ecause bringing a child into the world is one of the most significant things that a person can do, a just society has to be one that accords enormous moral weight to parenting.  Or so it is if one holds, as I do, that how a society treats the most innocent and helpless among its members is a most substantial measure of the moral timbre of that society.  Unfortunately, the way in which so many citizens of modernity go on about the right to have children, one would very well think that a child is some sort of amazing toy that people are clamoring to possess—not a human being whose very life, upbringing, and well-being people would be responsible for. 

You will notice that in the preceding paragraph I said “amazing toy” rather than “amazing toy or amazing animal”.  This is because there is the very odd reality that there is almost more concern over what people do with animals than there is over what people do with infants.  I am not even sure if there is group which advocates for children that is as powerful as the one that advocates for animals, namely PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals).  No doubt I am caricaturing things here.  Yet, the inescapable truth is that the caricature has quite a bit of force to it. 

When is the last time you heard a self-identified group of whatever persuasion arguing that we hold that children are so important that we hereby commit ourselves to achieving the following excellences before we bring any child into the world? 

Now, the headlines to a recent newspaper story for Great Britain read as follows: “Women Win Right to Children without Fathers”.  The old rule of a need for a father has been replaced by the new idea of a “need for supportive parenting”.  What is interesting here is that no group seems to argue that its members of are particularly good at supportive parenting.  The idea, rather, is not so much that any group is particularly good at supportive parenting, but that none is any worse at supportive parenting than any other group.  That, alas, is precisely the point.

The crux of the argument is not at all about promoting the well fare of children.  Instead, it is about the claim that a group is no less entitled to have a go at raising children than any other group, and so to commit whatever mistakes and horrors that any other group commits.  What more proof could one have that in a most important respect society has not taken the parenting of children much more seriously than it did hundreds of years ago. 

Indeed, the only argument that is offered about children being better nowadays is, from the standpoint of parenting, a most paradoxical one.  For that argument holds that children are far better off in day care than with being at home with their parents. 

Well, guess what: If children spend the vast majority of their most formative years in infancy in the care of a non-parent, then it only stands to reason that it does not much matter which group of people actually has a child.  This is because, in the first place, the day care argument already entails that parents are not the most valuable thing in a child’s life.  So of course studies about this or that making a difference are irrelevant, since the very lynchpin of the prevailing ideology in modernity is that parents themselves do not, in fact, make a difference.  After all, the real parenting is primarily done by the non-parents in day care. 

What follows from this is quite profound and most disconcerting.  What follows, in fact, is that we have stopped sanctifying parenting.  While the desire for children may very well be ubiquitous, the idea of parenting is not being seen as one of greatest moral tasks that a person may perform.  And guess what: All sorts of desires are ubiquitous.  So the ubiquity of a desire tells us nothing at all about the moral significance that anyone attaches to the fulfillment of that desire.  Indeed, precisely what we know is that no moral significance is attached to the satisfaction of many such desires; and in lots of cases, this is not at all a criticism.

But notice what has happened.  We have moved from the morally repulsive view that children are some form of property to the equally morally repulsive view that the parents do not really matter, since the proper place for children is day care.  Unless I am missing something, there is no part of this that even remotely amounts to moral progress.  Rather, we have merely replaced one morally obnoxious view with another morally obnoxious view. 

We have not sanctified parenting.  What we have done, instead, is turned parenting into none other than a form of social status, having entirely lost sight of the very beings most affected by it all, namely the children. 

And while we pay lip service to raising children, it is manifestly clear that what is far important from the standpoint of society is not that children be raised well but that no one be unjustly deprived of the social status of having children.  Insofar as children matter, it is only by accident that they do. 

Once again, I ask: When is the last time you heard a self-identified group of whatever persuasion arguing that we hold that children are so important that we hereby commit ourselves to achieving the following excellences before we bring any child into the world? 

It has always seemed to me that insofar as human beings have a claim to being like gods, it is in virtue of parenting that this is so.  For as I wrote in The Family and the Political Self:

. . . not even God’s love, nor therefore God’s law, can be a substitute for parental love (p. 41). 

Surely, a more perfect society would be a society in which one of the most important aims among on the part of its citizens would be to cultivate this extraordinary moral power.  Alas, it is manifestly evident that we all have some ways to go before we achieve that more perfect society.  To take seriously the moral power of parenting would be to do none other than to sanctify parenting. 

Written in honor of two families: the Rougemont (France) and the Saks (United States) familes—individuals whom I regard as more perfect parents.