Suffer the Children in Our Brave New World

The Gift of Parenthood in an Age of Decadence

For the past couple of years, I’ve been trying to come to terms with how at odds parenthood seems with cultural assumptions around the good life (which I sense boil down to chase freedom and pleasure; spurn responsibility and obligation).

This essay is a sermon I preach to myself often. Everything is either a good time or a good memory, and I actually wouldn’t trade the hard times parenthood has brought. It took me a bit to get there. I hope this can encourage others.

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It’s almost banal at this point to liken modern life in the West to Aldous Huxley’s 1934 novel Brave New World. Huxley imagined a future with rampant smut, constant stimulation, and soma—a drug that provides numbing pleasure without side effects or withdrawal symptoms. We have the smut and stimulation, and social media is at least enthralling, though hardly harmless. In this comparison, one other parallel is often overlooked: the dissolution of family life.

There are still children in Huxley’s book, but they’re all grown in test tubes. Contraception is universally practiced, and sex is completely decoupled from romance and procreation. Becoming a father or mother is not simply undesirable, it’s absurd. Along these same lines, a 2021 Pew survey found that among non-parents younger than fifty, a majority explained that they “just don’t want to have children.”

In Brave New World, this arrangement is by design: the World Controllers found that sensuality, sterility, and docility were mutually reinforcing. A childless population remains comfortably numb. Our own world may not have the same political overlords, but what Ted Gioia dubs the “dopamine cartel”—the internet ecosystem that optimizes for distraction and addiction and leads to misery for kids and adults alike—also stands to benefit from a pliable population.

Parenthood—with its inevitable yet often meaningful sacrifices—poses the grave risk of awakening pleasure-seeking drones from their stupor.

Unlike in Huxley’s fiction, where prosperity and gluttony led to contentment, we now can see how our superabundance and infinite scroll actually burn out our dopamine receptors, leaving us unable to experience and enjoy our own lives. The irony of those caught in a hedonistic paradigm—attempting to maximize pleasure and freedom and minimize pain and obligation—is that they think they’d be miserable if they had kids when in fact they’re miserable because they don’t have them.

That is, by idolizing comfort and avoiding challenge—whether the challenge of a sleepless baby or even a dissenting viewpoint—young people are failing to build up the necessary resilience to endure life’s complexities and vicissitudes. Jonathan Haidt has made the case since 2018 that humans are “antifragile.” From their immune system to emotional regulation to intellectual nuance, exposure to stress and challenge makes them stronger not weaker.

That’s not to say that parenthood would be a panacea for all anxious young people. You don’t teach someone to swim by throwing them in the deep end. But then again, no one’s ever really ready for the earth-shattering arrival of their firstborn, and many new parents discover unexpected depths of love and resolve. Rejecting parenthood is often one symptom of a broader misunderstanding of the good life. In reality, a fulfilling, even happy, life requires periods of duress and deprivation. To have any meaning, feasting must alternate with fasting.

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Children used to be one of many sources of salutary stress, but now, in what one author calls our “Comfort Crisis,” our lack of counterbalancing asceticism makes our luxury difficult to enjoy. If you never leave climate-controlled spaces, can you really appreciate A/C? If you never miss a meal, can you really appreciate that steak dinner? So while some parents still frame childrearing in hedonic terms—sleep deprivation bad; baby laughter good—in reality, both the good and bad of raising kids can be a blessing, especially to the coddled and miserable Gen Z.

As a young parent, I have seen and experienced this firsthand.

For instance, children bring home that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” It’s easy for Zoomers accustomed to living online to find their bodies restrictive or inferior. The trans movement is the most extreme version of this antagonistic view toward embodiment. The less extreme talking points center on all the ways computers are supposedly better than humans. The argument goes that we are slow readers, biased thinkers, bad drivers, etc., but (praise be to Silicon Valley) AI will soon deliver us from ourselves. But this facile criticism of the human body is discredited by pregnancy and childbirth.

