IN THIS WORK I have argued that early Confucian accounts of the role of parent–child relationships in moral cultivation have much to teach us. When compared with philosophers throughout the history of Western philosophy, Confucian philosophers stand alone in recognizing and giving sustained attention to the unique and irreplaceable importance of parent–child relationships in moral cultivation, especially during the earliest years of our lives. Even when compared with the work of contemporary feminist philosophers, some of whom do emphasize the unique value of parent–child relationships, the work of Confucian philosophers stands out for its insistence on the importance of the earliest stages of our development, during the prenatal period and early infancy, and its contention that filial piety—which stems from the right kinds of parent–child relationships—serves as the foundation for nearly every other virtue and moral capacity. The work of early Confucian philosophers is also distinctive when compared with other views, because the Confucians argued that there is a direct relationship between the quality of parent–child relationships and the quality of a society and emphasized the nature and possibility of moral cultivation and how it occurs. They further propose that alongside the highly specific roles mothers play in children’s moral cultivation, other members of a family—including fathers, elder siblings, and grandparents—have identifiable roles as well.
I have argued that in addition to being unique in the history of philosophy both for what they wrote about these topics and for the amount of space they dedicated to them, early Confucian accounts of parent–child relationships, early childhood, and moral cultivation merit our attention because they align with much of what our best contemporary science tells us about the relationship between these areas. At the same time, while several important features of Confucian views of parents, children, and moral cultivation are supported by the most reliable empirical evidence we have on these matters, others can be augmented, amended, or further developed as a result of sustained engagement with this evidence. In arguing for this view and in showing how the sciences can help us improve upon some of the accounts offered by early Confucian thinkers, I have attempted to show how the sciences can inform work in the humanities in some important ways. I have also argued that this task is worthwhile because early Confucian views can serve as a distinctive and helpful resource for promoting policy change as well as social change relating to the family, and because allowing work from the sciences to inform these views helps to make them more readily applicable in a contemporary setting.
Just as I work to show how the sciences can augment work in the humanities, I also aim to show how the humanities can contribute to ongoing efforts to understand and apply what we know about parent–child relationships, early childhood, and moral cultivation. One of the aims of this work is to offer an example of how the humanities can contribute in important ways to our understanding of issues that are often regarded as primarily the domain of fields such as developmental psychology, while also contributing to our efforts to address these issues practically—something often regarded as the domain of public policy. While policy makers often readily draw upon research in the sciences when advocating for certain forms of policy change, they do not often regard the humanities as a helpful resource. The constructive value of work in the humanities for promoting societal change tends to be overlooked, partly as a result of the strong emphasis on policy change (as opposed to other approaches to promoting societal change) and the accompanying emphasis typically placed on the financial benefits of “investing” in programs that support families, especially during the early years of children’s lives. Since the sciences measure outcomes that are often quantifiable, the sciences typically are a more appealing resource when gathering this type of support for policy change.
Following the Confucian view that changes in laws and policies alone are insufficient for bringing about widespread social change (even though, as I argue, they are certainly necessary), in discussing early Confucian views of parent–child relationships, early childhood, and moral cultivation, I offer an example of how work in the humanities can be a resource not only in working for certain forms of policy change but also in relation to the difficult task of promoting social change within individual families, communities, and places of work. There are some good reasons to think that the changes in attitude, belief, and practices that I describe in this work are more difficult to bring about than changes in policy, even when we consider the sometimes almost insurmountable bureaucracy one faces in bringing about policy change. For one thing, working to change the attitudes, beliefs, and practices of individual families and communities in a society requires adapting one’s message for different contexts and audiences, giving them reasons they can relate to and find compelling, and getting individual citizens to reflect critically on themselves and the world around them. In contrast, working for policy change typically involves crafting arguments for smaller, more specific, and more consistently well-educated audiences (e.g., legislators). Perhaps most importantly, though, I have argued in this work that policy change often relies upon social change in important ways. In order for policy changes that take seriously the importance of parent–child relationships to be successful, we need citizens to reconsider their views on how important the early years of children’s lives are and the dramatic and tangible ways in which the right kinds of parental caregiving can shape the entire course of a person’s life. Scientific evidence from successful, evidence-based programs such as the Nurse–Family Partnership and theoretical perspectives such as attachment theory ought to have an important role in convincing citizens and policy makers alike that social change is necessary, but the kinds of stories, anecdotes, approaches, and practices we find in the texts of early Confucianism can also make an important contribution to this process. This is an excellent example of how the humanities can contribute alongside the sciences to our efforts to promote both social change and policy change.
One of the most unique features of Confucian views of parent–child relationships and early childhood development is that they focus on the qualitative difference that loving, supportive parent–child relationships can make in our lives. I have cited the evidence that frequently serves as the most readily given justification for programs, policies, and laws that support parent–child relationships during the earliest years of children’s lives: they lead to a return on the financial investment that is seen in savings to government in areas such as welfare and crime. However, what the early Confucians would focus on is that these children and their parents are leading happier, more fulfilling, and ethically better lives; they exhibit a greater capacity for empathy and are more readily able to imagine themselves in another person’s place, to reflect critically on their decisions, and to stand up to peer pressure. These are things that the humanities seeks to nurture in us, in contrast with disciplines that tend to focus more on profit.
In Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Martha Nussbaum highlights the strong tendency to focus on profit and economic value not only in policy making, but in education—a tendency that is reflected in a steep decline in the percentage of students majoring in the liberal arts and the sciences and a corresponding increase in preprofessional undergraduate degrees. Nussbaum quotes the following observation of former Harvard president Drew Faust: “Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present. Human beings need meaning, understanding, and perspective as well as jobs. The question should not be whether we can afford to believe in such purposes in these times, but whether we can afford not to” (Nussbaum 2010:124). Nussbaum points out that the pressure for economic growth has led many universities—especially in Europe and Britain, but in the United States as well—to pressure disciplines within the humanities whose contribution to profit is not obvious to “emphasize those parts of its own scope that lie closer to profit, or can be made to seem to.” For instance, philosophy departments are in many cases encouraged to
focus on highly applied and “useful” areas, such as business ethics, rather than the study of Plato, or skills of logic and critical thinking, or reflections about the meaning of life—which might ultimately be more valuable in young people’s attempts to understand themselves and their world. “Impact” is the buzzword of the day, and by “impact” the government clearly means above all economic impact. (Nussbaum 2010:128)
This tendency to understand “impact” primarily as economic impact is an expression of the same tendency I have highlighted, whereby the value of “investing” in children and families is measured primarily in economic terms.1
This tendency and the assumptions that motivate it should not go unchallenged. Why should programs that support parents and children demonstrate that they will bring a return on our “investment” in parents and children that is financial in character? One potential response to this question is that a financial return is what demonstrates the effectiveness of a particular program or policy, and it is true that programs that are effective at bringing about improvements in parent–child relationships during the early years of children’s lives often bring a financial return on their investment. At least in some respects, this helps to show that the Confucians were right about the close relationship between the quality of parent–child relationships and many of the larger challenges a society faces. For instance, when breast-feeding mothers are supported and encouraged, more women breast-feed successfully, which helps more infants to avoid illness, and in turn there is less of a burden (financial and otherwise) on a society’s health-care system and on employers, due to fewer employee absences to care for a sick child. Similarly, children and parents who are enrolled in the NFP have fewer encounters with the juvenile and criminal justice system, which, once again, has both financial benefits and benefits concerning the overall safety and desirability of our society. However, it is important to remember that these quantifiable measures of success are not the only measures of success, nor are they the most important ones. Indeed, the financial benefits of successful early childhood intervention programs or policies that support and encourage breast-feeding or provide parents with paid parental leave, though significant, do not represent the biggest changes that are typically seen in the lives of families; even families who are transformed in remarkable ways by the NFP typically are not catapulted from a low-income bracket to the middle class. But this program, as we have seen, brings about changes in the lives of families that are nothing short of extraordinary and that represent the things most of us value more highly than anything else—including, most notably, the experience of being cared for, nurtured, and supported by our families for our own good, and the experience of knowing, by virtue of those expressions of care and support, that we are loved. This is true not only for high-risk families but for other families, too, who experience the benefits of policies as well as social and cultural attitudes and practices that support, encourage, and nurture the relationships between parents and children. We should want to pursue such programs for moral reasons, even if money were no object.
A number of the changes that programs such as the NFP and policies such as mandated paid parental leave bring about in the lives of families can be measured quantifiably, but the most important changes are seen in the quality of the relationship between parent and child and the ways in which this relationship enriches the lives of families and shapes the moral character of both children and their parents. Through the NFP, for instance, as we have seen, many mothers come to feel for the first time in their lives that someone genuinely cares about them. They learn how to show their children that they love and care about them, and those feelings of parental love and affection are nurtured and developed in new ways, in turn giving rise to deeper, more meaningful expressions of love and nurturance for their children; the children, in turn, feel loved and cared for. These things translate into a wide variety of observable, sometimes even quantifiable changes in their lives, but in too strongly emphasizing the quantifiable changes, we often lose sight of the more important changes, such as the experience of being loved and cared for unconditionally and the way in which relationships of love and trust within families contribute to our overall happiness and well-being. We ought to support programs such as the NFP and policies that effectively nurture parent–child relationships not solely or primarily because they are “good investments” financially; we ought to support them because they improve our lives and the lives of our fellow citizens by contributing the most important goods life has to offer—none of which, as most of us know, are financial.
Nussbaum writes that political leaders in the United States often rightly emphasize the importance of making all Americans capable of pursuing the “American dream.” But as she points out, “The pursuit of a dream requires dreamers: educated minds that can think critically about alternatives and imagine an ambitious goal—preferably not involving only personal or even national wealth, but involving human dignity and democratic debate as well” (Nussbaum 2010:137). Nussbaum argues for the crucial importance of the humanities but notes that they do not make money: “They only do what is more precious than that, make a world that is worth living in, people who are able to see other human beings as full people, with thoughts and feelings of their own that deserve respect and empathy, and nations that are able to overcome fear and suspicion in favor of sympathetic and reasoned debate” (143). In light of my argument in this work, I would add that the pursuit of the American dream requires that the hearts and minds of all of our children be prepared for the kind of formal education Nussbaum argues for, which includes the development of their capacities to think critically about and feel empathically for others in their own society and throughout the world. This is something that can only occur if they are nurtured in the right ways during the earliest years of their lives—and throughout their childhood—by loving, supportive relationships with their parents and families. This kind of nurturance depends upon parents recognizing and taking an active interest in the unique and irreplaceable role they have in their children’s moral development.
Here, we can begin to see more clearly how the humanities can make a distinctive contribution to our efforts to promote social change. My argument is that in addition to highlighting and supporting the evidence-based policies that our best science recommends, we need to reflect on and communicate the most important goods that come from nurturing parent–child relationships during the early years of children’s lives—the goods that many works in the humanities highlight for us. In this work, I have argued that more than any other tradition or philosopher, early Confucian thinkers communicate these goods to us in moving, vivid ways that speak to the heart, prompt reflection, and inspire change. As the opening lines of the Great Learning say,
Those of antiquity who wished that all people throughout the empire would let their inborn luminous virtue shine forth put governing their states well first; wishing to govern their states well, they first established harmony in their households; wishing to establish harmony in their households, they first cultivated themselves.2