As a pediatric physician parent of 4 who took 11 years off to raise the children, I found there is no accomplishment that is as fulfilling as being able to raise a child. My self, my identity, my financials and my status took second place. It was a relief freely to give and what I got in return was more than I ever expected. I found like- minded parents, and have a supportive husband, and have no regrets. Previous to children, I was ambitious and driven, after I became a better physician and person. Lesson: I found it best to not have my life all about me. Pursuit of myself was empty.
His entire argument falls flat to me. At its root is the same ontological argument that women are made for motherhood in a way that men are not made for fatherhood. That motherhood is only virtuous when it is all consuming. That women would flock to the self-annihilation that is modern mothering if only there were status involved. But in many cases it seems that motherhood is a zero sum game, with women losing in order for children and husbands to win. Seems many millennials and GenZ have watched their mothers (GenX) attempt to be moms and hold on to their personhood, only to fail at both, and are opting out of a scenario in which no one thrives.
What do you mean by “win?” The argument here is that the problem is that everyone defines “winning” by various status measures (income, job title, vacations, clothes etc) it seems your adopting that measurement when you’re saying husbands win. If instead we measure winning by…say… “loving” (which is what Christian says we were made for) then moms win plenty. The good news is there is no “zero sum” when you measure winning that way since love is not a zero sum game.
"Win" might be unfortunate -- i was trying to point out the zero-sum nature I experienced as a (Jesus following) mom in trying to keep the lives of my two kids and my husbands life supported. The commenter below refers to being under-resourced and that's a better way of saying it. Without enough resources of time, energy to go around, mine got utterly depleted in service to my family having their needs met.
So true, love is not a zero-sum game. But my reality was that either my kids/husband had what they needed each day OR i took time for myself. Sure, anyone can do that for days or even weeks. But when weeks turn to months and years with no reprieve, its a recipe for the self-annihilation I mention i the original comment.
I used to think motherhood meant annihilation of the self. I grew up working class. Then I married a lawyer and met all the upper middle class, prewar suburban moms in north NJ. They absolutely are people. They are generally thriving. They look good and feel good. 2 kids and a dog. First baby at 35.
The secret is simply that mothers are able to mother when they are well resourced. I did not meet many women like this in childhood. I say resources because usually it was white working class women who had it hardest, with a sick "bootstrap" culture, being forced out at 18 and cut off from family help, etc. Money can't buy everything but it sure helps.
Great piece 👍🏼 I just finished Hannah’s Children. Mom of 4 girls here and I do find the “oh that’s a lot of weddings” comments bizarre. It is always comical to me how vastly inflated people without children estimate them to cost. But I also just reject viewing your life solely through a financial income and expense sheet. Some things are worth more than money.
If they have $8,000 a month to spend on consumption, it seems like they could afford to pay significantly more in taxes to provide tax relief to parents. Given that other peoples kids will have to pay for their retirement (SS, Medicare, etc) that seems fair.
I wonder how many of these people would remain childless if there was no disposable income advantage to it.
This punishes people like me and my husband who have tried to have kids since we were late 20s and could not. Not everyone who is child free and makes a decent income is self absorbed. For a lot of us it wasn’t a choice.
This has nothing to do with intent or fertility. It's simply a ledger of accounts that needs to balance. Raising a child is a huge personal expense. The beneficiaries of that expense, via our entitlement system, are diffuse and include those that didn't take on that personal expense (voluntarily or involuntarily).
In short, I think we should account for the costs of raising a child as a form of social security tax, and those who are currently taking on that expense should not also have to be paying FICA taxes at the same time. Of course if you give parents such a tax break you will have to raise taxes on non-parents to balance the system, but that's only fair. People should get out what they put in, and what they are putting in includes the cost of raising a child.
Taxing individuals more because of medical issues outside of their control is a punishment. Should we tax a disabled person more because they use more resources and don’t contribute as much as a healthy person?
"because of medical issues outside of their control"
You are not being taxed for having a medical issue. You are being taxed to provide for your own future retirement.
SS & Medicare are "pay as you go". That means that they can only be paid for by future taxpayers. If you've created no future taxpayers, then you have not funded your own retirement. You will be asking other peoples children to pay for it.
Since I would rate the odds of your waiving your own medicare and social security at around 0%, the only fair way to do this is for you to pay more now so that people who are taking on the expense of raising a child can pay less. Then you could in some sense say that you took on the expense of raising their children and thus are entitled to some portion of their future taxes.
