Telling people kids will change them in ways they can’t possibly fathom is not a great way to pitch having kids

Plus: medieval clergy, executive orders, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post.

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Telling people kids will change them in ways they can’t possibly fathom is not a great way to pitch having kids

(via)

I suggested at the end of last week’s post that this week I’d likely write something on the new Trump administration, but, mea culpa, I’m not going to do it.

In my defense, the change of plans is partly because I’ve not had time to read up on the deluge of executive orders—many of which could be very consequential—pouring out of this White House, and I’m not interested in writing a half-informed take before it’s even clear how much of this will hold up in court. (If you need something on Donald Trump right now, read this from

O. Alan Noble

.)

But partly, it’s because what I actually want to write this week is a corollary to

Stephanie H. Murray

’s thesis, as argued in her new Dispatch piece (and also on Substack), that we should talk more about the value of children to society as a whole rather than focusing on the warm fuzzies that may accrue to invidvidual parents:

Even those who seem perfectly well aware that low fertility is a challenge for society often set about addressing it by treating it as a problem for individuals—that is, by attempting to reassure would-be parents that parenthood is a gift, one that brings immense emotional rewards that the child-free life simply cannot replicate, and that people forgo at the expense of their own happiness. In all cases, it amounts to an understandable but, in my view, ultimately counterproductive hesitation to admit that the real reason we’re having this discussion is not that individuals need kids, but that society does.

Yes to all that, and before I get to my thing, let me commend to you this series underway at The New Atlantis explaining and making a small effort to rectify the fact that so “many of us know next to nothing about the systems that undergird our lives.”It’s more about stuff like sewers and agriculture and garbage collectors, but you can see the connection: If no one has kids, we won’t have any garbage collectors, and that would be a very bad time. ¹

The point I want to make here, though, is not about societal function but this about issue Stephanie raises of how we pitch babies to those ambivalent about parenthood. The presentation she sketches—and particularly the idea that being a parent is wonderful in ways that people without children can’t understand—is a common one, and it’s often inextricably wrapped up in a declaration that kids will change you, and that this too is something you can’t really fathom until after you take the plunge.

Here, for example, is a post from The Atlantic’s

Olga Khazan

assuring readers considering children that “it’s okay if you don’t ‘seem’ like a mom.” Before having a baby, she writes, Khazan associated parenthood with extroversion and fun. She didn’t think she’d fit the bill. “But a funny thing happened on the way to the delivery ward,” Khazan continues:

I became fun. Thanks to a witch’s brew of hormones and evolutionary biology and mirror neurons and exhausted delirium, as a parent, you’re biologically programmed to do whatever it takes to make your baby laugh. You will want to make the goofy faces. You will want to make the animal sounds. You will want to dance to the YMCA, titty a-dangle from the nursing bra, to stop the baby from crying. Yes, even you, an introvert who needs quiet time to themselves to recharge.

This does happen to people. There are whole books about maternal instinct and how matrescence physically reorganizes your brain.

But what I want to suggest is that in a time and place so focused on identity and prone to anxiety, telling people that having children will totally change them in big and unforeseeable ways is not a great strategy of persuasion!

That mid-20s impulse to have a quiet evening at home is what we used to call being ready to settle down

Think about it: If you’re hot off a decade or more of honing who you are—whether in an obsessive, internet-driven way or a typical being-a-teenager-and-young-adult way—you likely don’t want to draw an identity wild card. Or if you’ve just done a 15-year run of striving through high school and college and maybe grad school and early career moves, you don’t want to do something that will literally scramble your neurons. For the kind of educated young adult, and particularly young woman, who agonizes over whether to have kids, I think we should much more seriously consider that this:

• parenthood will mysteriously and irrevocably change you,

• and, trust me, it’s really great,

• but no, I can’t explain any of it

is not an attractive message.

Instead of pitching having kids as this huge thing that will overhaul your very soul, I think we should pitch it as just normal. Doable. Routine.

It also bears mentioning that not every new parent will experience the dramatic change Khazan describes. I feel much the same as I did before having children: I do not like to make the animal sounds. I absolutely would not dance the YMCA. I am not, in fact, “getting a little bit into Pokémon,” as one of our twins ventured to suggest the other night. I actually can’t believe we’re still less than a month into the Pokémon era, and I curse am lightly annoyed with the small nephew who introduced it to my house.

I have many new skills as a result of parenthood, and many new memories and affections. I watch less TV. I’ve added parenting, fertility crisis, and education topics to my writing wheelhouse. But at a more fundamental level—a level of identity, of how my brain works, or my tastes and proclivities, interests and beliefs—it all seems about the same.

That’s not to say parenthood doesn’t change your life (it does) or that it won’t change you (it will). But it’s not necessarily a daunting, unknowable, turn-on-a-dime change. Having children will change some things, but not everything, and not all at once, and you’ll have a say in the change.

As Khazan aptly concludes, you’ll “become ‘like a mom’ after you literally become one,” not because your brain gets run through a blender during the birth but because you’ve taken on a new role and will make it your own.

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Intake

• Selected Stories, by P.G. Wodehouse

• The Scourging Angel: The Black Death in the British Isles, by Benedict Gummer—I’m well into this now, and it’s quite good! I’m dying to know his research process; the level of detail I’m getting about random medieval peasants is incredible. It’s also a fascinating snapshot into how the church functioned in England back then, as many of the available records are ecclesial. One bishop in particular, a John Gynwell, wins Gummer’s clear admiration for his dogged travel around his district over the course of the plague. Ordination and cemetery consecration records show the man was routinely doing 20 miles a day, going from village to village to make sure every parish had a priest and a place to put their dead.

• God with Us: Lived Theology and the Freedom Struggle in Americus, Georgia, 1942–1976, by Ansley L. Quiros, for a piece I’m working on for CT

• “The better Benedict Option,” by Angel Adams Parham for Comment

• “A Christ-lite sermon,” by Caitlin Flanagan for The Atlantic

I must be one of the only people other than those actually in the cathedral to have listened to the entire thing. It was dry, high-minded, and Christ-light, and it built on a theme of “unity” in which all people drop their political differences and embrace a generalized, feel-good, Esperanto-like uni-faith, with everyone directing their prayers to Whom It May Concern.

• I continue to be too fascinated by the AI slop account, and I try to limit what I share from it, but this one—and its (also AI??) comments—I have to show you. Just … click to watch:

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Output

New work:

• The biggest post-ceasefire problem | Defense Priorities (newsletter)

Newly relevant work:

On the subject of all those executive orders—not their content, but the fact of them:

• Not everything is a national emergency | Reason, July 2022

• We need better emergency powers laws | The Week, September 2020

• Beware the emergency power grab | The Week, March 2020

• Why Presidents Day is the worst American holiday | The Week, February 2020

• Trampling separation of powers is just as bad when Democrats do it | The Week, April 2019

• The disgraceful kowtowing of formerly anti-imperial Republicans | The Week, March 2019

• America’s abuse of national emergencies is the real national emergency | The Week, January 2019

• How Trump exposes a dangerous problem at the heart of American government | The Week, May 2017

• Every president’s executive actions, in one chart | The Week, January 2015

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1. A taste: “The great European cathedrals were built over generations by thousands of people and sustained entire communities. Similarly, the electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-distribution network, and the public-health system took the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. They are high among the great accomplishments of our civilization. But they don’t inspire bestselling novels or blockbuster films. No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery. Like almost everyone else, they rarely note the existence of the systems around them, let alone understand how they work.”