[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Parenting and Children's Socioemotional Development
Why do people bother with parenting? It is time consuming, exhausting, strains otherwise pleasurable and tranquil relationships to their limits. Still, humanity keeps at it: breeding. It is the easiest to resort to Nature. After all, all living species breed and most of them parent. We are, all taken into consideration, animals and, therefore, subject to the same instinctive behavior patterns (Belkin, 2000). There is no point in looking for a reason: survival itself is at stake. Breeding is a transport mechanism: handing the precious cargo of genetics down generations of "organic containers". But this is a reductionist view, which both ignores epistemological and emotional realities – and is tautological, thereby explaining something in terms of itself. Calling something by a different name or describing the mechanisms involved in minute detail does not an explanation make.
We bring children to the world in order to "circumvent" death. We attain immortality (genetically and psychologically – though in both cases it is imaginary) by propagating our genetic material through the medium of our offspring. This is a highly dubious claim. Any analysis, however shallow, will reveal its weaknesses. Our genetic material gets diluted beyond reconstruction with time (Belkin, 2000). It constitutes 50% of the first generation, 25% of the second and so on. If this were the paramount concern – incest should have been the norm, being a behavior better able to preserve a specific set of genes.
We bring children to the world in order to preserve the cohesiveness of the family nucleus. This claim can more plausibly be reversed: the cohesiveness of the social cell of the family encourages bringing children to the world. In both cases, if true, we would have expected more children to be born into stable families (ante or post facto) than into abnormal or dysfunctional ones. The facts absolutely contradict this expectation: more children are born to single parent families and to other "abnormal" (non-traditional) families than to the mother-father classic configuration......