Seriously. There’s nothing sadder than growing up as the child of someone who is ambivalent at best about raising children.
In my case, by the time I got together with my wife, we were at the edge of her childbearing years. Finally having a true partner (our incomes are within 15% of the other), we wanted to enjoy what was left of our “youth” together. She’s a bit older than me but I’m definitely an elder millennial.
Finally, many of us elder millennials have elder parents to take care of. The prospect of caring for my parents - who have health issues - and children at the same time, just would be too much, IMO. I moved my parents to the house we bought in CA - they live with us.
I appreciate the folks having kids, and I support paying not-inconsiderable property taxes to live in one of the best school districts in the state. But it isn’t for me, and I will brook no attempts to convince me otherwise.
I do note that most of our friends don’t have children either, even those with good professional jobs. Cost of living here is definitely a factor for many.
A person who is ambivalent about the children they already have is emotionally immature. Adults take responsibility for their actions. Everything in life is about how you frame it. Feelings are to be explored, not treated as facts. Ambivalence can stem from many things. It’s good to have our reasons challenged by someone who be impartial or has a different perspective to expose the flaws or blindspots in our thinking.
For example: I had a friend initially be ambivalent about kids. At the root, she was afraid of failure at being a parent because of her own bad parents. But she came to accept she won’t be the perfect parent but having self-awareness, and willingness to course correct, she can be a good parent. She has one son now.
After pursuing the antinatalism subreddit, I suspect many people who don’t have kids also secretly harbor the same fear as my friend.
Same here. I’m conscious of what my parents did right and wrong and there was a time when I wanted to do better - but there’s also a big part of me that knows I can’t change the macro environment and is grateful to not have to worry about whether the world will get their shit together about, say, climate change.
Every generation has had its childless outliers for a variety of reasons. The article isn’t about outliers but how the rise of meaninglessness and low fertility have a common source.
Yes, parenting IS hard. But I think that these millennials who are opting out really do miss out on the opportunities for maturing and learning about responsibility to others, something that no occupation or profession can teach you like parenting does. And I say that as an MD.
And more than the personal growth is the joy of seeing children grow and mature themselves. And the intense joy of hearing an excited “Daddy’s home!” after a grueling day at work, and enjoying just being with your family. I know that my wife, who set aside her own profession to be a stay at home mom, would speak to her joy in doing so, notwithstanding the toil. “Days are long, but the time is short.”
I’m not sure I agree about missing out on responsibility to others. I love being a mom and raising my child but before that, I spent far more time caretaking my parents and extended family. My brother doesn’t have kids so he does more of that than I do. I see the same pattern with my coworkers - the childfree ones take on a lot of caretaking for elderly parents or volunteering in their communities. They just have more time for it. Again, I love being a parent but I don’t think it necessarily means you’re more mature or nurturing than someone childfree.
This is spot on. Humans are hardwired toward negative bias and to avoid what they deem to be suffering. Before I became Catholic, I also held views of children as a nuisance and overwhelming. Now I see children as a gift from God and motherhood as sacred. There has always been childless adults in every generation prior, but we’re living in such spiritual and literal death culture.
The WSJ article describes a couple in New Orleans with a household income of $280,000. It goes beyond saying this couple is not representative of many people in a city where the median household income is just over $50,000 in a country where the median household income is just over $70,000.
I don’t get the claim parenting is hard, unless you have children with profound problems. Parenting is a joy. It’s more work than no kids, but the pay off is immense.
I feel like people forget (never knew) that women are people - humans. We expect them to care for everyone with nary a thank you. We have a good 50 years of TV and hundreds of years of books. So it’s not that hard for any woman of child rearing age to see the motherhood trajectory in our society and to reject it.
We’re not going back to the days when biology made us the proverbial “ball and chain” and all the abuse that ensued after that.
It’s not hard to see that our society doesn’t value children when they are the most likely to live in poverty. Our society absolutely doesn’t care about mothers who aren’t attached to a man or children from people of color - married or not.
It would be so easy to explain to men that the paradigm of women scarifying for everyone is not sustainable and that new fathers are going to have to do their share if they want to have wives and children . Maybe tell them how fulfilled they’ll be to have a family instead of a 40 year career. Maybe explain to them the joys of carrying for 3+ kids and later the elderly grandparents.
