I loved your ending. Perhaps young women should be told that a meaningful life matters more than a successful life - and that a meaningful life generally includes children.
I would also tell them that putting their fertility on hold until their late 30s is often a mistake. And to think of a career that can accommodate children.
The message in the UK to young women is to have relationships but to remember their contraception. And that if they have children, they should return to work as soon as possible, leaving their babies in all day state childcare.
How sad and wrong such messaging is. No wonder young women are unhappy.
I got a degree from Cambridge, then married and had 8 children. The fabled career never got going - but my children got a lot of care and attention and as I read to them constantly they are very literate (!)
👏👏👏 Thank you, Liza for a most important and timely article! It’s still very much up in the air at this point whether most young women will have children. Miller’s data doesn’t prove anything. If we want to change the low birth rates and our culture more broadly we need to avoid the extremes of the anti-natalism of the left and the Trad Wife Movement on the right. We need to as you said, find a middle ground in which women know they can have a career and be a mother and homemaker. Here are the steps I think we should take to reverse this trend:
• Shift images of motherhood and family in the media to be more positive.
• Stigmatize at a societal level, anti-natalism, child hate and misanthropy.
• Return to traditional values and monogamy.
• Restore the nuclear family in our society.
• Teach fertility education to children at a young age.
• Start building lower density neighborhoods.
• The left and the Democratic Party must embrace pro-natalism.
• Ditch the Trad Wife Movement.
• Eliminate third and fourth-wave feminism.
• Continue to not trust and drive the mainstream media out of business.
• Put an end to the Gender Wars.
• Socially ostracize radical feminists and chauvinists like Andrew Tate and Myron Gaines.
Ah, no, repeated studies have found that having children doesn't make anyone profoundly happy!
Only after children are grown up and left home do parents achieve parity of happiness with their childless peers. In other words, they regain good levels of happiness only after the child raising job has concluded.
Maybe in the far more conservative and Christian dominated culture of the US those very old fashioned values held true for Gen X, not so in other countries.
As an adult in that era, no one was espousing marriage or babies as a path to fulfillment for women.
In Australia, nearly 20 percent of Gen X women haven't had children.
Up to 43 percent - and increasing - of women with a university education don't have children (again, Australian figures). Childlessness has long ago stopped being unusual here.
The single reliable predictor of childlessness or fewer children is the education level of women. This holds true in first world or third world countries and everything in between.
Give a woman other options, via formal education, and having children becomes a lesser priority. Education is a way out. This was established many decades ago . Childlessness has a long tail, and it always comes back to level of education and access to alternative opportunities.
The trad wife movement seems to entirely miss how the modern economy has changed the economies of households. Traditionally (painting with a broad brush here), men went out to the fields and forests and brought home raw materials that women then processed into finished goods in the household, with the help of their growing children. Men and women were both engaged in important, complex, productive labor, which together built up the wealth of the household. And the labor of their children also contributed to the household wealth and ensured continuity of income for the family as the parents aged, making children an economic asset rather than a liability.
A modern household still requires maintenance work, but it is not the site of productive labor (except in the sense of doing office work from home). It consumes finished goods brought from outside and paid for with money earned from outside work.
There is no going back to the traditional economy that provided women with productive and challenging work in the home. At least, not without returning to the levels of poverty that pertained for most of history. This leaves a real problem for modern women who naturally want to be productive and also naturally want to have children and raise them at home. For the first time in history, they can't do both these things in the same place.
As FP below, I thought your last paragraph was great. Certainly women should not be shamed for not having children. To me it's an individual's choice about how to live her life. If she wants kids, great. If not, also fine. In my view, there is no such thing as a duty to have kids. Again, it's up the individual.
I always see a real gap between the 2 sides of the argument between the so-called trad wife movement and the disdain for the sacrifice of child-rearing. Self- actualization and having children are not mutually exclusive. Nowhere is it discussed that, if someone is able to stay home with their small children, and I wish I'd been able to, a solution for additional family income and use of brains and talent is self employment.
It’s topical, as well as supportive of Liza’s core thesis, to look at Viktor Orban’s policies in Hungary here. These optically produced a “baby-boom” a few years ago, but that now looks like a statistical artefact and birth rates are back to where they were.
Orban’s government spent 5% of GDP(!) on subsidies and tax breaks, but in a very trad-wife way. “We would like our daughters to consider bearing us grandchildren as the highest form of self-realization” Orban’s Speaker of Parliament (in)famously said. You had to be married of course – no tax breaks for single, co-habiting or (gasp) same-sex relationships. And the subsidies really kicked in after your fourth child. Where I am in the UK only 10% women return to the workplace after their fourth child.
Orban’s government didn’t make any improvements to maternity leave, maternity pay or workplace flexibility. Nor did they increase paternity leave or shared parental leave. All these remained at the EU-mandated minimum.
My wife and I passed the baton of primary-carer back and forth a couple times as our children grew. I’m very grateful to her for the time I’ve been able to spend with the kids – more than many other Dads. She has been able to “have it all” as the cliché goes, although she rightly points out that being married to me is a significant downside.
Bringing up our family is the best thing we've done together. Although I would say mileage may vary on "life filled with utter joy" :)
I loved your ending. Perhaps young women should be told that a meaningful life matters more than a successful life - and that a meaningful life generally includes children.