I remain in awe of my wife’s Herculean efforts to deliver our children as well as the intricacies of her provision for them. Even though I’ve seen it twice and know it’s a common occurrence, every newborn seems like a miracle to me. Moreover, my firstborn’s arrival kicked off a cascade of caring for my body. I was told that my child should spend time outside, eat healthy meals, and sleep on a regular schedule, which prompted me to start noticing trees, planning meals, and prioritizing my sleep.

Which brings me to sleep, the topic every new parent can’t help but kvetch about. But even there, when your objective circumstances are worse and your control is diminished, there’s so much gained through that loss. If you’re anything like me, you didn’t really appreciate an uninterrupted night’s sleep pre-kids. In fact, you probably sabotaged your own sleep quality by staying out late or binging Vanderpump Rules past your bedtime. Now, while I may have less flexibility with staying up, I have developed a genuine appreciation for something as simple as a good night’s rest.

If you really want to level up, you can treat rocking a baby in the middle of the night as an opportunity to pray. Orthodox writer Frederica Mathewes-Green prayed during nighttime wake-ups as a young Mom and that developed into a lifelong habit of waking up to pray. One fellow Dad told me that he views newborn care as a sort of forced monasticism. Monks interrupt their sleep to pray by choice. Newborns do the waking up for you! I admit, this piety is often beyond me, but I like the idea!

Of course, there’s no getting around how kids thwart your best laid plans. Just when you’re ready to dive in to your to-do list, the napper wakes up too soon or the playmat doesn’t entertain like usual. You can either resent your kids for this or accept that you couldn’t have done everything anyway. You never would’ve completed your ever-expanding list of projects and plans, and kids force you to accept that. Considering the overwhelming options young people face, some binding responsibilities that let you say “No” can be a relief.

Yes, kids can be a relief but not necessarily a comfort because there is no “safe space” for when your kids “trigger” you. Gen Z helped popularize the concepts of psychological safety and “microaggressions,” which essentially consist of magnifying and pathologizing perceived slights. Again, Haidt has argued that obsessing and medicalizing these moments of discomfort actually trains students to be weak. Fortunately for parents, kids do something closer to “macroaggressions,” and they offer no retreat.

Before I had kids, I remember a young Mom once told me, “I didn’t think I had an anger problem until I had kids.” I now know what she means. Kids will hit and bite and mock and disobey you, right to your face. If a spouse can take sandpaper to your rough edges, children have power tools, and they do not know how to operate them. You say “enough,” they say, “I’m just getting started.” But that crucible can change you for the better. When that Mom told me about her anger problem, my immediate thought was, “Anger problem? You’re one of the calmest people I know.”

Indeed, there’s something refreshing about parenthood’s inescapable difficulty. Nowadays, with digital tools and communities, you can carefully curate and present your whole life. That sort of posturing makes for shallow connections though. By contrast, I’ve found there’s an instant kinship with every parent I meet because we all know, at least a little, the other’s suffering. There is an intense camaraderie among the parents in the pre-flight boarding queue. We know there will be casualties, there will be nasty looks, but we’re all in it together.

At root, we Christian parents take Jesus as our model, who we believe was actually human and actually suffered and died on the cross and then actually rose from the dead. It wasn’t fake, and it wasn’t easy. So it’s not that raising kids is a breeze if you just do some mental gymnastics. That’s just skin-deep. But, Christianity can help frame the genuine struggle of childrearing as a spur to sainthood rather than a foolish endeavor.

In Brave New World, only an outsider, “John the Savage,” can see and show what “civilization” has lost. He comes from the “reservation” where religion and natural families remain and pharmaceutical interventions are shunned. Even though the reader often identifies with John’s critiques, the “respectable” citizens find him a mere oddity and amusement. They remain fat and happy.

We live in a society that is decadent but miserable. This presents an opportunity in how we raise and talk about our kids to witness to a deeper way of being. While our collapsing fertility rate is due to many factors, it often hinges on a fundamental misunderstanding. Kids are not a blessing despite all their attendant difficulties. Now more than ever, they are a blessing because of them.