There is a good deal of swirl in media and in social channels right now about parenting. And I don’t mean the traditional fodder on what it takes or how to be a good parent. I’m talking about whether anyone ought to be one these days. As recently as a few years ago it was a low and consistent buzz. As global conflict and existential concerns over climate change have increased, it’s blossomed into a full throated scream. The term DINKs (Dual Income No Kids) has come to fame via smug Tiktocs about traveling worry free and getting the Costco snacks only they want. The Wall Street Journal joined in. Perhaps the anti-parenting zenith was an article in the New Yorker about the moral question of having children with climate change looming. The millennia of subsistence living, slavery, plague and constant continental warfare preceding today’s world of ubiquitous comfort and consumption were somehow better.
I suspect that the moralizing and theater of the anti-parenting movement is less grounded in the risk of human existence than it is in the very real shifting attitudes towards parenting. Prevailing cultural forces have done the work to paint a picture of parenthood that steals your time, ruins your wellbeing and drains your bank account. It’s not false. It just focuses on the wrong side of the ledger. But I get it. We had three kids in four years in between military deployments. One is severely special needs and requires pre-school age supervision at 17. And almost certainly well beyond. I have a front row view of the difficulty of parenting and an unnatural reality that it will never end for us. Yet, I maintain that it’s the greatest experience of my life. And the truth is that it’s the most scalable of the truly noble and honorable things anyone can do. Not everyone can or should be or has to be a parent. But pretty regular people can create life and be great parents which for most humans will be the most noble thing they can ever do, by far. It’s good, in the most basic of human senses.
The good news for the anti-parenthood tribe is that they’re winning. Since 2007, around the time my wife and I were doing our duty to replace ourselves in the continuation of the human race, birth rates in the U.S. have tanked.
While there is no shortage of economic, political and social drivers behind why more economically developed societies have lower birth rates, there’s something else that’s likely at work here. Because reducing or removing economic or social barriers doesn’t seem to matter. In theory, if the call to be a parent were thriving and there were simply social or economic barriers, then removing them would have an impact. Where birth rates have dropped to the lowest that’s already been tried. And it hasn’t worked. Taiwan started giving six months paid leave to everyone and handing out cash gifts. Hungary tried giving $30k to couples that have three kids. Russia handed out $7k per kid. Austria has 2.5 years of maternity leave as a law. Germany has guaranteed access to daycare. None of it moved the needle. Because the culprit isn’t barriers. It’s demand. And that’s a harder problem.
A 2022 paper by Melissa S. Kearney, Phillip B. Levine, and Luke Pardue in the Journal of Economic Perspectives pulls apart the data. What they found was that it doesn’t really matter which demographic group you look at. Parenting is in decline. Moreover the trend in the U.S. is actually just us catching up to the rest of the developed world in reluctance to parent.
The direct reason is pretty predictable. People aren’t willing to trade their free time away.
The desire to have more leisure time is also reported as the leading reason among adults who said they did not want to have children or were not sure whether they did.
What’s a little more surprising is what’s driving the expectation on how much of an investment parenting takes. And I don’t mean the very real cost of housing and higher education. Instead, kids raised post 70’s and 80’s utopia low parental presence are coming into the parenting age with eyes wide open on just what it takes to be a parent today.
It also seems likely that the cohorts of young adults who grew up primarily in the 1990s or later—and reached prime childbearing years around and post 2007—experienced more intensive parenting from their own parents than those who grew up primarily in the 1970s and 1980s. They would have a different idea about what parenting involves.
This is where the John Haidt books tell us we’re ruining our kids with too much attention and catering to their needs. We’re not giving them enough unstructured time. And we’re harming them as a result. Suicides and mental health statistics are all pretty ugly for today’s youth. And the culprit is some part overbearing parents.
I appreciate the sentiment. I’m a middle aged military vet that feels the ever growing pull down the rabbit hole of believing everyone in the world has gone soft and that the softness is at the route of all the world’s ills. Yet the pull is easily broken when I take a second to honestly account for my parenting experience. And that experience flips a bit of the narrative. It’s not, in fact, parents driving the parenting experience into an unlivable hellscape that makes no one ever want to have kids any more. It’s that actual requirements for parenting today are different than they used to be. And the standards are higher. And that’s the truth.
