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They believe that the sustained effect of living with needy young children for an extended period of life fosters other-regarding virtues necessary for egalitarianism and civic friendship: empathy, generosity, solidarity, and self-denial. Like Hannah, my subjects typically described a life of religious seriousness in which they allowed their beliefs about God and the meaning of life to shape their own hearts and desires. Finally, like Hannah, they had adopted a posture of openness to children as a way of life and not a mere season.
The contrast calls to mind the two ways of life highlighted by Hannah: fitting oneself into a narrative of childbearing versus fitting children into a narrative of the self.
Looking back to the Founding era, he notes that if something like rugged individualism characterized the American temperament, it was a feature of the household rather than the individual man or woman.
The shift [in how people viewed their marriages] was part of a broader increase in expressive individualism in American culture—the kind of individualism that involves growing and changing as a person, paying attention to your feelings, and expressing your needs. Expressive individualism encourages people to look inward to see how they are doing, and it encourages them to want personal growth throughout adulthood. It is not incompatible with lifelong marriage, but it requires a new kind of marriage in which the spouses are free to grow and change and in which each feels personally fulfilled.
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Finally in 2017, the demographers looked at the same relationships going back to 1968 and forward through the Trump election of 2016. They showed that “the spatial patterns of . . . [family demographics] and voting start converging in the 1990s,” with a steady and “substantial correspondence after 2000 and continuing through the latest 2016 elections. More specifically, after the turn of the century, correlations were observed between [0.83] and [0.90] for no less than 5 successive elections.”18 These
Children can be an economic benefit to a household in two primary ways: by providing labor or wages to the family when they are still young, mostly a thing of the past, and by providing support and care for aging, retired parents. A guaranteed pension will tend to reduce the interest in having enough children of one’s own to rely on in old age. Births will go down. This is not a mere theory: Italian scholars Alessandro Cigno and Furio Rosati estimated that “as much as three-quarters of the reduction in the total fertility rate which occurred in Italy between 1930 and 1984 can be ascribed to
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At the root of the Malthusian paradigm is the idea that people are a problem to be solved.
Malthusian-inspired eugenics infected American leaders in the Progressive Era, informing immigration policy and labor proposals such as the minimum wage, pitched to keep “the most ruinous” people from competing for jobs by working for low pay.
Resource pressures that arise from population growth, far from spelling doom, lead to substitution, discovery, and innovation through human ingenuity. Forego the resource pressures, forego the new sources of abundance.
Economic demographer Lyman Stone wrote in 2018 that across countries “there is no association between increases in family benefits and fertility. . . . Nordic-style policies just don’t budge fertility all that much. Similar results show up for other Nordic countries. While some policy interventions do have limited, especially short-term, effects, the average Nordic-style policy intervention doesn’t do very much for age-adjusted fertility.”38
It has been the universal observation of political economists and historians that fertility cannot be encouraged by policy, even if it can be very successfully discouraged.
Worse still, the fertility gap itself may be related to the phenomenon called “the paradox of declining female happiness.” In a 2009 paper, labor economists Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers documented that subjective measures of women’s happiness have been declining since 1970, both absolutely, and also relative to men.47 The scholars stated that “this decline in relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, demographic groups, and industrialized countries.”48
Hannah Arendt, wrote that “the miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the tact of natality. . . .” She continued, “It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope. . . .”
The relevant obstacle to choosing a child, they said, was the cost of missing out on the other things you could have done with your time, your money, or your life.
They believe the nation would be happier and more virtuous if we spent more of our adult lives taking care of children—and if our children grew up with more siblings. Taken together, these narratives sorely challenge family policy prescriptions, particularly pro-natalist policies. Cash incentives and tax relief won’t persuade people to give up their lives. People will do that for God, for their families, and for their future children. If you want to find a policy angle to improve the birth rate, expanding the scope for religion in people’s lives is the most viable path. Make it easier for
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She surmised that being needed protects children from depression. She’s probably on to something. High levels of social connectedness reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression in children and adults.7
Their reasons for wanting children more frequently led to a posture of openness towards children, rather than to one of demand for children. Kim used the language of “just whatever, open to it all the time” and Miki found herself “open to three.”
Only 40 percent of female faculty are married with children within twelve years of Ph.D. receipt, compared with 70 percent of their male colleagues.
Shaylee also mentioned a point that Kim had raised: growing up she was needed more than normal, even for a large family, since her dad became disabled. She didn’t look back with resentment. She “liked it” and believed that it shaped her character in a fundamental way.
One of my funny stories is that I just had [my daughter], so of course I have this postpartum body (and baby) and I was chosen as the, well every senior gets looked at for how well they did on their strength and conditioning work and how much it affected their sport. And I won that, which is the, it’s big ’cause it’s every athlete from every sport at [my college] whose strength and conditioning, weightlifting, whatever affected their sport the most, over the four years. And so, I walk up to receive the award looking nothing like the strength and conditioning winner. But I did.
But I know at a certain point it was more me saying omigosh I’m so overwhelmed. . . . And my husband is more laid back and more fun, and he’d just be, ‘You’re doing great, you’re doing great.’
I think once that clicked for me it was more, okay, whatever, we can just . . . let babies come when they want to come. . . . If I start to panic about not being ready, “I’m having a baby, I’m not ready,” they really just need . . . a boob and an outfit. So—me and an outfit—and we’re good.
Kids couldn’t make your marriage worse: kids were the meaning of a marriage, the “fruit of your love.”
[For me] I could care less if my kids are happy. That’s their job. You figure that out. Like you need to find out what makes you happy and you got to go out and find that. I’m happy to give you whatever tools you need. I’m happy to give you whatever instruction to help you out. But that’s, that’s on you.
