The problem with pop pronatalism

Plus: please take my poll about fillers and Botox, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.

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1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere

The problem with pop pronatalism

(via)

“America’s premier pronatalists” are “having ‘tons of kids’ to save the world,” begins a new Guardian headline, which concludes with one of the aforementioned pronatalists’ prediction that we’ll see low-fertility “countries of old people starving to death.”

The headline is intended to shock, and so is the rest of the piece. Our premier pronatalists, it turns out, are Malcolm and Simone Collins, that techy couple with the thick-rimmed glasses who were previously introduced to us by The Telegraph as one of a group of “‘elite’ couples breeding to save mankind.” They run Pronatalist.org and are often mentioned in the same breath as billionaire Elon Musk—both of these stories note his pronatalist views and gaggle of children—as leading representatives of the Silicon Valley wing of pop pronatalism.

The other well-known wing, as described by the Guardian piece, is “Quiverfull, the fundamentalist Christian belief that large families are a blessing from God.” More succinctly, it’s the Duggars. Years before the Collinses self-described as “human clickbait” whose lives are designed to raise public awareness about plunging fertility rates, the Duggars got on TV and made themselves a shorthand for “people who have—and think you too should have—lots of kids.”

That’s a pretty good working definition of what I mean when I say “pop pronatalism.” And here’s the problem I see with it: It doesn’t simply accept, as I wrote a couple weeks ago, that we’ve all come to think about having children as a choice to be made instead of a default part of adulthood. It goes a step beyond treating reproduction as a lifestyle choice and makes it a choice tied to a very particular and, for many, pretty off-putting lifestyle. Having children is a choice, it says, for people who aren’t like you.

We’re all secularists about having kids

Now, I do not think everyone should have kids. I had ample ambivalence about the decision myself, and having twin infants was not a fun time! I get it. But I do think that for most people—I can’t give a percentage but feel comfortable saying it’s somewhere north of 50 percent—having children is probably the right call. Probably not seven kids, like the Collinses want, or 11 like Musk, or 19 like the Duggars. But probably a few.

So what happens when deciding to have children becomes difficult in a way it never was before in human history—and also the faces of pop pronatalism are all … bizarre?

I choose that word deliberately. The Duggars’ whole thing is familiar by now, as is Musk’s, so let’s consider excerpts of the Guardian account of the Collins family:

Malcolm, 37, answers the door of their 18th-century farmhouse with four-year-old Octavian George, who is thrilled to have a visitor, bringing toy after toy to show me like an overexcited golden retriever. His little brother, two-year-old Torsten Savage, is on his iPad somewhere upstairs. Simone, 36, in an apron that strains across her belly, has her daughter, 16-month-old Titan Invictus, strapped to her back. The imminent arrival of their fourth child, a girl they plan to name Industry Americus Collins […]

The average pronatalist is “young, nerdy, contrarian, autist,” Malcolm says, proudly. “Usually, they will be running a tech company or be in venture capital.” […]

When deciding where to live, they weighed metrics on a spreadsheet, ranging from LGBTQ+ rights (which they support) to the density of Nobel laureates produced in a given area to levels of homelessness to major weather events. […]

It is a very cold home. It’s early March, and within 20 minutes of being here the tips of some of my fingers have turned white. This, they explain, is part of living their values: as effective altruists, they give everything they can spare to charity (their charities). “Any pointless indulgence, like heating the house in the winter, we try to avoid if we can find other solutions,” says Malcolm. […]

Both boys have their own iPads fitted with a strap so they can wear them around their necks. Two-year-old Torsten is alone somewhere with his. […]

Instead of Christmas, they have Future Day. “The Future Police come and take their toys, and then they have to write a contract about how they’re going to make the world a better place, and they get their toys back with some gifts and stuff. They get more gifts when they do whatever they said they were going to do. What does Christmas teach them? Get random toys if you’re vaguely good?”

This is only from the first half of the article, and I’ve left out the stuff about weapons, alleged commonalities with racists, and the story of The Slap (which has since received a lot of tabloid coverage; see the Collinses’ response here).

Again, the Guardian story was obviously written to shock, and I share these bits not to point and laugh at this family but merely to note they are well outside the norm in American culture, as I’m sure the Collinses themselves would agree. Most Americans celebrate Christmas, heat their houses, decide where to live based on considerations like where they can get a job or where their families live, don’t work in venture capital, and give their children names more ordinary than “Industry.”

(The Collinses’ full embrace of the screen-based childhood is quite normal, unfortunately, but my sense is that the kind of person who engages in protracted debate over whether to have kids typically aspires to screen-lite parenting.)

You can begin to see the problem if these are our country’s “premier pronatalists”—if every time you take the clickbait, what pops up is the Collinses and Musk or the Duggars. This lifestyle, as much as the Quiverfull lifestyle, will be off-putting to many people, so much so that they may well look askance at pronatalism of any kind: Why are all the people who want me to have children so odd? Do they have an ulterior motive here? Maybe having kids is not for me.

I don’t know if I’d describe myself as a pronatalist, significantly because—much like “evangelical”—I suspect that what people hear is often not what I mean. But I find the fertility rates troubling, and I think most couples going in earnest circles on this question should answer “yes.” And if the pro-kids crowd is all wearing prairie skirts and canceling Christmas, I suspect the more appealing answer will often be “no.”

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2. What I'm reading this week

In succor and silence, by Wendy Kiyomi for Christianity Today. A long and thought-provoking personal essay I edited, then reread this week. Worth your time!

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3. A not-yet recommendation

More like a request for recommendations, actually: Have any of you tried Brick for your phone? It’s this little plastic box with an associated app. The concept is that you offload your smartphone’s distracting apps (social media, games, even internet browsers) to the Brick via its app, and then you can only use those apps when the box is physically close to your smartphone.

So if, for example, you go out to a new restaurant, you can take your smartphone with you to use Google Maps to get there and be reachable by the babysitter, but you can’t sit on Instagram at the table, because Instagram is on the Brick back at home. In theory, at least, it lets you enjoy life both with and “without” a smartphone while keeping around practical benefits like navigation and the camera.

As you can see, I’m intrigued, but I’m not quite sold yet. I’d love to hear from you if you’ve used this (or if you know of a better option).

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4. Recent work

• No NATO trainers in Ukraine | Defense Priorities (newsletter)

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5. Miscellaneous

I’m batting around ideas for a possible CT piece inspired by the news of South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s “MAGA makeover,” which includes veneers (by her own account) and way too much lip filler (to my eye). Before I write anything, though, I’m trying to parse my own reactions to this stuff—I have an instinctive aversion to a lot of it which I’m inclined to describe in ethical language, but I may be confusing my personal and cultural tastes for morality. Or maybe not? I’m not sure yet!

Anyway, I made a casual little poll because I’m curious to see where other people land on this stuff. Anecdotally, there’s a lot more openness to fillers and Botox among people I know in real life than I ever would have anticipated. So tell me what you think! The poll is unscientific and entirely anonymous (you can even take it in a private browser window if you like), and I’d love it if you got other friends, family, etc. to take the it too:

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