I would also tell them that putting their fertility on hold until their late 30s is often a mistake. And to think of a career that can accommodate children.
The message in the UK to young women is to have relationships but to remember their contraception. And that if they have children, they should return to work as soon as possible, leaving their babies in all day state childcare.
How sad and wrong such messaging is. No wonder young women are unhappy.
I got a degree from Cambridge, then married and had 8 children. The fabled career never got going - but my children got a lot of care and attention and as I read to them constantly they are very literate (!)
👏👏👏 Thank you, Liza for a most important and timely article! It’s still very much up in the air at this point whether most young women will have children. Miller’s data doesn’t prove anything. If we want to change the low birth rates and our culture more broadly we need to avoid the extremes of the anti-natalism of the left and the Trad Wife Movement on the right. We need to as you said, find a middle ground in which women know they can have a career and be a mother and homemaker. Here are the steps I think we should take to reverse this trend:
• Shift images of motherhood and family in the media to be more positive.
• Stigmatize at a societal level, anti-natalism, child hate and misanthropy.
• Return to traditional values and monogamy.
• Restore the nuclear family in our society.
• Teach fertility education to children at a young age.
• Start building lower density neighborhoods.
• The left and the Democratic Party must embrace pro-natalism.
• Ditch the Trad Wife Movement.
• Eliminate third and fourth-wave feminism.
• Continue to not trust and drive the mainstream media out of business.
• Put an end to the Gender Wars.
• Socially ostracize radical feminists and chauvinists like Andrew Tate and Myron Gaines.
Ah, no, repeated studies have found that having children doesn't make anyone profoundly happy!
Only after children are grown up and left home do parents achieve parity of happiness with their childless peers. In other words, they regain good levels of happiness only after the child raising job has concluded.
Maybe in the far more conservative and Christian dominated culture of the US those very old fashioned values held true for Gen X, not so in other countries.
As an adult in that era, no one was espousing marriage or babies as a path to fulfillment for women.
In Australia, nearly 20 percent of Gen X women haven't had children.
Up to 43 percent - and increasing - of women with a university education don't have children (again, Australian figures). Childlessness has long ago stopped being unusual here.
The single reliable predictor of childlessness or fewer children is the education level of women. This holds true in first world or third world countries and everything in between.
Give a woman other options, via formal education, and having children becomes a lesser priority. Education is a way out. This was established many decades ago . Childlessness has a long tail, and it always comes back to level of education and access to alternative opportunities.
The trad wife movement seems to entirely miss how the modern economy has changed the economies of households. Traditionally (painting with a broad brush here), men went out to the fields and forests and brought home raw materials that women then processed into finished goods in the household, with the help of their growing children. Men and women were both engaged in important, complex, productive labor, which together built up the wealth of the household. And the labor of their children also contributed to the household wealth and ensured continuity of income for the family as the parents aged, making children an economic asset rather than a liability.
A modern household still requires maintenance work, but it is not the site of productive labor (except in the sense of doing office work from home). It consumes finished goods brought from outside and paid for with money earned from outside work.
There is no going back to the traditional economy that provided women with productive and challenging work in the home. At least, not without returning to the levels of poverty that pertained for most of history. This leaves a real problem for modern women who naturally want to be productive and also naturally want to have children and raise them at home. For the first time in history, they can't do both these things in the same place.
There is nothing better than a loving relationship with a child but we live in a fiercely individualistic culture where loving isn't trusted.
There is nothing worse than a bad relationship with a child.
As FP below, I thought your last paragraph was great. Certainly women should not be shamed for not having children. To me it's an individual's choice about how to live her life. If she wants kids, great. If not, also fine. In my view, there is no such thing as a duty to have kids. Again, it's up the individual.
Excellent except…”glorification of abortion in many leftist circles.” No one glorifies abortion.
I always see a real gap between the 2 sides of the argument between the so-called trad wife movement and the disdain for the sacrifice of child-rearing. Self- actualization and having children are not mutually exclusive. Nowhere is it discussed that, if someone is able to stay home with their small children, and I wish I'd been able to, a solution for additional family income and use of brains and talent is self employment.
And, the push for tiny families started in the 70s with zero population growth
It’s topical, as well as supportive of Liza’s core thesis, to look at Viktor Orban’s policies in Hungary here. These optically produced a “baby-boom” a few years ago, but that now looks like a statistical artefact and birth rates are back to where they were.
Orban’s government spent 5% of GDP(!) on subsidies and tax breaks, but in a very trad-wife way. “We would like our daughters to consider bearing us grandchildren as the highest form of self-realization” Orban’s Speaker of Parliament (in)famously said. You had to be married of course – no tax breaks for single, co-habiting or (gasp) same-sex relationships. And the subsidies really kicked in after your fourth child. Where I am in the UK only 10% women return to the workplace after their fourth child.
Orban’s government didn’t make any improvements to maternity leave, maternity pay or workplace flexibility. Nor did they increase paternity leave or shared parental leave. All these remained at the EU-mandated minimum.
My wife and I passed the baton of primary-carer back and forth a couple times as our children grew. I’m very grateful to her for the time I’ve been able to spend with the kids – more than many other Dads. She has been able to “have it all” as the cliché goes, although she rightly points out that being married to me is a significant downside.
Bringing up our family is the best thing we've done together. Although I would say mileage may vary on "life filled with utter joy" :)