Why Do We Celebrate the Privation of Children?

“Destiny, quite often, is a determined parent”, so writes one of America’s greatest choreographers, Twyla Tharp.

In other words, committed parents are attentive to the natural affinities and proclivities of their children. They encourage those traits, guide their children, and fight to get them recognized by the right people, in the right fields. They are their agents, life coaches, and biggest fans.

We’ll never know if Mozart would have reached his level if not for having a father who was a composer who was talented with multiple instruments, but it seems doubtful. If his father had been absent and his mother was too busy working to get the basic needs met, would he really have shone as brightly? In the very least, it's doubtful his hands would have touched piano keys till he was much older. And just like that, the world would have been a bit darker.

Accepting this, one can’t help but to extrapolate that onto the millions of children who are raised in such homes. How much less beautiful is the world than it could have been? How much further behind are we technologically or architecturally? What are we missing? We can't know with precision, of course, but surely it's not hard to infer that we are all the poorer for depriving countless children of what they need to thrive and flourish.

Perhaps I’m a bit of a romantic, but I do believe that each person was made to reflect an aspect of the Divine in the world. That if we each were to become who we were made to be, we would look at one another and marvel at the splendor of our neighbor’s Creator. I believe that’s what makes it possible to “love your neighbor” — to see that neighbor as the product of love and a potential lens into the transcendent, each person a new way of seeing a part of Him. Ask an artist of any stripe what his creations are to him, whether he’s a painter, composer, sculptor, or writer — his works reflect pieces of his soul. In kind, we too reflect our own Creator.

To best reflect that light into the world, we would have to move toward that for which we were made. It’s not always easy to know what that would look like. St. Catherine of Siena would say, “Start being brave about everything. Drive out darkness and spread light.”

Ideally, our inherent gifts would be nurtured when we are young, by the family that we are owed. Yes, owed. A child is owed a loving mother and a father. Anytime they don’t get those, they are missing something that they should have had. We must be willing to say so. Any cultural shift that does not acknowledge the pivotal role of a healthy family unit will be futile at best, corrosive at worst.

It is in the examination of those who have mastered their crafts that we see the impact that such parents can have, and also the tremendous privation of those children who were denied such a family. Yes, of course, they are more likely to face poverty, live lives of crime, and have inferior educational opportunities. Those statistics are familiar to all. But what about greatness? What about becoming a light in a dark world? How many lights were dimmed, affecting both them and the society they would have brightened?

Everybody recognizes that those children have a vacancy, but the sheer unjust privation that is caused by single-parent homes has been so normalized. Part of the problem is that it’s socially acceptable to raise children who are thus deprived. In The Abolition of Britain, Peter Hitchens describes how in the early days of the television, the new video medium was used in a social engineering effort to change the way people treated children who were born out of wedlock. The campaign was hugely successful. Such children were no longer referred to as “bastards” or as “illegitimate”, as had hitherto been the norm.

I don’t think it’s appropriate to label children that way, because I don’t think children should be held accountable for the misdeeds of their parents. However, shouldn’t there at least be a negative social element associated with having children out of wedlock and raising them without two parents? We know the harm that it does to the children, and yet modern efforts of media and entertainment seek to lionize single parenthood. That’s at least a nuanced issue — yes, a parent who is raising a child alone because the other parent abandoned the family is behaving dutifully, but the willingness to engage in rapid separations, get divorces, and have children before any real relationship develops (let alone marriage) must be condemned by society if we wish it to happen less often.

Please don’t misunderstand. Children are always a gift and should always be embraced. The problem is that the modern approach to children treats their needs as an afterthought, and celebrates those who would place them in homes that only scarcely provide for their basic needs. A society that truly cares for children would condemn the actions that lead to single-parent homes and laud adoption by married couples.

If Mozart seems too outside of the modern experience, watch 15-year-old Alexander Malofeev perform, and you’ll see a combination of giftedness and parental love that made it possible. He began playing when he was five, and has received instruction and encouragement throughout his life, as is appropriate.

On the other end of the spectrum, Australia Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) made the suggestion that parents should stop reading bedtime stories to their children, because doing so gives them an “unfair advantage” over those children who don’t get that experience. The benefit of such reading is starkly manifest in child outcomes later in life. This suggestion by ABC supposes that depriving children is a positive thing as long as it is a shared deprivation. It’s an act of evil to intentionally handicap children, knowing the lifelong implications of doing so.

In any case, it’s not accurate to say that the children in those nurturing homes are receiving an unfair advantage, because it is fair, in the sense that they are receiving what is due to them. It would be correct to say that the other children are at an unfair disadvantage, for they are being tragically denied something. Justice is never served by hurting the innocent.

If we wish to do more than stay five years behind the current leftist craze in our culture war, we must begin pushing back on the issues that matter. None are more foundational than the family unit. We must begin fighting on issues that were long ago surrendered. Single-parent homes deny children the mother and father that they deserve, and we should thus condemn them instead of celebrating them.