How the Fertility Crisis is a Meaning Crisis

And how it might get resolved

Last month, the Wall Street Journal profiled a childless couple in their early 40s who moved to New Orleans “in search of the city’s joie de vivre—and other childless millennials”

With a combined income of $280,000, the couple is able to put about $4,500 a month toward what they hope will be a mid-50s retirement. Another $2,600 pays rent on a sprawling Creole townhouse. The remaining $8,000 or so—much of which they assume would have been eaten up by child-rearing—goes primarily toward enjoying their lives.  

The couple often dines at the city’s upscale restaurants (including two recent $700+ dinners), regularly works out at a high-end wellness center and recently paid cash for a BMW. Edenfield meditates for an hour every morning and works on the novel he’s writing at the local corner bar many nights. For companionship, the couple fosters a rotating cast of Bengal cats. 

“Edenfield takes a class at a holistic wellness center. He is also working on a novel. Photo: Christiana Botic for WSJ”

As you read about this couple and other childless couples in the piece, a few assumptions become clear:

1. Children are viewed first and foremost as an inconvenience and imposition on adults, a suck of time, money, and energy. The explicit goal of these couples is zero unchosen obligations. No kids now and by their mid-50s, no more work either. Just $8,000 a month to put toward “enjoying their lives.”

2. Norms are strongly influenced by your community. The couple above moved specifically to be around other childless millennials. Another couple at the end of the piece describes their wedding party as “friends and family members who they say mostly intend to remain childless.”

3. Couples assume that reaching a certain amount of income or maturity will trigger the desire to have kids, rather than having kids triggering a growth in income and maturity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many never reach this hypothetical income or maturity threshold and thus choose to remain childless.

While people often say that millennials are too poor or too concerned about climate change to have kids, recent data (and this WSJ article) suggest a simpler explanation: they just don’t want to.

#1 and #2 = Kids are a drag

And why don’t they want to? A recent piece by

Johann Kurtz

poses an interesting explanation: having kids (particularly, the sacrifices necessary to raise kids) is low-status in our modern society:

The Enlightenment brought with it not just intellectual, economic, and scientific revolutions - it drove a status revolution. It challenged the dominance of the Church and aristocracy through the elevation of the ideals of equality, freethinking, and meritocracy.

In turn, this emphasis on the moral primacy of meritocracy changed the primary status game from dominance and virtue to success, with those who demonstrated exceptional knowledge or professional skill held in newly high esteem. Importantly, meritocracy is an individualist model of status. The status accrued by a prominent scientist does not necessarily extend to his wife or children.

…

This is relevant because the successful accrual of status through virtue mechanisms requires one to be embedded in a largely static community with shared norms, who appreciate and reward sacrifices made for the group. Conversely, status markers associated with success (wealth, knowledge, skill) attach primarily to the individual and are fungible across groups and geographies, thereby retaining value in less dense networks.

Thus the Enlightenment initially opened up new status opportunities for men (success) whilst undermining those that supported women (virtue). We all have a psychological need for status, and so it was only a matter of time before women demanded access to and participation within success games (education, commerce, politics, even sport). Unfortunately, accruing status through success games is time intensive, and unlike virtue games, trades off directly with fertility.

Over time, this set of status mechanics spread, intensified, and deepened, particularly during the process of urbanization during the Industrial Revolution. Ultimately this culminates in today, when the standard introductory question has become ‘What do you do?’. This is because the most effective way to gauge the status of one’s interlocutor is to understand their level of success within our meritocracy. Unfortunately, ‘I’m a mother’ is not a good answer to this question, because this conveys little status within a success framework, which is usually the operative one. Women are, understandably, hesitant to be continuously humiliated in this way, and will make whatever tradeoffs are necessary to ensure they have a better answer. [bolded emphases all mine].

Two key points there:

1. A wife of a prominent scientist may not share in her husband’s status. This increases pressure to outsource childcare (or skip childbearing altogether) to maintain professional identity and standing.

2. “What do you do?” is the standard question because it helps gauge status in our meritocracy. Stay-at-home Mom is not a winning answer.

Nevertheless, it’s worth mentioning that “parenthood” is viewed differently at different stages.

