Over the past few months, several articles have been on our radar that seem to be mulling over different versions of the same question: what does our culture say about children?
One of these was a viral NY Magazine essay by Allison Davis about how children tend to kill adult friendships. She’s musing about how kids can form a wedge between previously tight-knit friend groups and that those of her friends who’ve decided to have kids somehow automatically become “less cool.”
Digging a little deeper, the issue Davis is really getting to is less about friendships and more about becoming (gasp) ordinary or, worse, her version of boring. She prefers those who continue living in their 30s and 40s the way they did in their 20s and criticizes the friends who accept that life has different seasons.
She’s not the first to lament that kids tend to “get in the way” of how they were accustomed to living life—tidy apartments or living rooms, the ability to spontaneously meet for dinner or stay out partying. You know, the “cool stuff.” Sure, some child-free folks DO travel the world, have exotic vacations, and have Coachella on their annual calendar. But the majority? The majority in their 30s and 40s are juggling the same 40+ hour work week as the rest of us and find they’re a lot happier and healthier having a do-nothing weekend at home in their sweats than running with the bulls in Pamplona.
There’s an ancient worldview that frames family as central to –not just happiness, but purpose. From the beginning of creation to the saga of Abraham (the father of 3 major world faiths), (& the whole context of Christianity where Christ uses language of the church as His bride and the church as brothers/sisters/family), God concentrates with laser focus on a household. It is of ultimate importance that we learn to relate well to our spouses and our offspring. It’s precisely these relationships in the context of family that can (and should) speak volumes to the world about the kind of God we serve.
So what are critics like Davis offering in the place of the patently “uncool” idea of family? A philosophy that gives highest importance to fun? To narcissism? Are we really to believe that racking up workplace trophies or having a girls’ night out is the reason we’re on this earth?
Jim Dalrymple, in an IFS article, says flat out that adopting this vaguely anti-child worldview also likely means a harder life. We know, for example, that an overwhelming majority of parents describe their experience as enjoyable. Parents live longer than the childfree. And adult children have traditionally served as caretakers of their aging parents—something that is exceedingly important at a time when loneliness has reached epidemic proportions among the elderly.
In this context, it’s hard to see how being someone’s version of uncool really matters. Instead of listening to those voices that might make parents question their choices, think that they’ve “given up everything” or “lost themselves” once they brought children into the world, we shouldn’t forget that those voices are relatively new, however loud they seem.
Instead of justifying our “coolness” via social media or continuing to live like a pre-formed college kid, it’s a sign of wisdom and maturity that you’re reaching new milestones, growing and caregiving for another, flexing muscles that serve your soul instead of your Tik Tok reel.
Becoming a parent certainly CHANGED our life, but it didn’t DERAIL it.
Being happy or cool or interesting is not life’s purpose. It’s a collateral benefit of leading a full life, of partaking in core human experiences—of which having a family looms larger than pretty much anything else.
It’s a false choice to frame the choice to have kids or not as family versus self or kids versus fun. These are not inherently opposites and ALSO not equally purposeful worldviews.
Another recent article by Stephanie Murray (the Atlantic, Jan 31, 2025), gets at this in a slightly different way… Murray looks at the way we talk about children as a category of humans.
We’ve said offhandedly on the podcast before that we “don’t like babies” (except our own) or that we weren’t as comfortable with the baby stage…
Maybe you’re one of those people who’ve said similar things: “I don’t like kids” or “I hate kids.” Most of the time, what we ACTUALLY mean is that we don’t like the way people’s kids behave or we don’t like the way we imagine kids “interfere” with our own schedule, desires, selves.
When we say we “don’t like” kids, it’s usually because we’re irritated by them in public or at family gatherings—they’re loud, they’re messy and needy.
But Murray asks us to pause & think about what we’re saying. This sort of language is essentially assigning children as “objects,” the same way you’d talk about sushi or Teslas. But kids aren’t objects.
We know words matter & language matters. When we talk about children this way (and this fits into the worldview that Davis was complaining about in the earlier article), it does reinforce a view of children as somehow “other.”
We don’t do this with other categories of people….we understand it’s wrong. We don’t say, for example, “I don’t like old people” or “I don’t like Asian people.” But people talk about children this way all the time. It’s a way of dismissing kids as a matter worthy of their concern.
If they’re not “mine,” then I can feel annoyed when “one of them” throws a tantrum in a restaurant. I do not bear any responsibility for this “other category”.
Of course it’s not the greatest when there’s a crying kid behind you on the airplane. But—as an adult—do we have a societal responsibility for how we engage with and accommodate children?
Whether you should help a blind person cross a busy road has nothing to do with whether you “like” or “dislike” blind people. What we owe our fellow humans—regardless of their life stage or abilities is a moral issue, not a preference issue.
Murray suggests that if you find yourself about to say you don’t like kids, swap in another group of people and see whether that feels like an acceptable thing to say. If not, think about what you’re really trying to say about your fellow humans.
This plays into the wedge that tends to come between parents & non-parents… we should all be on the same team here as humanity. (as far as our public policy is concerned, etc… which is why our collective tax dollars are used for public schools, not only the taxes of parents… the outcome of children affects us all).
