mobility. Basically, every family needs to have the right
to stay home.
First, this means
the family needs the right to be, the right to sit down and be, to rest and
sleep somewhere, and to be safe in one place. Then they need a safe place for
their stuff, clothes and tools and so forth. Of course, safety for one’s
belongings includes protection from the weather.
Once the priority of
being able to stay home at night is taken care of, then it’s time to look at
the priority of being able to stay home during the day. Now this gets a little
more complicated, because we were bred to be hunter-gatherers, so many if not
most of us like to get out and about a bit, especially when the weather is
friendly.
But almost or none
of us like to have to commute in heavy traffic every day. And if memory serves,
before cars and before cities, pretty much everyone commuted on foot. In fact,
most people, mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins,
did not commute all that far nor every day. And hunter-gatherers tend to live
in the same place, with longterm shelters to sleep and often cook in.
Now as I’ve matured
to a hopefully not-yet-overripe age on the shady side of 60, I’ve noticed in
myself an increasing attachment to my home and a fading interest in going out
on the town. And I’ve read about the throngs of reluctant immigrants who
typically would really rather stay home too were their home not too dangerous,
as very often happens for reasons of violence both social and domestic, as well
as other forces such as drought or flood or toxic contamination.
So really, for a
family to offer children the kind of stability that gives them the best kind of
place to grow and learn and participate in society, that family needs to have
true land security. So any nation that actually cares about families and family
values will see to it that all families have an actual right to stay home in
one place.
Of course, there are
a few other needs to be considered, such as food and water. And fire, which has
become more or less part of our DNA after hundreds of millennia of
co-evolution. When the land that a family can be secure on offers the space and
fertility for obtaining these key items, then they can all basically work at
home and commute on foot.
Obviously then,
politicians who truly care about family values, about creating a society where
families have this kind of deep and enduring security, will take immediate
action to invite such a society even if it means not letting multinational
commodity corporations evict families just to make money. Of course. Or even if
it means restructuring our system so people’s basic needs can be obtained
without the inefficiencies of fossil-fuel-addicted corporate profiteers. Of
course.
