Translated from MSZ 4-1980

Parenting

Family happiness in theory and practice

After finding out that the intelligentia’s insatiable need for meaning has once again turned to the family and discovered the object of its dedication and sacrifice in children who are supposed to be thankful to their parents for this, we no longer dare rule out the possibility that MSZ readers also might, after years of being disappointed in a boyfriend or girlfriend, fall for the idea of having children in order to finally be allowed to give and receive unconditional affection, according to the saying

It’s not hard to become a father ...

There’s already something brutal about this idea, which is also why it leads with monotonous regularity to complaints about children growing up with problems and raising them being more difficult than herding cats. But nobody lets it be for this reason. On the contrary – good advice is highly appreciated and so shouldn’t be neglected at this point. The eager appraisal of parenting practices should certainly not criticize its success, but bemoan that it never quite turns out the way that the ideology of parenting would like. Of course, this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist: the explosive combination of effusive love and disciplinary exasperation showered on the child always has one result: the child learns to use his will in a scheming way – in a mirror image of his parents’ struggle to raise him that is as grim as it is successful.

… but being one is very

“Am I doing this right?” is the question of mothers and fathers, by no means only those with university educations, who are anxiously seeking a universal standard of parenting. As if raising children could fail! Every society uses praises and reprimands, carrots and sticks, to get the young accostumed to its reality and participating in it properly. The ridiculous worries and uncertainties of parents about the “right way to raise a child” is unmasked by the certainty they demonstrate in practice that their daily random rebukes of the child do not necessarily harm him or cause all sorts of side effects or possible long term consequences. By contrast, the ideology of parenting would have us believe, for example, that the bad thing about parents beating kids is not that they want to break the will of their offspring, but that they impair the little creature’s future learning ability and so their chances in life. That’s why the opinion persists that a good spanking never hurt anyone. Every child learns to stop shitting his pants as well as to walk and talk, which is why nothing is “determined” in “the most important first two years.” This doesn’t just express the intrinsically obedient hope of parents that their children will have it better than them, which could otherwise simply be promoted in practice by taking care of the children as well as their means allow. Rather, those who are so “well meaning” toward their still immature and therefore “cute” creatures quickly override their little subjectivities with the loveless problematiziation of whether they are doing what’s best for the child’s future. The fact that the latter is determined by the society’s decisions about what makes its members suitable in terms of education and work can’t be forgotten even by those with parental authority who want to repudiate this fact by taking it into account in the family and making life difficult for their dear little ones with the demand that they must learn to behave “properly” because only “obedient” children are good. Even if childish “good manners” do not guarantee a career as a president, one is proud to have “done it all” to make the young citizen in the playpen obey with stupid rules or promises at the right moment and thus to have made him socially acceptable.

The assurance that the little squirt has no choice but to train his will – which is supposed to “belong” to him at one moment and then doesn’t the next – in the required nonsensical manner is presented by the parents as an attentive commentary on the progress of the little tyrant’s current “stage of development.” As dubious as the parents’ delight may be in the ability of their offspring to adapt to their commands and to try out whether and how they are suitable for making “demands” of their own, it is inevitable that an ugly note sounds in the family when the child’s will makes use of his moral means against those of his caretakers: something the brat is forced to get the hang of quite quickly and according to his childish needs and possibilities. Then the nagging brat gets his nose rubbed in the fact that these are just means whose use depends on the interests of the adults and gives their parental power the irrational effect of being justified. “We still have the(!) say,” they say, and the whining child learns to be tactically shrewder the next time he has to deal with grown ups who he can’t understand but on whom he depends.

The happiness gets sent to his room

All the wrangling over the brats’ stubborness and ridiculous know-it-all attitude, in which parents could identify the reason for these home-made difficulties – their own work raising a “decent human being,” which is necessarily enforced through parental despotism, is not seen by them as what it objectively is, but merely as a “problem,” because they see all their freedom and their happiness in putting up with the obtuseness of the young as their highest purpose in life: in return, “difficulties” – especially those of children – are gladly accepted, since they attest to the stupid parental logic that adversity and sacrifice only make the noble intention of raising children appear all the more glorious. However, the assholish contentment of these abstraction performances does not bring them or their victims any closer to the ideal little world they are trying to create away from the big bad one. They endure domestic quarrels and strife with their brats simply because they see their love for them as excluding them from criticism, along with their child-raising ideas and their spawn – a type of luxury that has room even in the tiniest shack. As a simple woman said: “My child is my life.”

