MSZ 4-1980
After our findings about the intelligentsia's insatiable need for meaning, which is currently turning back to the family and identifying children as the object of commitment and sacrifice who should thank their parents for this, we no longer dare rule out the possibility that even MSZ readers, after years of disappointment in a boyfriend or girlfriend, will fall for the idea of having children so that they can give and receive for once unalloyed affection, according to the motto
Becoming a father is not difficult ...
There is already something oppressive about this thought, which is why there are constant complaints that problems increase with children and raising them is more difficult than herding cats. But nobody takes this as a reason to let them be. On the contrary – good advice is much appreciated and should therefore stop at this point. The eager assessment of parental practice certainly does not intend to criticize, but to lament its success, because it never really fine-tunes the way that the parenting ideology would like it to. This, of course, does not mean that it does not exist: the explosive mixture of effusive love and disciplinary exasperation that washes over the child always has one definite result: the child learns to use his will in a manipulating way – a picture just as bleak and successful as his parents’ struggle to bring him up.
… but being one is very
“Am I doing it right?” is the anxious question concerning a general standard of parenting that is asked not only by academically educated mothers and fathers. As if raising children could fail. Still, every society has habituated the young by means of praises and reprimands, carrots and sticks, to adapting to this reality and participating properly. The parents’ inane worry and insecurity about the “right way to raise a child” is revealed by their practical assurance that their daily arbitrary rebukes do not necessarily harm the child and cause all sorts of side effects and possible long-term consequences. The ideology of raising children, on the other hand, wants us to believe that the bad thing about beating children is not that parents want to break the will of their offspring, but that they impair the future learning ability of the earthly creatures and thus their chances in life. Which is why the opinion persists that a good spanking never hurt anyone. Each child also learns to stop shitting his pants as well as running and speaking, and not by a long shot is anything therefore “determined” in “the most important first two years.” This is not the expression of the parents’ brave hope that their child will be better off than them, which, for that matter, could be established in practice simply by caring for them as well as their parents' means permit. Rather, those who “mean so well” with their still unfinished and therefore considered “cute” creatures quickly disregard their little subjectivity with the loveless problematization of whether what they do benefits the child’s future. The fact that this is determined by what the society decides is suitable for its members in terms of educations and careers can’t be forgotten by the worried legal guardians, since they would like to deny this fact precisely by giving it a place in the family and making life difficult for their dear little ones with the demand that they must learn to behave “properly” because only “well behaved” children are loved. Even if childhood “manners” do not guarantee a career as a Federal Chancellor, one is nevertheless proud to have “done everything” to make the young citizen in the playpen obey with stupid rules or promises at the right moment and thus make him socially acceptable.
The certainty that a squirt like this has no other choice than to train his will – something that is supposed to “belong” to him at one moment and then again doesn’t – in the required unreasonable manner is expressed on the parental level as an attentive commentary on how advanced the “stage of development” of the respective Häwelmann is [trans: a German fairy tale about an attention seeking little kid]. As doubtful as the joy of the old ones in the ability of the offspring to adapt themselves to their commandments and to try out whether and how they are suitable for announcing their own “claims,” it is inevitable that ugly tones erupt in the family when the childish will makes use of its moral means against the will of its nurturers: something unruly children necessarily get the hang of quite quickly and according to their childish needs and possibilities. Then the whining brat fully blows up and gets told that they are just means who are used according to the interests of the adults and gives their parental power the irrational impact of being justified. “We still have the (!) say,” it says, and the whining child learns to adopt more clever tactics next time toward the big ones, whom it can’t understand, but on whom it depends.
Happiness at an angle
All the bickering about the refractory and foolish smarty-pants attitude of kids could help parents figure out the reason for such home-made difficulties – their own work raising a “decent person,” necessarily achieved by parental whims; this is not considered by them as what it is objectively, but merely as a “problem,” because they see all their freedom and their happiness in persevering with the stubbornness of the young folk as their highest purpose in life: for this, “difficulties” – especially those of children – are gladly accepted, attesting to the stupid parental logic that adversity and sacrifice allow the noble intention of raising children seem all the more radiant. The pathetic contentment of such abstraction artists, however, gets neither them nor their victims any closer to the small ideal world they seek to establish away from the big evil one. They endure domestic quarrels and strife with their brats simply because they see their love for them as exclusion from criticism of themselves and their child-raising ideas as well as of their spawn – a kind of luxury that also has room in the smallest hut. As a simple woman said: “My child is my life.”
