Trophy Children

It strikes me that there is an all pervading expectation that adults have an ordained right to have child as and when it pleases them. No questions, this is an absolute, I want a child, I want it now so why are you not making it happen? Nature of course is very complicit in this and more often than not, sometimes to all-round consternation, pregnancies come along easily. That is for most young heterosexual couples. Just because perhaps it can be too easy to conceive we mistake that as a right to conceive. Now children are great fun, through them we can rediscover and enjoy once again our childhood, through the contacts made around children we can slide easily into new social circles with multitudes of opportunities to boast, display our child or parent skills and engage in all manner of one-upmanship contests and with a child as entry ticket we can exalt in all manner of events and occasions. Should the child's needs clash with your ongoing adult life there are plenty of opportunities to park them out with all manner of educational enrichments to boot. Or failing that option then just parking them infront of a TV or a computer console will ensure you can get on with those essential adult tasks with the minimum of distractions. So good to have children around, it feels right, familiar and is after all what every other couple expects. You are conforming to the social norms. You have child, purrr.

When child mortality was so high in the past, the supremacy of new life, any new life, was paramount to the survival of the nation. We are in a different era, there are too many of us on this planet, beyond what it can renewably sustain but we each want to add our child into the pool, to reproduce and further increase this pressure of just too many people. We have outgrown our planet. The sanctity of life is no longer a prime issue, instead we should be thinking deeply about the quality of the children we already have and even more so about those children that might come in the future. Those that are born to carry our genes forward, what should we set as a benchmark when considering all the deprived children, the maimed children, the children born with life challenging abnormalities, the children yet to be born or at the moment of conception? We should want all our children to be self-confident, enthused and full of hope as they launch out into the world. Sure children are highly resilient and can overcome the most dreadful of beginnings but they do carry those emotional and physicals scars, from that childhood, into their adult lives to pass on reflections of their horrors endured into the next generation. So with a reduced pool of children going forward we should want to encourage that the most assured and confident children carry our genes forward and not the scarred and maimed.

We should be aware of a range of concerns that impinge on whether or not the children we choose to have occupy this pole position of assured and confident. Same sex couples are biologically incapable of having a child sharing genes from both partners. Surrogate genes are just that, apart from many other issues, the motivation and or selection of genes thus acquired has to be questioned. I go further, the right environment for a child to grow is within that tension between the male and female roles. Only here can the child truly explore and understand this complex relationship and learn where they fit within these complimentary but almost opposing models. When career choices and or the ability to afford a home pushes back the mothers age for a first child beyond the early thirties in to the forties and even further on into the sixties, the risk of foetal errors increases as does the inability to readily conceive. If the career is the first choice then the honour of creating the genes to be passed on should move over to others fully committed to the mother role. Nowadays the stable family unit is no longer the norm instead serial partners with half-siblings are the new units. There are many strands to why this is occurring. The key issue is that a family unit that has overcome the tensions that arise between the male female bonding is a stable model and a good environment for child development. A pairing which, for whatever reasons, fails, leading to separation and new pair relationship to be formed, damages the children involved leaving them scarred, confused about their identity and their self-worth. This does not bode well for their development or their induction of future generations. Just because a woman is a natural mother with an inexhaustible appetite for yet another baby to care for, does not automatically mean that she is the right choice. Beyond some number there are just too many children in one family to be given full attention and the woman's body cannot recover from successive pregnancies, leading to runt babies. A final thought, we be protective of our gene pool and make sure, short of breeding for specific characteristics, that inherited defects, such as cystic fibrosis, are not passed.  

Nothing could be further from my intention that any couple wanting to have a child should be prevented. Perversely, such is life, the most unlikely child parent circumstance may well turnout an exemplary child. The State can and does choose to influence how society responds to issues. Often using taxes as a way of nudging behaviour in a direction. So I have nothing more in mind than that. A nudge, a financial incentive, where the outcome favours the emergence of a self-confident, enthusiastic and hopeful new adult. A tax regime with a nominal tax credit for any children during the first three years. After the third year the child tax credit cranks up significantly until a substantive level is reached only to taper off from sixth form until it ceases on graduation. However there are key criteria. The genetic parents must still be in a viable live together relationship, else it reverts to base nominal level. The benefit for all children in the family tapers off sharply with each succeeding child after the third.