Whenever this blind love strikes, no child grows up any wiser. Their stupidity and weakness are the very characteristics that the circus put on around them is based on. They pat and cuddle him, cheer the little guy for already being able to call his cute thingamajig a wee-wee maker, and are not without emotion when he can’t control it again. And even if he sometimes draws something, because it is crap that has to be cleaned up, the mother still sees it shining in the rosy light of Mephistopheles’ perverse paean: “seen from the rear view – Those rascals now are really appetizing!”

This attitude cuts across gender differences in the parenting personnel, but it takes on added physical form in the maternal physiognomy – as can easily be detected on her moronic happy face. Of course, this is not because these women have become slaves to the magic three Cs (child, cooking pot, church), in contrast to which occupational activity is magically upheld as “independence,” but has to do with the fact that they are forced into occupational dependence just as generally as they are additionally bound to the family cohesion in which they can deal with their handful of needs, which for them also includes raising children; they face up out of their own free will to this constraint as their “greatest task,” which distinguishes them from men.

Also not pure joy

It is, however, outspoken professional mothers such as the stupidly ogling Karin Struck (“The Mother”) who reserve for themselves the right to advertise this as a lucrative business, although male experts of the parenting scene, especially open-minded ones, have at all times made successful use of this propaganda:

“This means to guard and preserve this unconscious, still unclenched, but therefore original life.” (Rosenberg, The Myth of the 20th Century)

It thus also becomes clear that the ideological demand for the “abolition of gender-specific parenting roles,” which would like fathers to share in the parental joys of motherhood all the way up to giving birth, does not arise from male envy of female privileges, but is owed to the free intellectual insanity of wanting to theoretically extract every possible meaning from raising children in order to increase its imaginary pleasures.

This luxury is indulged in by more and more parents, who obviously have more time than their neighbors who are busy with their careers and allegedly not very fond of children – which is not true, but regularly “proved” by pedagogically erudite parents with the fuss they make over their super babies: essentially, the only difference between what they “do for the child,” apart from the additional material costs of taking care of them, is more nonsense about its stupid babbling being a learning problem. They want to think that “skin contact” is better than a stroller, which is why they strap the sweet load on their backs, argue about the necessary length of the breastfeeding period, which is not as long as for some Negro peoples due to a lack of milk (“how do they do it?”), run around with manuals and specialist journals which make unchallenged claims about the dangers of rewarding children with candy for doing “something good” because later in life they will then “often comfort themselves with other substances ingested through the mouth: cigarettes, alcohol, or even drugs” (Federal Ministry for Youth, Family and Health), etc. etc.

Where’s the class character here?

All these inane assumptions change nothing in principle about the parental practice which, in bourgeois families as well, breeds little nuisances who learn how to use the psychotic attention of their parents to demand that their “case” of growing up be handled properly. Because they are so well schooled in the elementary tricks of bullshitting thy dear neighbor and are made aware by every trick in the book of the educational goals observed in them, they soon find an opportunity to act up like the child raising problems they have always been treated as in the formation of their little personalities. In developing this skill, big kids who get too much enjoyment out of their daily performances as budding adults may develop greater abilities to showcase themselves accordingly. This then allows them to better accentuate their childish nature – they are either well-behaved, not only in the awareness that this might yield something but in the self-confidence that they really are something, or else they are naughty, whereby they calculate on the same enhanced importance the other way around – but the advantage over their peers is far from being on their side because their means, unlike those of their elders, are limited to being well-behaved or refusing to be and a peer can always punch them on the nose. The special character “formation” of jerks from “good homes” can therefore safely be ignored – as can the special conceit of their breeders, which some fans of egalitarian parenting won’t want to hear, but is already accepted in this country thanks to parental assistance.