Glenda and Kurt had anticipated that Trisha’s birth was going to require changes in their comfortable life style, and they prepared for them: “When Trisha was first born I took about six weeks off work and Glenda took four months off. So we were together a lot right in the beginning.” Following an initial period of testing and turmoil, Kurt and Glenda began performing their Generativity One roles and newly established routines with a high degree of mutual confidence. In time, this came to include Trisha wanting Kurt to give her baths. Whereas some mothers might resent the preference of their daughter for her father’s attention, Glenda viewed this preference with considerable fondness and perhaps some relief. She delighted in the affection expressed by Trisha and Kurt for one another and valued the differences between herself and Kurt.
There seemed to be three essential ingredients in Glenda and Kurt’s relationship that enabled them to establish and maintain the role of Generativity One. First, they exhibited an accepting and generous attitude about competing relationships, possessiveness and competition for attention when their child preferred the other parent in certain settings. Second, there was respect and affection about differences in their individual styles of childrearing. Third, there was a willingness on their part to perform nontraditional roles. We might all learn from the example set by Glenda and Kurt.
Surrogate Parenting: Generativity One Through Impacting the Lives of Children Outside One’s Family
Sometimes we try to have it all: children, a paying job, and some valued project on the side. In other cases, we try to make our project into a paying job by starting a business, turning a hobby into a business, or making our job more meaningful and enjoyable. In other instances, we make the hard decision to forego child-raising and instead invest our time, energy, and generativity in a very special project that directly benefits children who are not “our own.” This apparently is the case with Oprah Winfrey, who made the difficult decision not to have children herself. Instead, as she has noted in many interviews, Oprah reframed her Generativity One pursuits by declaring that she would seek to care for all of the children in the world rather than devote herself to raising her own biological children. Oprah Winfrey, of course, also has a huge project to run—namely her own massive media enterprise. That is enough to keep anyone fully occupied!
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