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Having children and sharing the parenting
Lawrie Moloney
School of Public Health, La Trobe University; Australian Institute of Family Studies, Melbourne VIC
Abstract
Have you ever thought about why we choose to have children?
On a recent television 'sit-com', a man asks his partner why they had had kids. You could sense the danger in the question. She looks at him. 'Don't you remember', she almost hisses? 'You promised me you'd show me a good time.' We used to talk about children 'arriving' or 'coming along', as if parenthood remained connected to 'showing each other a good time' but in ways that were somewhat less than predictable.
At a time when it was unacceptable to have children 'out of wedlock', roughly one third of first-born children within marriages were nonetheless conceived prior to the wedding day. The phrase, 'they had to get married', once so common, now sounds a little quaint.
Nowadays, most young people see the issue of marriage as separate from the issue of living together. More critically, perhaps, most young people assume that decisions about when and if to have children are decisions firmly within their control.
Making a formal decision to have a child and to commit to that child's development is perhaps the most long-term, irrational, exciting, challenging, uncertain, and necessary thing that we do as a species. It's like leaping from a diving board in the dark and trusting that everything will be OK in that moment, for the next nine months, and for the next 20 years.
References
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