If men were better they wouldn’t be worried about why women did want to have their kids.
PS - I’m happily married 25 years and 2 sons. I know what I’m talking about.
I’d add to the idea of women facing social “humiliation” as mothers that they also face risk of death and disabling injuries in childbirth and after and having their time and health stolen from them by a society (and often, by husbands) who don’t value motherhood.
I had women friends tell me they’d love to have kids if they could be a dad. Even mothers who work outside the home do more childcare than the fathers. The unfortunate trend is that often fathers get sleep and hobbies and exercise and mothers get to be exhausted and on call 24/7. Then if a father changes his own child’s diaper or mops his own floor it’s called “helping.”
Women will want to be mothers when fathers want to be actual parents on a large scale. The joke “men want kids the way a child wants a puppy” gets a laugh for a reason - too many women have met too many men who don’t take parenting seriously.
Zawn Villines has great work on this on her Liberating Motherhood substack.
I wish we could live our lives twice so we could experience all the opposite things we've chosen, or had forced on us, this go-around. Being a parent isn't sacred, it isn't some magical elixir for making a better human adult, it's a stage of our biological journey through live. Children are not a legacy, like an antique handed down through generations, they are living breathing humans who have every right to exist whether they make a parent proud or not. Elevating (or trying to) parenthood, and in particular, motherhood, into something it really isn't, is just another way of keeping women "in their place," below men.
Kurzt is certainly wrong, we also have low fertility in Europe and no one believes in a meritocracy, people partially believe real success is luck, not merit, partially believe that if you just do the same things as everybody else, you will get the same outcomes and those outcomes are acceptable.
I've not found that having kids is inherently low status, at least after a certain age, but it undoubtedly prevents you from pursuing higher status things. When you couple it with the day-to-day work and lack of time for recreation, I think this explains most of the fertility drop.
As a pediatric physician parent of 4 who took 11 years off to raise the children, I found there is no accomplishment that is as fulfilling as being able to raise a child. My self, my identity, my financials and my status took second place. It was a relief freely to give and what I got in return was more than I ever expected. I found like- minded parents, and have a supportive husband, and have no regrets. Previous to children, I was ambitious and driven, after I became a better physician and person. Lesson: I found it best to not have my life all about me. Pursuit of myself was empty.
His entire argument falls flat to me. At its root is the same ontological argument that women are made for motherhood in a way that men are not made for fatherhood. That motherhood is only virtuous when it is all consuming. That women would flock to the self-annihilation that is modern mothering if only there were status involved. But in many cases it seems that motherhood is a zero sum game, with women losing in order for children and husbands to win. Seems many millennials and GenZ have watched their mothers (GenX) attempt to be moms and hold on to their personhood, only to fail at both, and are opting out of a scenario in which no one thrives.
What do you mean by “win?” The argument here is that the problem is that everyone defines “winning” by various status measures (income, job title, vacations, clothes etc) it seems your adopting that measurement when you’re saying husbands win. If instead we measure winning by…say… “loving” (which is what Christian says we were made for) then moms win plenty. The good news is there is no “zero sum” when you measure winning that way since love is not a zero sum game.
"Win" might be unfortunate -- i was trying to point out the zero-sum nature I experienced as a (Jesus following) mom in trying to keep the lives of my two kids and my husbands life supported. The commenter below refers to being under-resourced and that's a better way of saying it. Without enough resources of time, energy to go around, mine got utterly depleted in service to my family having their needs met.
So true, love is not a zero-sum game. But my reality was that either my kids/husband had what they needed each day OR i took time for myself. Sure, anyone can do that for days or even weeks. But when weeks turn to months and years with no reprieve, its a recipe for the self-annihilation I mention i the original comment.
I used to think motherhood meant annihilation of the self. I grew up working class. Then I married a lawyer and met all the upper middle class, prewar suburban moms in north NJ. They absolutely are people. They are generally thriving. They look good and feel good. 2 kids and a dog. First baby at 35.
The secret is simply that mothers are able to mother when they are well resourced. I did not meet many women like this in childhood. I say resources because usually it was white working class women who had it hardest, with a sick "bootstrap" culture, being forced out at 18 and cut off from family help, etc. Money can't buy everything but it sure helps.
Karen - any response other that bravo is gaslighting! Excellent post!