Where this doting love strikes, no child ever grows up more sensibly. His stupidity and weakness are precisely the qualities that the fuss around him depends on. There is patting and pampering, rejoicing that the little guy can already say wee-wee maker to his cute thingy and register, not without emotion, when he can’t control it again. And even if he sometimes deposits something, because it is crap that has to be removed, mothers still see it shining in the rosy light of Mephistopheles’ perverse paean: “seen from the rear view – Those rascals now are really appetizing!”
If this attitude predominates across gender differences in the parental personnel, it takes additional physical form in the maternal physiognomy – as can easily be seen by her stupid, happy face. Of course, this is not because such women have fallen for the magic three Cs (child, cooking pot, church), against which they would then like to magically uphold professional activity as “independence,” but has to do with the fact that, just as they are normally obliged to vocational dependence, they are additionally bound to the family, in which they can see to their handful of needs, which for them also includes breeding and raising children; they voluntarily face this compulsion as their “greatest task,” which distinguishes them from men.
Also not pure joy
To advertise for this, however, has mainly been reserved by pronounced expert mothers like the stupid glassy-eyed Karin Struck (“The Mother”) [feminist writer who later became anti-abortion: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-karin-struck-1981-123550769.html ] who have turned it into a lucrative business for themselves, although at all times particularly open-minded manly assessors of the parenting scene have successfully appeared with this propaganda:
“This means to guard and preserve this unconscious, still unclenched, but therefore original life.” (Rosenberg, The Myth of the 20th Century, 551) [Nazi mystic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Twentieth_Century ]
It also becomes clear that the ideological demand for the “abolition of gender specific parenting roles,” which aims to make fathers partake in the parental delights of motherhood all the way up to child bearing, arises not on the basis of male envy of female privileges, but owes its existence to the free intellectual nonsense that every possible aspect of meaning-giving can be gained from bringing up children – theoretically – in order to increase the imaginary pleasure in them.
This luxury is indulged in by more and more parents who obviously have more time than their busy working neighbors who allegedly are not so fond of children – which is certainly not true, but nevertheless regularly “proved” by educationally informed parents, whichever playhouse they make with their super babies: essentially, they distinguish “everything they do for the child,” besides the additional material costs for its care, only through more nonsense concerning its stupid babbling as a problem of nurturing. Here they want to know that “skin contact” is better than a stroller, which is why they strap the sweet burden across their backs, argue about the necessary length of breastfeeding, which for lack of milk is not as long as it is with some Negro peoples (“how do they do it?”), run around with manuals and specialist journals which claim without challenge that it is very dangerous to give candy to children for doing “something good” because then they “later frequently comfort themselves with other substances ingested through the mouth: cigarettes, alcohol, or even drugs,” (Federal Ministry for Youth, Family and Health), and so on and so on.
What about the class character?
All these silly hypotheses change nothing in principle about parental practice, which even in bourgeois families spawns a little creep who has learned, with the help of its parent’s crazy devotion, how to demand proper treatment for its “case” of upbringing. Because they are so well trained in the elementary tricks of morally pissing off the beloved neighbors and enlightened according to every trick in the book about the child raising objectives followed on their behalf, they soon discover an opportunity to act out like the parenting problems they have always been treated as when developing their little personalities. In unfolding this trick, kids who get too much enjoyment from their daily demonstration of being budding adults may develop greater abilities to present themselves accordingly. This then allows them to better show off their childish nature – they are either good, not only in the awareness that this might get them something but in the self-confidence that this is already something, or they are naughty, whereby they calculate the same exalted meaning the other way around – but the advantage, also in relation to their older peers, is not on their side, because their means, unlike those of their elders, are limited to being good and refusing to be good, and a person of the same age can always punch them on the nose. The special character “formation” of sleazeballs from “good homes” can therefore safely be ignored – as can the special conceit of their producers, which some fans of egalitarian child raising will certainly not like to hear, but is already well-established in this country thanks to parental help.
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