Kid

Better Kids

Last Updated Aug 20, 2008 09:24 AM

What father or mother does not dream of a good life for his or her child? What parents would not wish to enhance the life of their kids, to make them better people, to help them live better lives? Such wishes and intentions guide much of what all parents do for and to their kids. To help our kids on their way and to make them strong in body and in mind, we feed and clothe them, see that they get rest, fresh air, and exercise, and take great pains regarding their education. Beyond ordinary schooling, we give them swimming and piano lessons, enroll them in Scouts or Little League, and help them acquire a variety of skills—artistic, intellectual, and social. In addition, we try to develop their character, educate their tastes and sensibilities, and nurture their spiritual growth. In all of these efforts we are guided, whether consciously or not, by some notion or other of what it means to improve our kids, of what it means to make them better.

Needless to say, the thing is easier said than done. Rearing kids is work only for the brave. kids can be recalcitrant, outside influences can corrupt, and even the best of efforts may not bear good fruit. But even apart from the practical difficulties, the very aspiration of “producing better kids” is hardly trouble-free, even for parents and teachers with the best of intentions. For it is easier to wish whole-heartedly that our kids be improved than it is to know what that would mean. For what, exactly, is a good or a better child?

Is it a child who is more able and talented? If so, able in what and talented how? Is it a child with better character? If so, having which traits or virtues? More obedient or more independent? More sensitive or more enduring? More daring or more measured? Better behaved or more assertive? Is it a child with the right attitude and disposition toward the world? If so, should he or she tend more toward reverence or skepticism, high-mindedness or toleration, the love of justice or the love of mercy? As these questions make clear, human goods and good humans come in many forms, and the various goods and virtues are often in tension with one another. Should we therefore aim at balanced and “well-rounded” kids, or should we aim also or instead at genuine excellence in some one or a few dimensions? It is not easy to answer. Yet absent knowledge regarding these matters, acting on the laudable intention of producing better kids can be a tricky, not to say dangerous, business.

This is especially true because of a second difficulty, one derived not from the ambiguity of “good” or “better” but from the ambiguity that is at the heart of being a child. kids much more than adults are, so to speak, double creatures: they are both who they are here-and-now and, at the same time, they are also creatures on the way to maturity and adulthood. To be a child means “to-be-not-yet,” means to be “on-the-way-up,” growing up, maturing, reaching toward one’s prime. Yet to be a child is also to enjoy a special time of our lives, with special gifts, possibilities, and opportunities, and—in comparison with adulthood—with a relatively carefree existence. Childhood is that stage of life justly celebrated as most innocent, open, fresh, playful, wondering, unself-conscious, spontaneous, and honest: “out of the mouths of babes.” This “doubleness” of childhood is responsible for the notorious paradox of parenthood: we love our kids unconditionally, just as they are, yet we are constantly doing everything in our power to get them to be different, to change for the better. Not content just to appreciate them in their childish glory, we labor to educate them, to lead them out of childhood, and to draw from them those latent but still largely dormant powers and virtues they do not as yet have or have not yet expressed. The task is made still more paradoxical once we remember the most important improvement we seek to promote: their ability to do without our educative meddling, to take the reins of their own chariots, and, in the best case, to repay the debt they owe us by doing the same for the next generation.

This delicate process of rearing the young, supporting and savoring them as they are while coaxing and directing them toward what they might well become, requires special attention to the means of improvement. As hard as it may be to say with confidence what we mean by “a better child,” it is equally difficult to select the proper means. Even were we to agree that it were desirable that our kids be well-behaved, excellent in their studies, or able to handle disappointment, there are tough questions about which means are best suited to these ends. The use of some means might actually undermine the goal, especially if they achieve their effect without demanding effort or engagement of the child himself; having a child do his arithmetic homework with a calculator will get him the right answers without teaching him long division. Also, the availability of new and attractive means that facilitate one-sided pursuits of a partial goal (for example, superior athletic or academic performance) can threaten the overall goal of rearing: to enable our kids to flourish as autonomous adults who can think and act for themselves, learn from adversity, and meet life’s vicissitudes with resilience and self-confidence.

These enduring perplexities regarding our aspiration for better kids now deserve our thematic and heightened attention. The reason: new biotechnologies, present and projected, are providing new and allegedly powerful means for improving our kids. Thinking about these possibilities invites us to examine our existing practices and purposes, even as we try to figure out what is new and how it matters.

In most of our efforts to assist our kids’s development, we proceed through speech and symbolic deed, using praise and blame, reward and punishment, encouragement and admonition, as well as habituation, training, and ritualized activities. Yet nature sets limits on what can be accomplished by education and training alone. No matter how much we try to help, the tone-deaf will need more training to learn to carry a tune, the short will be less likely to excel at basketball, the irascible will have trouble restraining their tempers, and the insufficiently smart will remain handicapped for competitive college admissions. If the inborn “equipment” is faulty, or even only normally limited and hence inadequate for realizing some human purposes, it is inviting to think about improving the native powers or the efficacy of their expression and use. For whether we like it or not, certain desired improvements in our kids will be possible, if at all, only by improving their native equipment.

Even before the coming of the present age of biotechnology, we have used technological adjuncts to improve upon nature’s gifts. We give our kids supplementary vitamins, fluoridated toothpaste, and, where necessary, corrective lenses or hearing aids. We even use biological means of improving their limited human capacity to resist disease: we immunize our kids against polio, diphtheria, and measles, among other infectious diseases, by injecting them with attenuated viruses and bacteria in the form of vaccines. But the scope of these now-routine kinds of biomedical improvement has until now been limited to restoring or protecting our kids’s health in a quite straightforward sense.

It is here where some truly novel biotechnologies enter the picture. According to some predictions, our ability to improve our kids’s native endowments may soon take a quantum leap, thanks to prospects for genetically engineered improvements of native human powers and drug-assisted improvements in their use. It is these prospects—for so-called “designer babies” and for drug-enhanced kids—that we shall consider in the present chapter. The technologies differ widely, so that they are rarely considered together. Yet once seen in the context of the common goal, “better kids,” they raise overlapping and similarly profound ethical and social issues—especially about the significance of procreation, the nature of parental responsibility, and the meaning of childhood.

See also Kid 612 1 - 9