Almost all Americans agree that our society ought to strive for equality of opportunity — that no child’s prospects should be limited by the circumstances of his or her birth. Yet achieving equality of opportunity in this sense is quite a bit harder than you might think. Throughout human history, parents have been motivated by a desire to better the lives of their children, and to this end parents routinely make sacrifices. It’s often said that fatherhood is a force that restrains the worst impulses of men, and that motherhood fills women with a powerful urge to protect their children from the dangers of the wider world. Parents save, in the hope of building wealth that they can pass on to their offspring, when they’d prefer to spend. They withstand petty indignities rather than lash out violently at those who insult or otherwise undermine them, to avoid landing in jail or worse, all to help ensure that they can continue to meet their familial obligations. The parental desire to fulfill these obligations hasn’t always been motivated by love or generosity of spirit alone: Fear of social disapproval has also played a role.
But what if parents were promised that, regardless of the choices they made, regardless of whether they planned carefully for the future or indulged in this or that vice, they could rest assured that it was the job of society to provide for their children? What if all parents came to believe that their own contributions to the well-being of their children were ultimately immaterial? According to this logic, one ought to expect the fortunes of children with absent fathers and those with attentive fathers to be essentially the same. Wouldn’t you expect that the texture of society would start to change if people came to take this idea seriously, and that many parents would free themselves from the straitjacket of guilt, deferred gratification, and exhaustion that has long been at the heart of child-rearing? Could it be that the goal of equality of opportunity is fundamentally confused, as the prospects of children raised by nurturing parents will necessarily tend to be brighter than those of children raised by parents who for whatever reason can’t or won’t provide the same spiritual nourishment? Even children raised by loving parents can find themselves overwhelmed by material deprivation, which is one of the many compelling arguments for a social safety net. Yet one wonders whether we’ve led recent generations of parents astray by suggesting that the life chances of their children aren’t ultimately in their hands.
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