Louise Perry has a podcast called Maiden, Mother, Matriarch, and in episode 121 she interviewed Johann Kurtz, who proposed that there is, in fact, an under-appreciated fundamental cause of [declining fertility trends across the Western world], which manifests in the form of different proximate causes (real and imagined) across different geographies and times.
This fundamental cause is status.
Specifically, I contend that the basic epistemological assumptions which underpin modern civilization result in the net status outcome of having a child being lower than the status outcomes of various competing undertakings, and that this results in a population-wide hyper-sensitivity to any and all adverse factors which make having children more difficult, whatever these may be in a given society.”
His article is well worth the read and it’s entitled It’s Embarassing to be a Stay-at-Home Mom. 🙂
In such a paradigm, if a tradeoff is to be made between having children and another activity which results in higher status conferral (an example would be ‘pursuing a successful career’ for women) then having children will be deprioritized. Because having and raising children is inherently difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, these tradeoffs are common, and so the act of having children is commonly and widely suppressed.
Here it is worth defining terms. What is status?
Status, or ‘social status’, is a key field within sociology. The term denotes a universal set of human instincts and behaviors. Status describes the perceived standing of the individual within the group. It denotes their social value and their place within the formal and informal hierarchies which comprise a society. It finds expression in the behaviors of deference, access, inclusion, approval, acclaim, respect, and honor (and indeed in their opposites – rejection, ostracization, humiliation, and so forth).
Higher status individuals are trusted with influential decisions (power), participation in productive ventures (resources), social support (health), and access to desirable mates (reproduction).
Gaining status is a motivation for each individual to productively participate in society. Status is gained and maintained through approved behaviors (achievement, etiquette, defending the group) and through the possession of recognized ‘status symbols’ (titles, wealth, important physical assets).
For the group, status has utility when coordinating social actions: it serves as a proxy measure for attributes like probable competence, leadership capacity, and virtue.
As Will Storr describes in ‘The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It’:
We play for status, if only subtly, with every social interaction, every contribution we make to work, love or family life and every internet post. We play with how we dress, how we speak and what we believe. We play with our lives – with the story we tell of our past and our dreams of the future. Our waking existence is accompanied by its racing commentary of emotions: we can feel horrors when we slip, even by a fraction, and taste ecstasy when we soar.
As an explanatory factor, status has the advantage of being a relative – as opposed to absolute – attribute. Ascribing primary explanatory status to any absolute factor is challenging because almost all material factors have improved over the last two centuries, while fertility has dropped. It is difficult to make a straightforward economic argument that millennials can’t have children for financial security reasons when their ancestors had a higher fertility rate while living in far greater poverty (and had such medical and food insecurity that they would have expected several of their children to die in childhood).
Let us turn to the first of the small number of European and Asian countries which defy wider fertility trends. This is the country of Georgia, which sits at the intersection of the two continents, with a population of about four million.
In the mid 2000s, Georgia spiked its birth rate, which went from ~50,000 to ~64,000 over the course of two years – a 28% increase, which it sustained for many years. The country went from poor to replacement-level fertility, and it did so without spending more money or changing policy. What caused this?
The evidence points to an unusual factor: a prominent Patriarch of the popular Georgian Orthodox Church, Ilia II, announced that he would personally baptize and become godfather to all third children onwards. Births of third children boomed (so much so, in fact, that it eclipsed continuing declines in first and second children).
This has widely been understood as a religious phenomenon, but I propose that it is better understood as a status phenomenon. Becoming associated with a celebrity figure who becomes, in some sense, an intimate part of your family is an event which is primarily attractive because of our desire to be elevated in status.
There is considerable evidence that people emulate celebrity fertility trends more generally. Individuals with high-status who become parents cause others to follow suit (which is why Taylor Swift’s pregnancy status is so carefully followed). The prevalence of out-of-wedlock births among celebrities likely played a key role in normalizing the practice for the general population, which followed their lead.2 This is to be expected: it has long been known that fertility is subject to strong mimetic effects, and that – even controlling for other factors – an individual’s chances of having a child significantly increase after a close friend has one.3
The implications of these dynamics are likely also true in the negative: celebrities and friends prioritizing other pursuits over having children probably suppresses fertility. Status is to be found elsewhere.
https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/its-embarrassing-to-be-a-stay-at
Ultra-orthodox Jews have birthrates of up to 7 children per woman, even in the middle of major Western cities. The Amish also show the dramatic effects of a pro-natal subculture. While rural women, in general, have a TFR of around 2.08, Pennsylvania Dutch-speaking women without a phone have an incredible rate of 7.14. This is a fertility rate higher than Niger while living in the United States.
The ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of the incredible fertility levels of these particular communities bear more examination, and to this I will shortly return. It is not merely that they are ‘very religious’. There is something particular about their cultural isolation and the structure of their social constitution which facilitates birthrates that other religious groups could only dream of. Spoiler: it concerns unique social mechanisms available for elevating the status of parents.