Nowadays we hear much about planning—town planning, city planning, nation planning. The elder and younger statesmen are going to see to it that we are well-housed, well-fed, suitably employed according to our abilities, and provided for in our old age. Good. This, as I understand it, has always been the American plan. I am sure that no American who is willing to work deserves less than the fullness of the earth. And I shall assume that this country is going to be well enough planned to enable you to raise a family—with suitable planning. For family planning is the most important planning. Indeed, the whole point of national planning is to enable us in turn to plan the nation. The nation rests on the family. Your family rests on you and your mate. What are you planning to do about it? How, when, and why?
In our children we live over our own childhood and project ourselves into the future. Until our own children come along we tend to forget that the world, to which we are now so thoroughly and sometimes wearisomely accustomed, once struck us as a thing of mysterious glamour, promising an endless opening vista of keen excitement.
And yet, if life is to continue worth the living, we must continue to hold onto that early attitude. We must continue to find ecstasy in simple sources. And often it is our children—easily yet deeply pleased, ceaselessly busy with their paints and blocks and animals, ready for every new adventure, never jaded, never dull—who must remind us, their elders, how to get the most out of life. In their love for flowers and animals, paints and song, we may rediscover the submerged or forgotten purpose of our own lives. Or our talent may be for building happy lives from the ground up, in which case the children themselves are the answer to our search for pure-hearted, never flagging excitement.
As for projecting ourselves into the future through our children, reaching ahead through them in order to affect, if possible, generation after generation of people yet unborn—this is a kind of immortality snatched from death and a satisfaction, though composed entirely of hope, that parents prize. Strong-souled people feel that their personalities are worth perpetuating, especially in conjunction with their beloveds'! In proportion to their love of life, to the strength of their joy and the clarity of vision of even better things, people find one lifetime all too short to fulfill the expanding urges within them. In their children they see human beings who may carry on their work, or at any rate transmit their traits to grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Just at present people who have found life good, the ideal parents, feel the need of entrusting the future to people like themselves, the desperate need to keep power from falling into the hands of morbid madmen who, under the pretext of enlarging life, precipitate horrible wars precisely because they themselves, starved, oppressed, or humiliated from the cradle, have never found life good. Yes, our children can make all the difference between a life full of hope for the future of the race and one of pessimism and despair. It is this sense of children as carrying something of ourselves, our tempers, our hopes, into the future which is at the bottom of what we call the eugenic urge—the desire, that is, to beget good stock and pass on only the best in us.
About the obvious pleasures that children bring, the fascination of seeing their characters unfold, the happiness of festivals like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, which without children lose half their charm, it is not necessary to speak.
For our purposes, however, the point is that there are literally dozens of reasons why nearly all of us want children. The problem is when to have them and in what numbers. For modern man likes to know what he is about in this world and to direct and control his destiny in the light of other knowledge and experience.
The time for the first baby is a question of readiness on the parents' part. Are they ready physically, psychologically, economically? These are not, of course, three separate ways of being ready; they are interdependent ways, but they offer suitable heads under which to discuss the subject.
Economic readiness is of utmost importance. Insecurity of employment, insufficient means to provide the mother and baby with medical supervision and good food, or looming debts are in themselves sufficient to prevent prospective parents from attaining the other kinds of readiness—physical and psychological. On the other hand, young people with steady incomes should not postpone having children merely because those incomes are not high. Three can live almost as cheaply as two, especially in the child's first years. It is the expense of hospitalization and doctor's care, during pregnancy and throughout the first year or two following the birth, that sometimes threatens to unbalance the family budget. This additional expense must be provided for. It need not be great—a matter of a few hundred dollars, often less in various parts of the country. The doctor's fee for pre-natal care and delivery will correspond roughly, unless he is a senior specialist of great reputation (by no means a necessity for healthy people), to the expense for hospitalization. The latter can frequently be obtained for a hundred dollars or less—though rarely, if ever, in a big city—making the total cost of getting the baby about two hundred dollars. In many parts of the country hospital schemes, into which you make a monthly or yearly payment, make it possible to get two weeks' hospitalization for mother and baby, with semi-private room, use of delivery room, and nursing care, for about ten dollars. This effects an obvious saving, and has done a great deal to bring children within the reach of all. During the first year or so the mother needs to be quite free to call on her doctor for service or advice whenever she wishes. Sometimes the doctor will be glad to arrange a flat charge for a year's attention, say a hundred dollars, or more or less, depending on the family income. Such an arrangement often does the parents a great deal of good, putting their minds at rest, for they feel they can call on the doctor in all reasonable emergencies, ask him all necessary questions, expect periodic visits to their baby, and receive all necessary vaccinations and immunizations for a fee they can afford. The sum may be paid in monthly or quarterly installments.
Money for the child may be saved out of monthly earnings. This well-known phenomenon is called saving for children. Very often the parents of the married couple are glad to help them with the extra expense involved in having their first child. I do not mean by loans—for it is not good for young people to be in debt, even to loving creditors—but by actually undertaking to pay the hospital and the physician. If people are ready for a baby in all other ways and only money keeps them from parenthood, the prospective grandparents often feel it their duty to help in this way. Dr. Josephine Hemenway Kenyon, director of the Health and Happiness Club of Good Housekeeping, has often made the wise suggestion that fathers give, in addition to any other wedding present, a $500 or $1000 bond, called "The Baby Bond," to be kept to meet the expenses of bringing the first baby into the world and protecting its first year of life. This idea appealed so strongly to some parents that Dr. Kenyon went even further, suggesting that young parents who can afford it take out a ten-year endowment policy of $1000 for their thirteen-year-old children, to be available when these children are twenty-three, if needed, to help them start their own families.