WHY NOT A CHILDRENS'S DAY?

There is perhaps nothing more written about, loved upon, and worried over than our children. Ever since Cain and Abel, parents have come to learn they can be the source of enormous joy and staggering sorrow. Often at the very same time. Which is why it's strange that with annually prominent Mothers Days and Fathers Days, we have no Childrens Day....!

Still, we do spend a great deal of time thinking about them.There are at least four trajectories of thought on the matter:
* At first the Greeks and later the Bible laboriously pore over the stories of archetypes like Electra (who takes Fathers Day much too seriously), Oedipus (who gets carried away celebrating Mothers Day), and Moses (the quintessential Jewish-boy-succeeds story). Shakespeare's "King Lear" and later Freud's psychoanalysis further plumb the filial depths.

When you read these guys you can't help do some serious introspecting about this sex thing. What at first seems so much fun brings with it more morning-after issues than any morning-after pill can ever handle!

* Evolutionists have come to understand us as essentially existing and evolving for one purpose -- our own reproduction. In this muted light, our species is hardly distinguishable from any other populating the planet. We're born to live, grow, mate and breed our own kind. Period. Exclamation point. End of story. And of any gushy Mothers or Fathers Day cards
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Personally, I've stopped reading Darwin and his successors. Right and brights as they may be, I can't quit look at my wife as simply the plumpest ovaries in the jungle, or my kids as merely the ordained genetic results of a one-night genetic compulsion. I guess I'll just have to evolve a few layers more to handle that!

* Victorians, ironically in the same19th century of Darwin and Freud , decided to swing in a different direction. Maybe it was Charles Dickens's poignant Tiny Tims and orphaned Olivers, but gradually children were seen as something more than just little adults. Enriched by the graphic sentiments of such as Currie & Ives, Norman Rockwell, and Hallmark, childhood blossomed into a sainted little garden of protected life.

Enter the Anglo-American legendary joys of Christmas and all things children. This opulent festival of gift-giving has pretty much become our Childrens Day; and when you're a kid or a grandparent, who's going to argue it!

* Finally, in our own times, children have become more than the subject of great narratives and grand gifts. To today's generation, they are the subject of study. By pediatricians, statisticians, and especially editors of the 104 current parents magazines that bulge from out of checkout counters and doctor's offices. And what's most amazing about their endless studies is that most of them comes down to some variety of "10-easy-steps-for.....".

Among such recent offerings is this latest from DePauw University which has researched the marital history of 600 adults. Observation...? "Of those frequently photographed as smiling in childhood, only 11% have ever been divorced.: Conclusion....? "Overall, people who rarely smile in their childhood are five times more likely to get divorced."

This and other such epic examples of current research leave one breathless. Perhaps we have at last reached the pinnacle of our long parenting progress through history. Greeks, Darwin, Dickens and Santa be damned -- the real reason we have children is so we can turn them over for publishable study.