Could it be bad for us to become parents? Of course, we might say; yes, if it turns out we made a mistake in having children, or if we turn out to be terrible parents, or perhaps if some horrible misfortune occurs. But when children are wanted and loved then we tend to think that having children contributes to our lives going well. Indeed, one of the major philosophical accounts of why parents have rights over their children appeals to just this idea. Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift have argued that parents have rights over their children not just because children need parents but also because, for most, having children contributes in distinctive ways to the parents’ flourishing.
In a recent article, we challenge this picture. Parenting is in one important sense bad for us, even when all goes well, owing to its power dynamics. In ordinary circumstances, especially in the context of the present-day nuclear family, parenting can pose a serious threat to parents’ flourishing.
This is a controversial claim. To see the way in which parenting can pose a threat to our flourishing, we first want to note an important feature of parent-child relationships: They involve a significant asymmetry of power. This is not a new observation. Indeed, Brighouse and Swift’s popular account holds that parenting contributes in distinctive ways to our flourishing, in part, precisely because of this asymmetry of power. In learning to exercise this power, their view goes, we will flourish in distinctive ways, unattainable in other, less asymmetric relations.
We argue that this asymmetry of power ought to worry us, rather than lead us to think that parenting is valuable. Typically, holding positions of great power is associated with the corruption of our characters rather than with our lives going well. Philosophers have made this argument specifically within the family. John Stuart Mill and Susan Moller Okin have argued that the patriarchal family teaches “despotism” not just to the patriarch but to all its members.
There are three aspects of the parent-child power relation to which we wish to draw attention. First, parents wield very great power over a deeply vulnerable individual (the child) who cannot escape the relationship. Second, parents are learning to wield the power they have. Before parenthood, unless perhaps we work as carers for the very old or very ill or very young, we are unlikely to have held such a position of power. Third, the power relation takes place in the context of the family. That is, it takes place in a context shielded from the eyes of the world and in which, as feminists such as Claudia Card have argued, parents and particularly fathers have “significant social support” for abuses of power. As a result, the family is a context in which parents get away with abuses of power.
The relationship between taking the parent role in the parent-child power relation and our flourishing should now be clearer. It is not good for us, for our characters, to exercise great power in a context in which our abuses and misuses of that power are likely to be ignored, or worse, sanctioned. Further, parenting is a context in which we are likely to so abuse power, since, as we have seen, it is a context in which we are most likely learning to wield such power for the first time.
That parents are reasonably likely to abuse power is a fact. In the U.K., for example, one in five people have experienced child abuse. When it comes to psychological and physical abuse, this is most likely to be at the hands of a parent. But we aren’t only worried about abuse when we think about the ways in which power might be misused. Take the tendency to use physical force to make one’s child comply: dragging them out of the playground or carrying them out of the house. Or think about the number of everyday decisions that parents might make without due attention to the needs and interests of their child. These aren’t abuse of the kind the statistics are about, but they are still exercises of power that are not justified by virtue of being in the child’s interests. These, too, are small instances of despotism of the kind that may corrupt our characters.
Still, it might be argued that certain parents, those who are diligent and attentive, need not worry about these arguments. Compare parenting to driving: Diligent and attentive drivers need to worry much less about harming others than those who are careless and distracted, even though they too are in charge of a vehicle that has the potential to inflict great harm on others. Yet diligent and attentive driving is in part a result of the structures that surround driving: Drivers have lessons and drive on roads with markings and speed cameras. By contrast, contemporary parenting is more like driving with very few of these supporting conditions in place.
So, what should we do?
Worried about the effects of the family on children, some have argued that we should redistribute parenting duties amongst more people. Feminists have proposed reform away from its patriarchal norms. We agree, but for the sake of the parents’ character, and we offer a partial solution before we achieve the collective radical reformation of parenting. That is, we should spend more time with, and give more attention to, our friends.
One much-discussed feature of contemporary parenting is its intensity. Modern parenting has a tendency to crowd out the time we have for other activities and other relationships. So, too, we have a culture that prioritizes parenting, and the romantic relationships that are often the context for parenting, over and above other forms of relationship, well beyond what is required for good (or good enough) parenting.
Insofar as we are concerned about the corrosive power of parenting, we suggest that we ought to be particularly troubled about the crowding out and de-prioritization of a particular form of relationship: friendship. Parenthood is one of the life stages that leads to a decline in people’s social networks of friends. Yet friendship has long been seen as contributing in positive ways to our character development and flourishing. Aristotelian accounts, for example, hold that friendship allows us to achieve the kind of self-knowledge unavailable through self-reflection alone. Dean Cocking and Jeanette Kennett argue that, because of the mutual trust and affection that characterize friendship, our friends are particularly well-placed to influence us. Friendship does not just contribute in positive ways to our character development and to our flourishing, it does so in a context that lacks hierarchy. Unlike parenting, friendship is paradigmatically a relationship of equals.
When we let parenting crowd out friendship, then, we are doing something that looks troubling from the perspective of our flourishing: substituting a relationship that supports our flourishing for one that threatens it.
But we could do things differently. Instead, we could give friendship greater priority. Valuing friendship and its contribution to our flourishing could mean limiting the size of our families, to ensure there is room enough left in a life for the pursuit of friendship. But it could involve less dramatic changes, too, such as making decisions to include friends within one’s family life, or by sometimes choosing to be present for one’s friends rather than driving one’s child to their fourth extracurricular activity of the week. Those are small changes but ones that go against the flow of the hierarchy of kinds of relationship in our societies.
We should also challenge social structures that support the turn inwards towards the household, especially once one has children. One example are the norms that encourage intensive parenting, especially mothering. Another is a lack of affordable childcare. Yet another is the lack of “third spaces” for mingling outside of the home, especially those available in the week and outside working hours, for those socializing with children in tow. Parks close in the dark evenings; cafes tend to be open only in working hours; and pubs often ban children in the evenings. There is more we could do, collectively, to undermine the relationship hierarchy that encourages us to devote ourselves—beyond what is necessary for children to flourish—to parenting.
Emily McTernan
Emily McTernan is Associate Professor in Political Philosophy, Department of Political Science, School of Public Policy, UCL. She works on the ethics and political philosophy of the social, focusing at present on the significance of social emotions and the ethics of social interaction.
Katy Wells
Katy Wells is Associate Professor in Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick. She works on housing justice, renting, power, and the ethics of relationships.