I sense howls of protest, discrimination, fault, blame, victimisation but society does have to make choices. It has to promote what is in its best interest, not the individual interests. Individual respond and make life style choices based on the freedoms they perceive society offers them. Singles parent should not be on the choice list, IVF should not be there on demand. Serial Partnerships should not be on the same footing as a longterm stable marriage. The trophy child should be confined to history. We have to make choices. We should choose carefully to ensure the children we do have emerge healthy, bright-eyed, confident and eager to take on tomorrow's world, carrying us along with their enthusiasm.



ps: Initially this was just going to be a post in https://somersetspiess.wordpress.com/ just airing some passing thoughts. But the more I considered the more I realised this is a mainline political theme that strikes at the core of our society. So this Blog is the better location. I hope you find it.

Sexism

This has been sparked by an article of no consequence, bemoaning the lack of Catholic woman priests. That is just the entry point and otherwise not significant. It is just that it bought my mind around to considering sexism. A few years back, starting with and as a celebration of my Mothers ninetieth birthday, I began charting my family history. Knowing nothing of my father, who left home when I was around 8years, naturally I explored my mothers side. Got engrossed and, with bit now fully between the teeth, explored all provable connections on my mothers line, proud of the links and lineage discovered. In reaching back to the tenuously discernible 1730's I began to consider and explore the social history that led to some key changes in my families histories. Farmers do not become labourers nor end up in a workshop to die of 'insanity', ( as alcoholism was known), without due cause. Cutting a long introduction short I eventually after a couple of serendipity moments, stumbled on an entry point and began to unravel my fathers family. Only to discover I was repeating the steps he too had taken some twenty years earlier. Nothing new under the sun.

I was pulled up short on more than one occasion by relatives who dismissed the maternal line as not having any significance. To them, it was only the male line of inheritance that had any relevance. With my background this puzzled me but slowly other pieces of jigsaw have begun to fall into place. 

We are now, here , this is where it is at, but we are only a continuum of our past. We have to keep our past in view to understand where our future lies. The way forward has to be shaped and based on the path taken to reach this point. All very laboured but let us not forget, male inheritance has been the dominate consideration. Up until this point, the now. Inheritance is simply the passing on of the title to land. Land equates to wealth, privileged, influence and power. Your position utterly depended on what land you inherited and the wheels and deals you could use it for to expand it or prevent others from taking it from you. The by far greatest wheeling deal in town was who you could get to marry you, bringing in privileges, connections or simply more land, not for love or romance but plain pragmatics. Hopefully a woman who could bear strong sons, strong enough to survive childhood. That she was compliant, frugal or even attractive were very secondary considerations. Lets us roll back the years even further. To get land and hold on to it, you had to be a strong fighter able to attract other men to fight by your side and defer to your authority. As top dog, women you could take and have a plenty but you needed one who would bear you a son and nurture it whilst you were away defending you claim to land against all others. Nurture it and stay loyal to you and you alone. A son that you could pass your battle won respect (titles) and land to to survive after your death and making your fights, battles and inevitable death in battle worth while. It does not justify it, but with so much emphasis on the brute force of the macho man, it is understandable that women were regulated. Regulated to a secondary role even to the point that they were legally chattels to be placed, controlled and futures decided at the whim of their lord and master.

Fast forward to today's now. Gender equality rules. The girl, should she choose to marry, may or may not take the male name. Maybe the continental practise of hyphenating the two families lines names into one surname, one from the father and one from the mother, would make good sense. But then which name is to come first, not as on the continent, the fathers name first, that would be sexist. Alphabetical order? And then are both lines to be given equal weight and standing in the family tree? I can avow that the family tree very quickly becomes very diffuse and difficult to read. Starting with four parents, with eight grandparents, sixteen great grandparents and so on. This does probably reflect our genetic inheritance. Very clearly we, as an individual, are a meld of our two parents and through them it is possible to discern genetic characteristics passed from the grandparents. There are some genetic features that are so dominate and survive through several generations even stretching back into the mists of time. We should not be too dismissive of genetic traits. Science has yet to declare whether one sex or other inherits more from one parent or the other, probably not.