Lane Scott

added:

Having a family is low-status when you're young but potentially high-status when you're older. When my five children were very young, people treated me like a welfare mom. We were well-off and I had my doctorate before I turned 30, but strangers in the grocery store just assume you're dumb and poor if you have kids when you're young…As soon as my oldest was 12 or 13, however, there was a noticeable change in the pecking order. All of the sudden people were more respectful--I was treated more like a community leader and a matriarch. I think it is actually high-status to be a mother of many children, even outside of religious groups. The status just comes later, after it's clear to people that you've done a good job raising your family, and you've kept your marriage together.” [emphasis mine]

As a young father of young kids, I can confirm that most people assume my wife and I are horrible at family planning.

---

Kurtz closes with some prescriptions that would create more social cohesion (thus incentivizing sacrifices made for the group, such as raising children). One key component would be increasing access to religious education that honors mothers and thus raises their standing in society.

This dovetails with my recent essay about Hannah’s Children by Dr. Catherine Pakaluk. The book compiles interviews with 55 college-educated women who have 5 or more children. While it’s true that wealthier, more educated countries see declining birth rates, Dr. Pakaluk wanted to investigate why some women are bucking the trend and what policy implications that may hold.

Here are some excerpts from my write-up:

The fact is, childbearing’s costs fall disproportionately on women. And what comes out in Pakaluk’s research is that these costs are not primarily financial. They are women’s opportunity costs: their loss of status, professional progress, and identity. Religious communities help frame the value of children to counterbalance the costs all women shoulder. Absent living religious communities, raising a large family can seem a foolish investment.

…

Parenthood is hard. No one disputes that. One narrative in the book brings out how parenthood’s challenges are treated differently than professional pursuits. Danielle, a mother of seven, completed medical school and residency and then, after having her first, decided she wanted to stay home with her kids. She reflected:

I feel like there is sort of an implicit notion [when you have a lot of kids] of like, well, “If things are busy you kind of asked for it.” Which is a really interesting contrast to the years of residency, which I also asked for and also made decisions surrounding. But it was always like I felt the overarching vibe was empathy or just more affirmation, like yeah, [medicine] is worthwhile work . . . a worthy choice. It’s consuming but worthy. [With kids], it’s sort of like, “Well, it’s your life.”

I asked Dr. Pakaluk about this specific phenomenon. We can all agree that difficult things require sacrifice. Why is it that we focus on the upside with professional life and the downside with family life? She replied:

We don’t think having children is valuable or worthwhile . . . We don’t value medicine and bootcamp and the military—these other all-encompassing professions—we don’t value them because they’re costly or because they’re hard. There’s all kinds of things that are hard to do that we don’t value . . . To say something completely absurd for a minute, try to live a functional life as an alcoholic. It’s actually very difficult. There’s an intense level of willingness to suffer . . . but we don’t value living as an alcoholic.

I don’t want to make light of an addiction, but I’m drawing it out. We have no difficulty separating out costs that people willingly take on to do something foolish . . . from the inherent value of the thing. The question is why we don’t value children and childbearing. They are as hard as medicine and the military and climbing a high mountain, but we don’t see them as worth doing.

This is the crux of Pakaluk’s argument. It’s hard for women to prioritize family at the expense of professional accomplishments, recognition, and camaraderie. It’s especially hard to do that when your colleagues don’t view family life as a meaningful commitment. These women who chose big families aren’t acting irrationally. They aren’t brainwashed. They are faced with the same trade-offs as other women, but when they consider the upside, the blessing of another child, they have more weight on that end of the scale than their secular counterparts. They value children more.

There is a type of person that I find difficult as a young parent. They continually dog you about the hard times ahead and imply that, no matter what stage you’re currently in, you have it easy. Just wait til you have a crying infant, just wait til you have to pay for braces, just wait til you have to pay for weddings.

“Little kids, little problems,” til the day you die.

I was talking with a friend about this recently, and he had a different take: “It just gets better. First, he smiled at me, and I thought, ‘This is amazing.’ And then he said ‘Dada’ and it was even better. And now we’re reading Lord of the Rings together, and however much I enjoyed reading it as a kid, it’s 100 times better experiencing it through his eyes now.”

I need more of that talk in my life.

One quote that didn’t make it into the piece challenges this dream of a mid-50s, childfree retirement. Here’s a mother of 5 on the idea that “babies take a lot out of you”:

I have struggled with depression my whole life, and my lowest point, I was living on my own by myself doing things the way I wanted, everything was about me and my brokenness, and I was very lost, and I couldn’t find out why the more focused I was on healing myself the more broken I seemed to become…

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.