¹ In the early 1970s, children overtook the elderly as the poorest group in the country. During today's relative affluence, 16.9% of American children under 18—or 12.1 million children altogether—live below the rate of poverty (United States Census Bureau, “Census 2000,” available on Census web site, www.census.gov, P60–210, vi and ix). Approximately 10 million children have no form of health insurance, according to Hewlett, Sylvia Ann and West, Cornell, The War Against Parents: What We Can Do for America's Beleaguered Moms and Dads (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), 250.Google ScholarThatcher, Adrian calls children, as a result, the new socially “oppressed” in Marriage After Modernity: Christian Marriage in Postmodern Times (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 132.Google Scholar

² Miller-McLemore, Bonnie, Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1994), 74.Google Scholar

³ Fuchs, Victor R. shows in Women's Quest for Economic Equality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 111Google Scholar, that over the 1970's and 1980's children's time with parents declined by on average around 10 hours a week. David Popenoe claims this trend continues, in “Modeling Values for Children in Families,” in Westerman, Jack E., ed., Parenthood in America: Undervalued, Underpaid, Under Siege (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), pp. 90–98, 92–93.Google Scholar

⁴ McLanahan, Sara and Sandefur, Gary, Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 2–3Google Scholar; Fields, Jason, Living Arrangements of Children: Fall 1996, Current Population Reports, P70–74, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2001Google Scholar; and Simmons, Tavia and O'Connell, Martin, Married-Couple and Unmarried-Partner Households: 2000, Census 2000 Reports, CENSR-5, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 2003.Google Scholar Living apart from a parent is also shown in these and many other writings to be a contributing factor toward problems like child poverty, physical and emotional illness, truancy and poor performance in school, and sexual abuse.

⁵ Popenoe, David and Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe, “The State of Our Unions 2003: The Social Health of Marriage in America,” report of the National Marriage Project, Rutgers University (2000)Google Scholar (see web site at marriage.rutgers.edu), 29.

⁶ McKenzie, Michael V., Domestic Abuse in America (Lawrenceville, VA: Brunswick, 1995).Google Scholar

⁷ Hewlett, and West, , The War Against Parents, 46–50.Google Scholar The Annie E. Casey Foundation's 2000 “Kid's Count Data Book” reports that the teen birth rate in the United States in the late 1990's was twice that of any other developed country, about 6 births per 1,000 females ages 15–19 (p. 28).

⁸ Doherty, William, in Take Back Your Kids: Confident Parenting in Turbulent Times (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2000), 138–39Google Scholar, reports that by the age of 18, the average child in the United States has seen 10,000 food advertisements per year, as well as 200,000 acts of violence and 20,000 murders on television.

⁹ Aristotle, , Physics II.3Google Scholar and elsewhere. Ricoeur's ethical thought is not patterned explicitly on Aristotle's four causes, but it does in fact have the structure of a movement from an ontological theory of human capability to three specifically moral capabilities that he terms teleological esteem, deontological respect, and a culminating mediation of these in practical wisdom (or “critical phronesis”). Ricoeur, See, Oneself as Another (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).Google Scholar Ricoeur himself does not, however, take up the ethics of child rearing.

¹⁰ Becker, Gary, A Treatise on the Family, Enlarged Edition [original edition 1981] (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), ix.Google Scholar

¹¹ Ibid., 5.

¹² What is more, parents are more altruistic than children, because “contributions to children tend to be more productive [or “efficient”] than contributions to parents because children have longer remaining lifetimes.” Ibid., 302.

¹³ Arthur, W. Brian, “Review of A Treatise on the Family,” Population and Development Review 8/2 (1982), 393–398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁴ Habermas, Jürgen, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason [German original 1981], trans. McCarthy, Thomas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 325, 355, and 367–73.Google Scholar Habermas himself specifically mentions child rearing: “the one-sided rationalization or reification of everyday communicative practice … [results from] the penetration of forms of economic and administrative rationality into areas of action that resist being converted over to the media of money and power because they are specialized in cultural transmission, social integration, and child rearing, and remain dependent on mutual understanding [through lifeworlds] as a mechanism for coordinating action” (p. 330).

¹⁵ Hauerwas, Stanley, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).Google Scholar

¹⁶ Ibid., 170.

¹⁷ Ibid., 160.

¹⁸ Ibid., 172.

¹⁹ Ibid., 165.

²⁰ Ibid., 173.

²¹ Meilander, Gilbert, “A Christian View of the Family” in Blankenhorn, David, Bayme, Steven, and Elshtain, Jean Bethke, eds., Rebuilding the Nest: A New Commitment to the American Family (Milwaukee: Family Service America, 1990), pp. 133–48, 143.Google Scholar

²² Etzioni, Amitai, The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society (New York: BasicBooks, 1996), 179 and 181.Google Scholar

²³ Elshtain, Jean Bethke, “The Family and Civic Life” in Blankenhorn, et al. , eds., Rebuilding the Nest, pp. 119–32, 131.Google Scholar See also Elshtain, , Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 326.Google Scholar

²⁴ Hauerwas, , A Community of Character, 174.Google Scholar

²⁵ Doherty, Take Back Your Kids (see n. 8 above).

