The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

Why have children?  Why choose to become a parent?  For much of human history, these two questions would probably have received significant pushback.  Children were an obvious concomitant of marriage and, in many cases, of survival.  But, today “only 26% of Americans say that having children is important for living a fulfilling life, whereas 71% consider ‘having a job or career they enjoy’ to be essential, and 61% say the same for ‘having close friends.’”  Furthermore, many leaders, demographers and sociologists are looking at birthrates and expressing real concern.  As Jennifer A. Frey, dean of the honors college at the University of Tulsa, argues “Demographers argue that countries need to have a total fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman to sustain long-term generational replacement of the population. Every European country is below replacement, and since 2007 the U.S. is too, with our current fertility rate at an record low of 1.62 births per woman. Economists point out that as a country’s population shrinks, government budgets come under pressure, which poses grave threats to programs like Medicare, Social Security and pensions.”  But are demography concerns the primary reason to have children?

In an important book review of three recently published books on parenting, Frey summarizes the major conclusions of the various books she reviewed.

• “Our contemporary attitude toward children is the topic of What are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice,  by Anastasia Berg, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California-Irvine, and Rachel Wiseman; both women are editors at the Point magazine. The authors, both elite-educated millennials, surveyed hundreds of their contemporaries about their desire for children, and discovered widespread doubts and anxieties. Many argued that they could not in good conscience have children unless they could guarantee a very high standard of living. Others feared children would be a threat to their freedom. For most of those surveyed, work was the dominating value, the source of meaning and purpose in their lives.  Even those who do not want to remain childless are putting off parenting. Millennial women are often in their mid- to late-30s before they feel ready to be mothers—but by that time they are already well past their peak fertile years. Their anxiety over their ‘readiness’ leads to delays that become de facto decisions: Children never appear because the clock runs out.”
• “These problems of time, anxiety and female biology permeate The Big Freeze: A Reporter’s Personal Journey Into the World of Egg Freezing and the Quest to Control our Fertility,  by the journalist Natalie Lampert. Women decide to freeze their eggs, Ms. Lampert argues, to ‘buy time’ to decide when to have children. Egg freezing purports to offer women more agency—more options and more control. It promises transcendence from the limitations of the female body, and expanded reproductive freedom . . . By the end of her years of reporting on the extreme means that American women take to control their fertility, Ms. Lampert ends up deciding not to freeze her own eggs and instead to let go of ‘the illusion of control.’”
• “The women who are the subject of Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth,  by the economist Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, all similarly concluded that more control isn’t desirable. Ms. Pakaluk writes about those who are open to children not for a narrow window of their lives, but for the entire span of their fertile years: the 5% of women in this country who are mothers of big families, which Ms. Pakaluk defines as five or more children per household . . . What is interesting is that these women’s decisions to give priority to motherhood is in every case a deliberate choice, and for many a choice made self-consciously against the prevailing culture they were educated in. Ms. Pakaluk’s subjects are, perhaps unsurprisingly, mostly religious, though many were not raised in religious households. As an economist, Ms. Pakaluk ultimately has her eye on policy. She rejects pronatalist policies that assume governments can motivate young women to make the sacrifices necessary for motherhood. Only ‘reasons of the heart’ can move a woman to do this, and she argues that the best chance we have of promoting these reasons is within religious communities.”

Frey draws several notable conclusions from the review of these three books:

• “What all three books reveal, in different ways, is that the question of parenthood cannot be separated from the question of human flourishing. If we value autonomy above all else, and we understand freedom as the maximization of our options, then spending a life sacrificing for our children will seem like a very bad bet. As a mother of six myself, I can tell you that having a child is like getting married in at least one important respect: If you are honest with yourself, you will admit that you had no idea what you were getting into. Marriage and parenthood are leaps of faith that require individuals to go from thinking and choosing for ‘me’ to thinking and choosing for ‘we.’ This is a transition in thought and action that our culture increasingly struggles to embrace.”
• “With parenting, the problem is worse, because the loss of control is greater—parents commit themselves to unconditionally loving someone they have never even met.  In a very deep and unsettling way, we do not choose our children. The mystery of birth is that when the child is born it is entrusted to its parents, who must accept, love and care for it. Parent and child are bonded for life; over time, they will change one another deeply and irrevocably. It is ironic that we delay this bond in the name of being prepared for it, because when we do that, we delay the very changes in ourselves that are necessary to parent well. Parenting may make us more patient, generous, hopeful and loving, but these changes are brought about through the practices of family life—a daily, subtle, continuous transfiguration.”

It is within this context of parenting that the US Surgeon General raised concerns about the mental health of parents:  “An advisory issued [in mid-September] by Dr. Vivek Murthy, the nation’s doctor, said parents in particular are under dangerous levels of stress.  The report cites the American Psychological Association, saying nearly half of parents report overwhelming stress most days, compared with 26% of other adults. They’re lonelier, too, according to cited data from health insurer Cigna. In a 2021 survey, 65% of parents said they were lonely, compared with 55% of those without kids.”