My desire to know where I have come from, whose dominate trait do I have that gives me the flair or flaw I struggle to cope with does not justify selecting a male or a female line as my line. To select both is too unwieldy, too diffuse, too many branches that could or could not be significant or worse arbitrary. To make sense you have to follow back along one line of parents but unless we all follow the same rules chaos ensues. Is the need to know and acknowledge our direct line of inheritance more important than this, probably, transitory fashion of gender indeterminacy? It matters to me. I have to know whether I am my fathers son. It matters to those few where the chance of inheriting the stately pile or crown depends on it. To the rest of the world? Just a blip in our ever evolving story of personkinds development and ultimate extinction.

All in the Genes

Very late in my life I found out about my paternal grandparents. Up until then I had interpreted all my personal characteristics within the terms of what I knew about my maternal side. Only just very recently it has become crystal clear that my (and other members of my family) single minded focus and concentration on fine detail counterbalanced with an aloof distancing from anything beyond my direct control, clearly comes down the line from my Paternal GMa. Equally my 'blue-sky' thinking, that gazing eagerly at an unfocussed future together with a passionate deep socialism, not your limp wristed capitalist lap dog Labour Party style, comes staight down the line from my Paternal GPa. So all my past assumptions about family characteristics were so wrong and are now history. I have had to reinvent myself at my age.

So what? Well the more that is being revealed about those genes that we inherit the more it becomes clear that everything, just about everything, from facial features, postures, to skin blemishes, the site for and wrinkle formation, our personality mix, it is all set in the genes we get at conception. The journey to understanding the gene contribution is on its way but it still has a long way to travel. What I am picking up is that hardship endured a couple of generations before will impact on the latest generation. I sense that particular trades accumulated particular aptitudes that fine tuned them for the demands of their work. I can see that a tailor has a different skills mind set from a coal-miner or farm labourer, a skill set that gets passed down the line. Or a weaver has a different take on life than a ship welder. All down to the genes. Sure environment plays a crucial part, emphasising or suppressing characteristics until lady luck gets to play her hand, but only working within that unique blend of genes you to inherit.

What on earth then do people think, when they go in for a donor child, whether by egg or sperm? A child is not a feel good status symbol toy. It is a huge investment, of time, emotion, energy, self-sacrifice, money that last for the remainder of the parents life-time. Not a glib, wouldn't it be nice, choice but life changing with no return ticket. The genes that you pick to mix up with yours are important, not to be left to some vague random factor. Not that I am saying a rapist or a murder passes these traits on in their genes but there are mind sets that clearly could sit very uncomfortably with another. But the genes your own mixes with are relevant and important. The next worst option to a wildcard choice would be to try and select for a particular aptitude. Crufts and dogs springs to mind, we just do not have skills to select for a well rounded human, versatile and flexible to cope with a very uncertain future. What has served us so well in the past is still the best option on offer, mutual attraction. Financial advantage, social status and stability are also runners but often with a latent sting in the tail. No, mutual attraction wins hands down.

Our understanding and conciousness of the ideal mate selection process may be almost entirely missing but there are, nevertheless intuitive processes at work, if only we give them time and a chance. It takes more than a steamy aroused one night stand to suss out whether a soul mate has been found. Conception really is best deferred until there is a solid air of certainty that this mate will be good for the long haul and that prospect, of living together, looks attractive. We have not even scratched the surface of why people develop mutual attraction, so for me, there is no techno fix. Just this belief in an intuitive process at work that rules some potential mates in and a lot more potentials definitely out. A complex process, this mate selection, with all sorts of variable and alternative game strategies. There is only one endgame objective, to find a mate that will care, support and bring up any progeny for the duration. Liking them in the meantime can be a considerable bonus.

So no one-night stands with a lifetime of regret for what might have been, certainly not a donor child with who knows what genes on offer and a categoric no to a technical profiled best gene match until, or if, we get to fully understand the processes. In the meantime just learn to listen to your heart strings.They are the very best thing you have going for you to find the best fit gene match to what you have on offer. Genes matter, it is all in the genes.

ps Have now found out that I inherited an ability to be cold, detached and dispassionate when faced with conflicts from my Maternal GMa. Keeping emotions in check and out of the equation can be a good analytical tool but boy it does make relationships fraught!