²⁶ Ibid., 15–23.

²⁷ Ibid., 26.

²⁸ Ibid., 36.

²⁹ Ibid., 57.

³⁰ Aristotle, , Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Ostwald, Martin (New York: Macmillan, 1962), Book I, chapters 7–9.Google Scholar

³¹ Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948)Google Scholar, Supplement, Q.43, a.2. Thomas envisions a three stage developmental cycle in which in the first seven years the child “neither understands by himself nor is able to learn from another,” in the next seven “can learn from another but is incapable by himself of consideration and understanding,” and arrives eventually at the above ability for fully social participation. Although Thomas' stages are clearly problematic from a modern psychological point of view, their description of the mature adult outcome is rich and suggestive.

³² Couture, Pamela, Seeing Children, Seeing God: A Practical Theology of Children and Poverty (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2000).Google Scholar

³³ Ibid., 13 and 15.

³⁴ Hans Jonas makes the argument, from a secular philosophical point of view, that children's vulnerability makes them in fact “the archetype of all responsibility.” “The state bears a responsibility for the children within its jurisdiction quite distinct from that for the welfare of its citizens in general…. [A] child's dying of hunger, that is, permitting its starving to death, is a sin against the first and most fundamental of all responsibilities which man can incur.” The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 134.

³⁵ Anderson, Herbert and Johnson, Susan, Regarding Children: A New Respect for Childhood and Families (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 17.Google Scholar

³⁶ Hewlett, and West, , The War Against Parents, xiii.Google Scholar

³⁷ Couture, , Seeing Children, Seeing God, 16.Google Scholar

³⁸ Ibid., 57.

³⁹ One is reminded of Schleiermacher's view that love for children as gifts from God stands up against the fallen world by “manifest[ing] the workings of the divine Spirit” and recognizing humanity's ultimate “absolute dependence on God.” Schleiermacher, See, The Christian Household: A Sermonic Treatise (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1991), 64.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Couture, , Seeing Children, Seeing God, 44.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Ibid., 92.

⁴² Anderson, and Johnson, , Regarding Children, 18.Google Scholar

⁴³ A powerful statement of this view can be found in Kathleen, and McGinnis, James, Parenting for Peace and Justice: Ten Years Later (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990)Google Scholar: “If we [parents and children both] can experience the possibility of peace—nonviolence conflict resolution—at the family level, then our faith in the possibility for peace and our willingness to work for it at the other levels grows” (25).

⁴⁴ Thatcher, , Marriage after Modernity, 132–70.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ McLanahan and Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent; Waite, Linda J. and Gallagher, Maggie, The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially (New York: Doubleday, 2000)Google Scholar; Wallerstein, Judith S., Julia Lewis, and Blakeslee, Sandra, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark Study (New York: Hyperion, 2000).Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Browning, Don S., Marriage and Modernization: How Globalization Threatens Marriage and What to Do About It (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2003), 7.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Ibid., 60–70. For a more detailed discussion of Becker see Browning, Don S., Miller-McLemore, Bonnie J., Couture, Pamela D., Brynolf Lyon, K., and Franklin, Robert M., From Culture Wars to Common Ground: Religion and the American Family Debate, Second Edition (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 254–64.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Miller-McLemore, , Also a Mother, 150.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Browning, , Marriage and Modernization, 44.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Leeuwen, Mary Stewart Van, “The Signs of Kuyper's Times, and of Ours” in Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, Grenz, Stanley J., Keyes, Mardi, and Stewart, MaryLeeuwen, Van, Women and the Future of the Family (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2000), pp. 75–92, 91.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. McNeill, John T. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 4.15.20.Google Scholar

⁵² Witte, John, From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 95.Google Scholar

⁵³ Subsidiarity has its roots in Pope Pius XI's 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo anno on the conditions of workers, but has subsequently been applied by others to families as well.

⁵⁴ Browning, , Marriage and Modernization, 26.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Cahill, Lisa Sowle, Family: A Christian Social Perspective (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2000), 16.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Ibid.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 6.

⁵⁸ I have elsewhere developed what I called a “critical covenant” with children based on a synthesis of the historical child rearing ethics of Thomas, Calvin, and Schleiermacher. See Wall, John, “Animals and Innocents: Theological Reflections on the Meaning and Purpose of Child-Rearing,” Theology Today 59/4 (January 2003), 559–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵⁹ I defend this larger position in Wall, John, “The Economy of the Gift: Paul Ricoeur's Significance for Theological Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 29/2 (Summer 2001), 235–260.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See Tracy, David, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1991)Google Scholar, Browning, Don S., A Fundamental Practical Theology: Descriptive and Strategic Proposals (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991)Google Scholar, and Kearney, Richard, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (New York: Routledge, 2003).Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Anglican theologian Thatcher, Adrian makes such an argument in Marriage After Modernity, 294–302.Google Scholar