So, asks Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times, “why has parental stress risen to the level of a rare surgeon general’s warning about an urgent public health issue—putting it in the same category as cigarettes and AIDS?  It’s because today’s parents face something different and more demanding: the expectation that they spend ever more time and money educating and enriching their children. These pressures, researchers say, are driven in part by fears about the modern-day economy—that if parents don’t equip their children with every possible advantage, their children could fail to achieve a secure, middle-class life.”

This parenting style is known as intensive parenting, as the sociologist Sharon Hays described it in the late 1990s. It involves “painstakingly and methodically cultivating children’s talents, academics and futures through everyday interactions and activities,” the sociologists Melissa Milkie and Kei Nomaguchi have written.  But we may have reached a point, the surgeon general and other experts suggest, where intensive parenting has become too intense for parents.

• “Parents spend greater shares of their money on their children than parents did a generation ago, especially for extracurricular activities like sports or tutoring. They spend more time actively engaged with them, reading or on the floor playing.  Though rich parents are more able to make these investments, the pressure to parent like this reaches across class, research has shown.”
• “Parents blame themselves when they fear they don’t measure up. A majority say they feel their children’s successes or failures reflect on them, and significant shares feel judged for their parenting, the Pew Research Center found. The surgeon general called out an intense culture of comparison, exacerbated by the internet.”
• “Much of the parenting conversation in recent years has been about whether intensive parenting hurts or helps children. There are fears that it can go too far, depriving children of chances to develop independence and resilience, though child development experts say that children generally benefit from more parental involvement.  But the surgeon general’s alert shifts the focus to parents’ well-being — which it said in turn affects children’s mental health. The increased demands of raising children, combined with responsibilities like paid work and elder care, have come at the expense of mental health, leisure time, sleep, and time alone or with a spouse.”

In 2020, The Social Capital Project documented the myriad ways in which associational life had deteriorated over the past fifty years. Nowhere is this decline more worrisome than in the realm of family stability. Relationships have become thinner and more fragile in many aspects of life, and the value of the social capital available to us has diminished as a result. But for children, there is no substitute for the benefits that come from strong family bonds. Unfortunately, family instability has increased to the point where it is the norm for many Americans today. Troublingly, those most likely to experience family disconnection are the least-advantaged among us. While family instability does not necessarily doom a child to poorer life outcomes, it often means greater disconnection in the most intimate of human relationships and less social capital of the strongest type. Changing the course of family stability will likely require substantial effort, given the magnitude of the challenge in many American communities today and the pervasiveness of the decline. Compounding matters, our understanding of what got us here is woefully incomplete. It should be no surprise, then, that policymakers have yet to find a way to reverse the troublesome trends documented in this report. Until we get a better sense of what has caused family breakdown to worsen and of what policies are effective at reversing breakdown, policymakers will need to experiment with a variety of approaches. Toward the end of strengthening families—the source of so much potential happiness or sadness in our lives—Americans of all backgrounds and perspectives must come together and make headway on this most important modern-day problem.

In conclusion, permit me a few personal observations about parenting:

First: what is a family? We discovered that a family is an institution established by God (Genesis 2:18-25) that is to teach and model the things of God (Deut. 6:1-11). We also discovered that a family is an institution of discipline, trust and openness (Ephesians 5:23-6:4). Peggy and I were committed to building a family that met these characteristics.

Second, my wife and I developed a series of principles that reflected our philosophy of parenting:

1. We would not neglect to discipline our children. We would set the boundaries for our home and expected them to adhere to those boundaries.
2. We sought to maintain a vibrant and personal relationship with our children built on trust. I would often say to my children, “I will always trust you until you give me a reason not to trust you.”
3. We sought to affirm and encourage, rather than criticize.
4. We knew we would need to discipline our children, but we wanted to be certain that they always understood and experienced our forgiveness.
5. We sought to cultivate respect in our family. We tried to respect their space (e.g., their bedrooms, their study space) and tried to respect their opinions and decisions. One of the most difficult aspects of this commitment was how to share disagreement with one of their decisions but still show them respect.
6. Most importantly, we sought to model before our children a robust walk of faith with God. We wanted them to see that Jesus is not only their Savior from sin but also their friend. This is a truth that cannot only be taught; it needed to be seen in how we ordered our lives. We did not always do this as well as we wished, but it was always our goal.

See Jennifer A. Frey in the Wall Street Journal (24-25 August 2024); Julie Jargon in the Wall Street Journal (29 August 2024); Claire Cain Miller, “Today’s Parents: ‘Exhausted, Burned Out and Perpetually Behind’” in the New York Times (16 September 2024); Tabitha McDuffee, “Parents Today Are Kinder and Gentler. They Can Still Take Sin Seriously,” Christianity Today (18 September 2024); “The Demise of the Happy Two-Parent Home,” Social Capital Report, REPORT NO. 3-20 (July 2020); tendencies.”