Twitter has been abuzz lately with articles and discussions about the happiness of parenting and the role of parenthood in our lives. This piece is my contribution.
It seems that, the lower you go in wealth, the happier people are with the experience of parenting.
This is not surprising. And it’s not the first time I’ve seen data on this.
The more money people have, the more they tend to work overtime. The more they tend to spend time “keeping up appearances,” being one of the pretty people, and attending events. Just think of suburban mothers with careers and enormous groups of friends.
When people have less money, they have less extra stuff going on in their lives. They have less career weight on them, less social weight on them, fewer outside pressures to “be” something. It leaves more mental real estate (and more time) to focus on parenting. Which is why tradition has long told us that one parent should be at home with the kids. It matters less which parent than it does that one of them is at all.
This is one of those places in life where tradition knew something that we didn’t. As I heard somewhere recently, tradition is a set of answers for which we’ve forgotten the questions.
One of the best things a family can have is a sense of necessity. I’ve written about this before — the most valuable thing any relationship can have is a sense of urgency to care for one another. A certain closeness that comes from not having much besides each other. If I could wrap that very thing up and give it as gifts during the holidays, I'd stop shopping on Amazon.
The easier our lives get, the less we “need” each other. This is why my generation is dating less, marrying later, and seeing more women than men graduating from college. We’re not playing by the old rules anymore, where the sexes needed each other.
Frankly, the sexes don’t need each other anymore. Every person is an independent economic unit with its own ambitions and goals. Some people call this progress. I call it a public tragedy.
To some extent, we’re making this trade voluntarily. And what we’re getting in return is that we’re less able than ever to commit to each other. Less able than ever to make the sacrifices necessary to keep someone around; less able to sacrifice and compromise for someone. Because in a world where every person of every gender is expected to simply provide for themselves, what use is sacrificing our freedom for a mate anyway? Seems kind of pointless.
Or at least that’s what our culture seems to be telling us now. We should all have our own careers, our own social ambitions, our own financial independence. We should all take on mortgages and buy bigger homes every ten years, we should all try to climb as many corporate ladders as possible. We should all be something… something other than mothers and fathers.
So where does that leave our kids? Yes, exactly.
It's interesting what happens as you acquire more shit in life. The very things that are supposed to matter to you get superimposed-over by shit that doesn't. And it’s the same way with actual goods as it is with relationships and careers.
The more we encourage each other to have career ambitions, the less available we are to be parents. The more stuff we buy each other on Amazon, the more our homes and lives are filled with shit we simply do not need.
We’re facing a crisis of parenthood the same way we’re facing a crisis of consumerism and a crisis of mental health. In fact, the three are inextricably linked. They’re the same problem. Too much shit.
I get physically uncomfortable, even angry, when people try to give me stuff. I mean I'm no woods-living minimalist, but I find that "stuff" is just more shit to worry about. It has become a physically demanding activity just to manage all the shit stuffed into my house. I hate it. I don’t want any more things in here.
I grew up wondering how each of my parents could possibly have a suburban basement loaded with shit they never use. "Maybe just don't acquire as many things, then," I'd think to myself with scorn.
But it happens without intent. A house is a celestial body with its own field of gravity. By its very existence, it attracts shit it doesn't need. It doesn't require intent; it just happens.
And every thing you have in your home is one more thing to worry about.
For every brand new shiny piece of furniture in your living room, there's one more delicate trophy to worry about bumping or scratching. For every new wooden table, there's one more surface women won't let you set drinks on.
If you and your partner buy a brand new set of furniture, it can be physically and emotionally uncomfortable to even use any of it. Doing any "living" in your own living room becomes financial blasphemy; it becomes an insult against the time you’ve traded for the money you’ve traded for the thing. Living in your own living room becomes an exercise in graceful movement and ever-mindfulness not to tarnish or taint any of these purchased treasures.
Taken all the way to the extreme, this ends with houses full of flawless furniture that look more like museums than homes. And feel more like museums than homes. Most of us have probably had that experience where our mothers wanted the house to look literally un-lived in before the family came over for dinner.
It's too many objects that need protecting and not enough beat up old shit you can just use as intended.
There’s a certain kind of freedom in not really giving a shit about your furniture. Especially, as it were, as a parent. You’re going to be a less happy parent if all of the furniture in your house is brand new and you’re constantly worried about the kids fucking it up.
I remember the story from Home Alone 2 where Kevin tells the pigeon lady about his pair of roller skates. He was so worried about getting them dirty that he never wore them outside. He avoided using his skates so long that he outgrew them and they were no longer worth anything.
The reason he was telling her this story is because he was trying to get her to trust again, to love again. If your heart goes unused, he said, what's the use of having it? The point is that, although it may get soiled with the filth of disappointment, at least it’ll live. There’s downside, sure… but the upside is life. It’s love. It’s cosmically significant.
And that's why parents with no money are happier parents. They have to use their own hearts to raise their kids with — they get to use their hearts to raise their kids with. Because there isn’t a bunch of shit standing in the way. Not furniture, not a fragile social reputation, not a bunch of business meetings that mean nothing to anybody. They're all-in on the closeness and immaterialism of parenting. The risks, the intimate time, the simple joys and surprises that occur hour after hour after hour.