Take the narrative that parents won’t let their kids do anything on their own for fear of something horrible happening. And that this is some sort of choice that hand wringing parents make unnecessarily. I’ve got news from the front. I’ve never stopped either of my neurotypical kids from riding off on their bikes to hang out with their friends at the age that I used to. I don’t have to. Because they don’t want to. They never leave the house because they don’t need to. Just like we don’t ride across the country on trains or covered wagons any more. Technology has moved us past that. They hang out with their friends online and play video games together. They spend more time with friends than I ever did. But they do at home in plane site of us. There’s zero separation. Nowhere to hide. The quiet existence is dead.
Does anyone not going through this situation understand what it means to parent a 12-year old connected to the entire world at all times through a super computer in their pocket the likes the human world could not imagine for all but 15 years of our existence? See any smart phones in Star Wars? Dune? No. They are incomprehensible to our base imaginations. And while it is easy to say we ought to simply not let our children have them, the honest reality is that is where the world exists today. Without my phone I am no longer in the 2024 world. And our children won’t be either.
But wait…there’s more…
A sports scholarship today is worth over half of the median U.S. family income. That’s much more than it was when I was a kid. Which means the lengths to which normal people are willing to invest is much more. I played two sports in high school. I never went to a camp or played “travel ball” and I was good enough to get interest from colleges in both sports. One of them got me into and paid for my college. The likelihood that I could have done that without camps or paid personal coaches or non-school affiliated travel teams is no longer realistic. Not because crazy parents are wanting to do it. Because if they don’t, their kids can’t compete and play. It sucks.
I have a high school quarterback son. He’s got his own coach I pay. Because if I didn’t he’d be the only kid on his team and probably in his league that doesn’t. And he wouldn’t be able to compete for a spot to play. So guess what I do on Saturday mornings during the off season. It’s not just top billing sports like football, basketball or baseball either. Women’s volleyball, swimming, lacrosse, you name it, there’s a cottage industry of camps, pay tourneys and travel teams that feed the machine. So is it my choice as a parent to participate? In a literal sense, sure. If I want my kid to play and have the same chance I did, it’s not.
Related…without sports, no one like me is getting into a top school any more. Global competition for American top schools has made it exponentially harder .
The reality is that the world has formed in a certain way around modern parents. It has not because we wanted it to or even have any say. It’s formed that way because of social and economic forces outside of our control. And simply opting out of them as a statement of one isn’t possible.
John Haidt isn’t wrong. We’re coddling our kids and over investing in their childhood. And we should stop. And I will. As soon as you and everyone else does. Because otherwise I’m opting my kids out of the modern world. Which brings us back to my original point. We’re not having kids that much any more. Because less people want to have kids. Because free time today is better for those that have it. And the modern parenting experience is far more consuming than it used to be. And it’s not likely to change.
It’s a good time to start asking questions about what the world looks like when the average age of an American is no longer 39 as it is today and it’s 50 like it is in Japan. Or when less than one in seven Americans are under the age of 20. How will it affect reproductive rights? What role does immigration play? How do we fund Social Security? If you think the existential risks of AI and climate change are worth thinking about, the crisis of low birth rates will come decades before either. This is a “my lifetime” problem we have no great answers for.
Some part of the solution is putting a higher social value on parenting than we have right now. I can say with a straight face that becoming a father is the most important and rewarding thing that has ever happened to me. It’s hard. I wish parts of it weren’t what they are. But that’s true of all important things. And a view of where I am with my family today, with humans we’ve created in the house with intellect and creativity and the agency to go forward to live an amazing life of their own is a worthy goal to have. Maybe the worthiest of all. Making that a more common belief is a good first step. And pushing back against any arguments that parenting in any time is immoral is another.
Sean ... I love every word of this! I can so related to this experience of change. I raised kids in both the 80s (Vermont) and 90s (Silicon Valley). Sooooooo much has changed. Exponentially! Load on top of that, being a working Mom, and Oy ... life is so hard! But still ... being a mom is the hardest and most wonderful thing I've done in my life. I wouldn't change it. And I have GRANDCHILDREN now :)
Sean - so much of this resonates with me and where I am with my children and sports. I am right there with you on the coddling of children and over investing in childhood and agree that it needs to stop. And I'll pull my kids out of club sports as soon as everyone else does!