We Spend a lot of Time Fighting for Children. But Little Appreciating Them.
Children in the West are undervalued by Secularists and Christians alike.
You have my deepest gratitude for sticking with me after this long hiatus. My monkeys have taken a hiatus at another circus for the moment (more specifically, to the Sandman’s domain), and as such, I have carved out a few moments of writing time. And speaking of those monkeys, let’s talk about children.
I did not set out to make every installment of this newsletter one revolving around current events like a swirl down the drain, but I find myself here yet again. There are several seemingly separate threads that have contributed to this tapestry of thought. This one is a good start:
As some of my readers know, one of my sticking points with social media is that it tends to take fringe views held by very few people, sometimes even those with very small audiences, and blow them up as a huge problem. Often they’re not. That someone at the Huffington Post wrote a story about “backlash” based on four tweets does not make those four tweets representative. But this isn’t a tweet by a deconstructing college student. This is a billboard. Paid for by an organization with a podcasts and a phone number and a website and a P.O. Box in Saint Paul. That’s not a fringe person, that’s an actual institution, which is indicative of a broader value. Children are fine and all, as long as there’s not very many of them.
Now to be fair, the “One Planet One Child” project is largely focused on environmentalism - have fewer children so as to lessen our burden on the planet, so to speak. But even political progressivism needn’t go that far. If you disagree with that, Matthew Yglesias would like to have some words. He literally wrote a book full of them (and I recommend this podcast interview with him, in which he actually addresses the environmentalism/population question, and rather well).
It doesn’t exactly take a Reed Richards to put this recent theme and a lessening value of children themselves in an overlapping Venn diagram. Especially when the same organization is pushing a podcast called “You Had Me at Childless.” This has also presented itself in the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, who is a Catholic woman with seven children. Irrespective of the politics of the nomination itself (trust me, I have opinions on that, but they’re hardly relevant here), the point here is that she has been attacked as having too many children. Even in a culture that supposedly values individualism so much that we’ll even challenge the traditional nuclear family, *that* choice in family planning is flat wrong.
And yet, this is not restrained to politics. Nor is it particularly recent, actually. One reminder of this came when I recently watched Halloween III: Season of the Witch for the first time. I don’t particularly recommend it. It’s not very good, and has some problematic sexual elements. But what I found more interesting was the sharp disconnect between the film’s supposed theme and its plot.
On some level, the film is all about saving children. An evil corporation markets masks to children in order to use them as a weapon to kill them on Halloween through a TV commercial. I can practically see Neil Postman’s face pasted onto the Will Smith gesturing gif. But in another sense it’s not about saving children at all because children are barely in the movie at all. The film even seems to introduce the idea of parenthood – the film’s lead is a divorced doctor who is father to two children. And although he eventually calls his ex-wife to beg her to take the masks away, he also weasels out of taking care of them (in one case, so that he can have sex with a woman young enough to be his daughter), and we barely see them at all after they’re introduced. It’s as if to say that providing for children in terms of safety and finances is all fine and good, but to actually spend time with them? Well…
And, in a twist exactly as shocking as vapid melodrama in a Woody Allen film, this way of thinking has been consumed and propagated by the church. The idea of a “quiver full of children” in Psalm 127 having anything at all to do with their number is, at times, openly mocked. One could also point to the common tradition of “children’s church” – dropping the kids off in a nursery so that the parents aren’t unduly distracted during worship.
Many of these elements come from a shifting foundation of theology of the family. We tend to view children (and spouses, too) as objects of self-fulfillment or a fuller self-idealization. We see those around us as opportunities to express ourselves, subjects in a realm of my lifestyle and self-expression, not objects in their own right, with their own experiences. Kids are great when they contribute that self-expression, but not so great when they get in the way of it. Thus, we prioritize having far fewer of them, reduce their attention needs through electronic devices, and in some cases, prime them for decoration with awards like a multi-tiered trophy, rather than investing in their emotional and spiritual well-being as whole persons themselves. A better vision of the family is one that recognizes how the family reflects the nature of God. This is already too long, so I won’t go terribly deep here, but man and woman are designed reflect complementary aspects of God’s character, and even procreation itself reflects the critical attribute of God as Creator.
But if you want a concrete example of children as commodities, one need look no further than the politicians using them as props for various viewpoints, but trends in genetic engineering provide a chilling illustration as well:
Currently, genetic engineering allows us to select our baby’s gender and eye color as well as modify the risk of certain illnesses. In the very near future, however, we could have a say over other more controversial characteristics.
Fascinating as these technological advances may be, genetic engineering leads us to some difficult ethical questions. Josephine Johnston directs research at the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute. In her opinion, having control over physical traits like a baby’s eye color “can seem awfully close to a eugenic mind-set, where we thought we can sort the worthy and fit from the unworthy and unfit.”
And are people actually marketing the current genetic engineering options? Yes, they are. Here’s one example.
Now I feel I should make a few caveats here. That one is a Rhodes Scholar does not mean they were relationally neglected. That one has fewer than five children does not mean he or she is being selfish with their time (I myself have two kids). One of these possible correlations or symptoms is not necessarily indicative of the deeper disease. And yet the attitudes gripping Western parenthood as of late, injected with our increasing hyper-individualism, are a recipe for this kind of posture.
Shifting away from this mentality is a complex cultural endeavor that no simplistic “call to action” can adequately address. But perhaps it starts with this encouragement: we must treat our children as persons in their own right, with their own ideas, interests, ambitions, preferences, and callings, ones that we might not have chosen for them if we were creating our perfect Designer Child (Trademark pending).