Great piece 👍🏼 I just finished Hannah’s Children. Mom of 4 girls here and I do find the “oh that’s a lot of weddings” comments bizarre. It is always comical to me how vastly inflated people without children estimate them to cost. But I also just reject viewing your life solely through a financial income and expense sheet. Some things are worth more than money.
If they have $8,000 a month to spend on consumption, it seems like they could afford to pay significantly more in taxes to provide tax relief to parents. Given that other peoples kids will have to pay for their retirement (SS, Medicare, etc) that seems fair.
I wonder how many of these people would remain childless if there was no disposable income advantage to it.
This punishes people like me and my husband who have tried to have kids since we were late 20s and could not. Not everyone who is child free and makes a decent income is self absorbed. For a lot of us it wasn’t a choice.
"punishes"
Do you consider taxes in general a punishment?
This has nothing to do with intent or fertility. It's simply a ledger of accounts that needs to balance. Raising a child is a huge personal expense. The beneficiaries of that expense, via our entitlement system, are diffuse and include those that didn't take on that personal expense (voluntarily or involuntarily).
In short, I think we should account for the costs of raising a child as a form of social security tax, and those who are currently taking on that expense should not also have to be paying FICA taxes at the same time. Of course if you give parents such a tax break you will have to raise taxes on non-parents to balance the system, but that's only fair. People should get out what they put in, and what they are putting in includes the cost of raising a child.
Taxing individuals more because of medical issues outside of their control is a punishment. Should we tax a disabled person more because they use more resources and don’t contribute as much as a healthy person?
"because of medical issues outside of their control"
You are not being taxed for having a medical issue. You are being taxed to provide for your own future retirement.
SS & Medicare are "pay as you go". That means that they can only be paid for by future taxpayers. If you've created no future taxpayers, then you have not funded your own retirement. You will be asking other peoples children to pay for it.
Since I would rate the odds of your waiving your own medicare and social security at around 0%, the only fair way to do this is for you to pay more now so that people who are taking on the expense of raising a child can pay less. Then you could in some sense say that you took on the expense of raising their children and thus are entitled to some portion of their future taxes.
why is that fair? did you contribute to their education? why are you entitled to what they worked for?
Look, everyone's life is theirs to do as they wish, as long as nobody's getting hurt. People find meaning in different things.
I don't *want* people being parents if *they* don't want to.
Seriously. There’s nothing sadder than growing up as the child of someone who is ambivalent at best about raising children.
In my case, by the time I got together with my wife, we were at the edge of her childbearing years. Finally having a true partner (our incomes are within 15% of the other), we wanted to enjoy what was left of our “youth” together. She’s a bit older than me but I’m definitely an elder millennial.
Finally, many of us elder millennials have elder parents to take care of. The prospect of caring for my parents - who have health issues - and children at the same time, just would be too much, IMO. I moved my parents to the house we bought in CA - they live with us.
I appreciate the folks having kids, and I support paying not-inconsiderable property taxes to live in one of the best school districts in the state. But it isn’t for me, and I will brook no attempts to convince me otherwise.
I do note that most of our friends don’t have children either, even those with good professional jobs. Cost of living here is definitely a factor for many.
A person who is ambivalent about the children they already have is emotionally immature. Adults take responsibility for their actions. Everything in life is about how you frame it. Feelings are to be explored, not treated as facts. Ambivalence can stem from many things. It’s good to have our reasons challenged by someone who be impartial or has a different perspective to expose the flaws or blindspots in our thinking.
For example: I had a friend initially be ambivalent about kids. At the root, she was afraid of failure at being a parent because of her own bad parents. But she came to accept she won’t be the perfect parent but having self-awareness, and willingness to course correct, she can be a good parent. She has one son now.
After pursuing the antinatalism subreddit, I suspect many people who don’t have kids also secretly harbor the same fear as my friend.
Okay so what do you say about people who consciously choose not to have children then?
This is me. I know I’d be a good dad. I just don’t want to be one. And I haven’t been convinced by arguments yet to have one.
Same here. I’m conscious of what my parents did right and wrong and there was a time when I wanted to do better - but there’s also a big part of me that knows I can’t change the macro environment and is grateful to not have to worry about whether the world will get their shit together about, say, climate change.
Every generation has had its childless outliers for a variety of reasons. The article isn’t about outliers but how the rise of meaninglessness and low fertility have a common source.