And those are the parents whose kids grow up to adore them. Those are the parents the kids end up calling “heroes.” As Robert De Niro says in A Bronx Tale, the working man is the real tough guy. He has to endure the hardship of parenting right on the chin. He can’t distract himself from it, and he can’t pay someone else to take those hits for him.
Houses, by their very existence, attract stuff. The same thing happens with money, careers, and social ambitions. They attract stuff.
In this post, Louise Perry discusses how people often take individual freedom as soon as they have the economic means to. She cites historian Marc Brodie, who says that people actually don’t like living in tight-knit communities where they are subservient to family, but only do so when they’re poor and have to.
I don’t fully agree with Brodie — I think competition is the bigger reason we run away from family and community and toward rich individualism. We see other people buying bigger homes and having status, and we just cannot bear the thought that everyone else is doing better than us. It absolutely tears us up inside.
The problem isn't that we don't want parenthood or tight-knit communities; it's that we've collectively competed ourselves out of them.
Perry goes on to say,
the consistent pattern we see across time and place is this: people long for privacy and autonomy during some periods of their lives. Specifically, able-bodied and childless young adults often crave distance from their extended families, and will often go to great lengths to secure it. During that stage of one’s life, communitarianism is incredibly annoying.
That’s another layer of the issue: we're extending this young-and-individual period of our lives. We want to be independent and isolated for as long as possible, owing as few favors as possible and having as much freedom to compete and self-actualize as possible, rather than just doing so until we have children and resorting back to tradition. We are in a honeymoon phase with our own freedom, and that honeymoon phase is becoming our entire adult lives.
We’re moving towards a world where the only people reproducing will be Mormons and morons. Because they’re the only ones laser-focused on having kids. They’re the only ones who are thinking “having kids and then raising them is my number one goal.”
Everyone else has different number one goals. Everyone else, everyone chasing careers and status and stuff, is either too distracted or too afraid to have kids. We end up talking ourselves out of it (because we hate the way the world is) or we’re sitting around waiting for a perfect partner and perfect financial readiness, neither of which is ever coming.
The most fertile people are serial fornicators and religious kid-factories; those of us in between are too clever for our own good. And it’s really, really bad and sad for our culture. The in-between is vanishing. Normal, reasonable people dedicated to parenting are vanishing. We think we've got better things to do.
For the first time in the modern era, we’re on the verge of global non-replacement. That is, numerous nations around the world are seeing such sharp drops in fertility that we’re no longer having enough kids to replace our dying elders. China is expected to drop in population by 30-50% in the next two generations. That’s half a billion people, gone and not replaced. That’s a ghost town the size of Western Europe. Here it’s not going to be that severe, but it’s still getting severe. And we should be worried about it.
The issue has a lot of contributing factors. Birth control and feminism have released women from the need to trust men. The corruption of higher education means we’re all further in debt for less and less economic payoff. Political polarization keeps us (particularly young men and women) at each other’s throats. The abundance of weak men without any good role models is giving women plenty of good reasons not to trust us. The internet has killed our sense of peace and quiet. And then there’s the absolute prank that is modern dating, with its pathetic superficiality and its orientation entirely around unearned sex.
I’d love to see people stop filling their lives with so much unnecessary shit and start having more children. But I don’t know how to make that happen.
Of course part of the problem is that we aren't as well-off financially as our parents. That's an inescapable truth. But plenty of us can afford to raise kids — on one income and maybe a fun little side business. We're just choosing not to. Because we want to sacrifice parenthood to live in a bigger house or get one more meaningless promotion. Because that's what everyone else is doing, and we feel like we have to.
And of course people usually do need further personal meaning in their lives, above and beyond parenthood. You can have both. But there are better sources of meaning than careers and status.
I dream, I fantasize, of making enough money that my wife can stay home with our kids. At least part of the time. Not because I’m going to be a lazy parent, not because I’m anti-progress… but because I fantasize about how much happier she and the kids will be. I want one of us to do something more meaningful — both for ourselves and our kids — than work.
And if my wife ends up with the better career and mine isn't necessary... fine. I'll stay home. Because someone should.
Drink some water and be fertile.
JDR
“We have smoothly transitioned from one form of feminine subservience to another, but we pretend that this one is liberation.” - Louise Perry
Maybe, maybe not!
The total psycho-physical state of both parents at the moment of conception creates an almost indelible pattern on the yet-to-be-born child.
Similarly the modern science of epi-genetics posits (and even proves) that the multiple traumas that every human being experiences in-utero, during the in most cases terribly traumatic birthing process, during their early child-hood environment and so on is passed on to the next generation. And, even more tragically, the traumas experienced by their grand parents etc, going back even several generations, even centuries.
That having been said please check out these references as to what a possible fully human culture may begin to look like, and the origins of our monstrous misunderstanding of what we potentially are as human beings
http://ttfuture.org
http://www.wombecology.com
http://violence.de/index.html