The family firm: parent and child
Phillipe Aries (1962), the noted historian of childhood, linked parental investment in children to the infant mortality rate. Thus parents could not afford, emotionally or otherwise, to become attached to children, or to allow childhood to develop as a separate stage of life, until most children would live to adulthood, becoming economic advantages for their parents.
The British jurist Blackstone (1765), writing in the eighteenth century, writes of an implicit contract between parents and children, one in which parents supply the child’s material wants and educate the child (morally as well as intellectually) in return for current obedience and wages and, later in life, support in the parents’ old age. This implicit contract becomes the basis for the legal system which protects the child during minority, gives the parent control over education, discipline and training, promotes the ‘best interests of the child’, allows the parent to consent to the child’s marriage before majority, and places the duty of the aged parents’ support on the adult child. Rubin et al. (1979) tie this set of reciprocal duties to holdings in land, supposing that there will be more parental investments in a child’s human capital as eventual inheritance of the family farm stops being an important inducement to adhere to the implicit contract. Because their children cannot adequately fend for themselves, parents act as fiduciaries for them (Scott and Scott, 1995), with many of the principal-agent problems that relationship typically produces (Cooter and Freedman, 1991).Once the children are born, as rational beings they manoeuvre to increase their share of the scarce resources of parental attention (Anderson and Tollison, 1991). The state assumes some of the functions that are difficult for parents to perform if they expect, as part of an implicit contract, to be provided for in their own old age by the children they now raise (Becker and Murphy, 1988).
Not only the state, but parents as well, invest in the children’s specific capital, attempting to forge bonds that will reward the parent in dotage (Becker, 1993; Brinig, 1994b). On the other hand, if they do not expect to have adult relationships with their children, parents may dissipate this most valuable human resource through abuse and neglect (Brinig and Buckley, 1999b). Cox and Stark (1993) say that parents may use their own behaviour towards ageing parents to model the way they would like to be treated by their children.Alternatively, some of what parents do may be seen as a biological response to the drive towards prolonging the species. Epstein (1989) uses biology to account for differences in child rearing by men and women as well as the investments parents make, while Bergstrom (1995) uses it to explain the difference in felt duty towards children versus other relatives, and Jones (1997) explains step-parent abuse through the absence of a biological tie with the child in question. Becker, in a series of famous papers, writes of the tradeoff between time or other resources parents spend on children and the number of children a family has (Becker and Lewis, 1973; Becker and Tomes, 1976). Two recent papers cast some doubt that biology can drive all of the parental relationship. Seltzer (1998) describes fathers’ relationships with children as being dependent on the man’s relationship with the children’s mother: once the father begins a new relationship, it is that woman’s children that are most important to him, sometimes to the exclusion of the man’s own offspring. Likewise, a number of family law scholars, including Woodhouse (1992, 1996) and Bartlett (1984), write of parent substitutes who assume the reciprocally fulfilling roles of parents in children’s lives. Lupu (1994) and Brinig (1995a) describe parents as complementary factors in the children’s upbringing: Lupu from a political science (balance of powers) perspective; Brinig from an economic one.