Yes, parenting IS hard. But I think that these millennials who are opting out really do miss out on the opportunities for maturing and learning about responsibility to others, something that no occupation or profession can teach you like parenting does. And I say that as an MD.
And more than the personal growth is the joy of seeing children grow and mature themselves. And the intense joy of hearing an excited “Daddy’s home!” after a grueling day at work, and enjoying just being with your family. I know that my wife, who set aside her own profession to be a stay at home mom, would speak to her joy in doing so, notwithstanding the toil. “Days are long, but the time is short.”
I’m not sure I agree about missing out on responsibility to others. I love being a mom and raising my child but before that, I spent far more time caretaking my parents and extended family. My brother doesn’t have kids so he does more of that than I do. I see the same pattern with my coworkers - the childfree ones take on a lot of caretaking for elderly parents or volunteering in their communities. They just have more time for it. Again, I love being a parent but I don’t think it necessarily means you’re more mature or nurturing than someone childfree.
This is spot on. Humans are hardwired toward negative bias and to avoid what they deem to be suffering. Before I became Catholic, I also held views of children as a nuisance and overwhelming. Now I see children as a gift from God and motherhood as sacred. There has always been childless adults in every generation prior, but we’re living in such spiritual and literal death culture.
The WSJ article describes a couple in New Orleans with a household income of $280,000. It goes beyond saying this couple is not representative of many people in a city where the median household income is just over $50,000 in a country where the median household income is just over $70,000.
Found you through your incredible review at FPR - keep up the good work.
I don’t get the claim parenting is hard, unless you have children with profound problems. Parenting is a joy. It’s more work than no kids, but the pay off is immense.
I feel like people forget (never knew) that women are people - humans. We expect them to care for everyone with nary a thank you. We have a good 50 years of TV and hundreds of years of books. So it’s not that hard for any woman of child rearing age to see the motherhood trajectory in our society and to reject it.
We’re not going back to the days when biology made us the proverbial “ball and chain” and all the abuse that ensued after that.
It’s not hard to see that our society doesn’t value children when they are the most likely to live in poverty. Our society absolutely doesn’t care about mothers who aren’t attached to a man or children from people of color - married or not.
It would be so easy to explain to men that the paradigm of women scarifying for everyone is not sustainable and that new fathers are going to have to do their share if they want to have wives and children . Maybe tell them how fulfilled they’ll be to have a family instead of a 40 year career. Maybe explain to them the joys of carrying for 3+ kids and later the elderly grandparents.
If men were better they wouldn’t be worried about why women did want to have their kids.
PS - I’m happily married 25 years and 2 sons. I know what I’m talking about.
I’d add to the idea of women facing social “humiliation” as mothers that they also face risk of death and disabling injuries in childbirth and after and having their time and health stolen from them by a society (and often, by husbands) who don’t value motherhood.
I had women friends tell me they’d love to have kids if they could be a dad. Even mothers who work outside the home do more childcare than the fathers. The unfortunate trend is that often fathers get sleep and hobbies and exercise and mothers get to be exhausted and on call 24/7. Then if a father changes his own child’s diaper or mops his own floor it’s called “helping.”
Women will want to be mothers when fathers want to be actual parents on a large scale. The joke “men want kids the way a child wants a puppy” gets a laugh for a reason - too many women have met too many men who don’t take parenting seriously.
Zawn Villines has great work on this on her Liberating Motherhood substack.
I wish we could live our lives twice so we could experience all the opposite things we've chosen, or had forced on us, this go-around. Being a parent isn't sacred, it isn't some magical elixir for making a better human adult, it's a stage of our biological journey through live. Children are not a legacy, like an antique handed down through generations, they are living breathing humans who have every right to exist whether they make a parent proud or not. Elevating (or trying to) parenthood, and in particular, motherhood, into something it really isn't, is just another way of keeping women "in their place," below men.
its none of your damn business- period.
Kurzt is certainly wrong, we also have low fertility in Europe and no one believes in a meritocracy, people partially believe real success is luck, not merit, partially believe that if you just do the same things as everybody else, you will get the same outcomes and those outcomes are acceptable.
I've not found that having kids is inherently low status, at least after a certain age, but it undoubtedly prevents you from pursuing higher status things. When you couple it with the day-to-day work and lack of time for recreation, I think this explains most of the fertility drop.