In more significant cases, like a pregnancy, the cost of screen obedience can be much greater. When a computer program mindlessly flags “pregnant yes” and “40+ yes” and indicates that induction should take place by such and such a date, medical personnel find it easier to pacify the alert that pops onto the screen than to learn the story of a woman. Quietly, attention is turned to the algorithm—lifeless code that does not care—and away from the human who is hard at work creating another human. Although my wife was fit and the baby healthy, we were caught in this mechanical logic. We had to fight for the thirty extra minutes it took for labor to begin without induction. Happily, the second delivery was quicker and simpler than the first.
After the birth, the clock began to tick again, this time for our expulsion from the maternity ward. My wife was alone in a small room this time, without the buzz of mothers, babies, nurses, and fathers to which we had become accustomed in Vienna. Only with difficulty did she remember how to encourage a newborn to breastfeed; no one was around to help with that crucial part of the beginning of life. We did get a xerox with some schematic drawings of breasts and a phone number, but that is no substitute for an ever-present nurse who knows what to do. We also got a pile of paper and excessive bills. The phone number was for a lactation consultant, whom we did eventually see. In the United States one has to have good insurance or spare cash to see a lactation consultant, and most people do not. In this way, inequality affects the biology of babies from their first hours. It does no honor to the idea that “all men are created equal” to mandate an unequal start of life.
We have commercial medicine from cradle to grave because that is what we have chosen. There are better ways. When my wife and I left the hospital after my son’s birth in Austria, we were given a kit with baby clothes and blankets in a handy diaper backpack. We also got a guide to all of the services the city of Vienna would offer, which included personal support for mothers who had trouble taking care of their babies, public child care, and public kindergartens and schools. All of these were free, provided parents took their children to the pediatrician and kept inoculation records in that “passport.”
When we moved back to Austria with the children, aged one and three, we were stunned at the quality of the public preschool in our working-class neighborhood. It had the amenities and good cheer of the private day cares and preschools we had visited at home. And it was indeed entirely free of charge, aside from the forty euro a month that we were expected to contribute for the lunches (the local sourcing of which was a point of pride—and the subject of an hour-long parent-teacher meeting, not to mention an evening with the chefs).
Our three-year-old son was in a group of children aged three to six, and a bigger girl looked after him. His teacher made sure that he got the help that he needed in his new environment. We felt a little guilty about the trouble he caused, as the youngest child in the class, unsocialized in Austrian ideas of order. He would toddle over and knock down, with gusto, the complicated structures of blocks built by the bigger boys. We felt bad about that. There was a twinkle in his teacher’s eye when we raised the subject: “But what a great feeling it is,” she said kindly, “to knock something down.”
When our son’s kindergarten teacher realized that we would be taking him back to the United States after the school year, she wept in front of us.
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Each time our family lived in Austria I had some adjusting to do when we came back to America. I had trouble understanding why American parents were so feverishly engaged with their own children, yet so hesitant about making contact with other children.
In music class in New Haven, when my son was one or two, the children often refused to sit in front of their own caregivers in a ring. They preferred to crawl or toddle across the circle to another child or parent. I was always happy if a kid showed up: after all, what difference did it make where on the carpet they banged their drumsticks? And yet uncontrolled crawling or toddling always brought drama. Caregivers felt that their children should be right in front of them at all times: and so a tambourine-shaking hour was passed in the absurdity of adults springing up from faux-comfortable cross-legged sitting positions to hasten after wayward offspring. One little boy tended to hustle over to my son and me. I thought it was nice that he recognized us. One week his mother snarled at me: “What are you, the magnet of eighteen-month-olds?”
I was startled. Wasn’t it nice when children smiled at adults and adults smiled back? Wouldn’t it be good for the little boy to have some friendly exchanges with people beyond his own family? Wasn’t socialization the point of getting out of the house and going to toddler music class? A few months into music class, I was speaking with another mother, with whom I had become friendly, about the tension. I asked her why the mothers seemed nervous when their children weren’t right in front of them. Her answer gave me a lot to think about: “I guess it’s because we know that at the end of the day we are doing this alone.”
Imagine an America where mothers (and fathers, and other caregivers) did not feel that way. In Vienna my wife and I never did. People made way for the stroller and held open doors without being asked. I remember one morning when I was jogging down a hill, with my daughter in the stroller and my son standing on the board attached to its back, trying to catch the last subway train (at an aboveground stop) that would get the kids to kindergarten on time. The sun behind me, I could watch through the subway car’s window as passengers pushed the button to open the doors for us, and then made way so that we could squeeze in.
This attitude to parents and young children is certainly not a result of Austrians being friendlier than Americans. It has to do with an understanding that rearing children is not something that a parent or even a family can do without help. The institutions that helped us, from the public hospital to the public kindergarten to the public transport (with an elevator at every subway stop), were not one-way gifts to families with children. They were an infrastructure of solidarity that held people together, making them feel that at the end of the day they were not alone.
* * *
In America, birth is where our story about freedom dies. We never talk about how bringing new life into the world makes heroic individualism impossible. I certainly needed a great deal of help to be anything like a free person as a parent of young children, and I was not the one who had to bear and breastfeed the child, and had every possible advantage as a father. We are also silent about what we need to do to ensure, from the beginning, that children can lead lives that are as free as possible. We imagine freedom as an absence of restraints, and that is surely an important element of liberty. Yet the beginning of life shows us that it is also inadequate. A newborn left alone and unrestrained is not free. For children the contribution of others to freedom is even more significant than it is for parents.
How children are treated when they are very young profoundly affects how they will live the rest of their lives. That is perhaps the most important thing that scientists have to teach us about health and freedom today. In the nineteenth century, scientists explained how diseases spread, introducing a kind of factuality useful for longer, freer lives. In the late twentieth century, another group of scientists came to understand the importance of early childhood for the rest of life. It takes courage for adults to grasp this, because it means that caring about freedom means caring about children. But if we do, we can begin a renewal of a land of the free.