Baby bonuses and subsidies don’t work because they aren’t the kind of incentive needed to tip the scale in favor of taking on big-ticket sacrifices and commitments. Incentives like that have to be big—big enough to give you a reason to die to yourself.
When it comes to having a child, for a woman, that weight is her whole self. That is what she “gives up,” in a sense, placing herself at the service of a new life. What can answer the weight of your whole self? Rightly only someone you love as much as your own self: God, your spouse, and your children. This is the simple reason that it is easier for policymakers to discourage fertility than to encourage it. The real resources to have a child never can come from the state.
“We teach our children that the Lord delights in them. I also want them to have that borne out in their experience . . . to just have that unwavering sense of like, ‘I’m for you. I’m for you.’”
Their goodness didn’t mean desiring children for the sake of having them but having them for the sake of desiring them. Stated otherwise: children give love, but they also call forth love, and the latter is the greater gift.
And if we can sacrifice our living offspring for the sake of school, income, or a profession, why not sacrifice merely potential offspring for the same?
people need to be awakened to that because you don’t have to have a lot of means to do it. They don’t have a lot of means and they’re making it work. Love is what it takes.
“When [my son] came along, I felt like I had somebody with me, and he was precious and perfect, and it just felt like it was what I was designed for. It’s hard to describe that feeling of peace and joy and fulfillment, even just in the very beginning of motherhood.”
children are taught that you have answers within yourself and to follow your own heart. And that doesn’t lead to happiness because feelings in your own heart are so changing and each person doesn’t have the wisdom to know the future, to know their own needs in the long run and what’s good for them.
Angela’s imagery suggests a family table crowded with children, and a mother and father seeing an open door for Sunday visitors as the moral equivalent of welcoming another child to that table. Looking back, I wish I had asked her whether openness to immigrants might also be connected to welcoming children—but perhaps she answered it already: “Almost everyone I grew up with is Irish or Italian.”
But I think we often mistake freedom with free choice. We often mistake freedom with license, freedom with the ability to choose anything from an infinite possibility of choices and I don’t think that conforms to reality at all. There’s always limits in our choices. And the first limit in our choice should be morality, actually. So, any choice outside of a moral choice is not free. That’s slavery. At least that’s what Christianity says, right?
freedom is conformity to God, not conformity to my own whims and desires.
and watching soccer.” Good thing, too. When I asked her what children needed for a happy childhood, she answered without skipping a beat: “I think they need their mothers. I think they need their mothers. More than anything. I don’t think they need a giant institutionalized day-care system. I don’t think they need a preschool. I think they need their mothers. That’s it.”
Because the cost was worth it to her, she had become a self for another self. “Like valuing children first,” she said, “the family unit being the priority above career and personal identity.” She defined her purpose and meaning by other persons—not things, not goals, not accomplishments. And not persons in general, “mankind in general,” as Dostoyevsky said,1 but specific people: her own children. They were the meaning of her self.
I couldn’t help but wonder if one of the unseen human costs of the birth dearth has been the warping of the teenage years into a muddled state of insecurity, anxiety, depression, and self-centeredness. What if none of that is biologically determined?
“Give to the Most High as he has given to you, and as generously as you can afford. For the Lord is the one who repays, and he will repay you sevenfold.”
Having a child doesn’t cost only so many diapers and so much baby food—it costs the gap between what a mom will earn working part-time and what she might have earned with uninterrupted work and an advanced degree.
Hannah and Esther, chapter 13, talked about the way “your love grows,” and seeing “amazing miracles,” and big blessings that “so far outweigh” the difficulties. Danielle, chapter 14, insisted that “the dividends are there too.” Steph, chapter 15, wanted to answer the rude lady in Goofy’s Kitchen by saying, “This is where the joy is.” For Jenn, chapter 16, God had fulfilled his promise of “plans to prosper her,” and “it was just perfectly planned out, the ones that we have.” She also said, “They provide their own therapy. They love you to death too.” And Leah, chapter 18, testified that “my
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what I think is, “I need to think about me and my goals.” Jesus Christ said, “No, you need to go outward, give your life to me and serve others and you’ll find your life.”
The women quietly defying the birth dearth believe that childbearing is worth doing, not as a limited phase of life but as a way of life. Motherhood requires self-sacrifice, they say, “to the breaking point at times.” But they also believe that God has blessed them by their children, in ways that evade human design and expectation.
Apart from the drama of self-sacrifice and reward, my subjects thought that the value of children proved itself over time. Babies better lives and love disinterestedly. They bring healing that no one else can bring. The mothers in my sample, reasoning from their own experiences, believe that the character of the nation has suffered from its dearth of children.
It was when I stopped looking in myself and started looking at these humans and started loving these people so much, and them and their suffering, and worrying about what they were going through, I started healing.
What effect do babies have on the well-being of children and adults? It’s a hard question to begin to answer, especially given the difficulties of establishing causality in health and social sciences. There is no randomized controlled trial we can run. Still, while many will point to our broken economy, divided politics, declining religion, or social media as causes of our mental health calamity, it is well worth examining a cause that nobody seems to have considered: Is the absence of babies in our midst partly to blame? I can attest that there are no teams of elite researchers scrambling to
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“Only the full experience of [natality] can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence,” wrote Hannah Arendt in 1958. “It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has been born unto us.’”
Religion isn’t truly free if it can’t effectively assist families in passing on faith and tradition to their children. So, by “thick” religious liberty I mean, at a minimum, emancipating religious institutions to collaborate with parents in the work of education. The massive system of “free” public education—a government cartel designed to compete against religious schools—represents a drastic violation of religious liberty. Fewer than 7 percent of American schoolchildren attend religious schools.13
This summarizes so well why, if we want to see birth rates increase and families become stronger, we need universal school choice.
