Reflections on Parenthood, Marriage, and Modern Society

Why Are So Many Adults Without Families?

“You talk about this unconstrained and emancipated life you have chosen, without wives and children, but you are no different from outlaws or the most savage wild beasts.

Certainly it is not because you take pleasure in a solitary existence that you live without wives, for there is none among you who either eats or sleeps alone. What you want is complete liberty to lead an undisciplined and promiscuous life…

Let none suppose that I overlook the fact that marriage and the procreation of children have their vexatious and painful aspects. But remember this too, we do not possess any other good which does not include some unpleasant element in its composition.” - Augustus Caesar [Cassius Dio, 56.6-8]

The sarcophagus of M. Cornelius Statius

As I await the birth of my son, I reflect on the universality of the human experience. Many responsibilities have got in the way of writing, for reasons that are familiar to anyone who has gone through this. Tolstoy famously wrote “All happy families are the same, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and my family is happy, and thus by extension typical. As we don’t currently intend to have a third child, because my wife dislikes being pregnant and I think two children is the maximum amount of irritation I can withstand while remaining a good parent, this should be the last time for us. I am trying to savor the good parts, though of course it is far from all being pleasant. Still, it is incredible the extent to which our society has scared people about being parents, and especially scared women of pregnancy. So much time has been spent trying to prevent teen pregnancy while remaining “sex positive” that it has been forgotten that starting a family with a lot of life ahead of you is a good thing. There has been such obsession with abortion rights that the miracles of pregnancy and childbirth are often portrayed as more of a curse. When it comes to marriage, the perfect has been made the enemy of the good, and many feel that the possibility of future divorce is a reason to not marry. Perhaps it is typical of our society, but we have made the worst of the best thing, and now have a mass of single and/or childless people unable to understand why they are unhappy, convinced that a lack of personal responsibilities is the ultimate freedom yet knowing that their lives remain unfulfilling.

My daughter just turned 5, but I remember when she was a baby telling a man who was marrying into my extended family that he did not need to worry about his lack of experience with children to have them in the future [it didn’t work out, due to lack of diligence in preparing for the union.] Every man fortunate enough to be married before having children experiences this in basically the same way: your wife does endless research about pregnancy, birth, and babies, and tells you about it every day. It was once the women of the village, now it is the internet. You more or less have to do what she says, or at least it is best that you do. It is the same with a girlfriend you’ve impregnated, but as a believer that adults should be married, I assume adults in a relationship are married, and let them have the shame of saying they aren’t, instead of risking the much graver offense of calling a man’s wife his “partner” or even his “girlfriend.” [I know it is 2024, but I assume anyone with a “partner” is either in business or gay, though now gay people have been allowed to marry for 10 years.] I hate when people call Alexis something less than my wife.

That is far from the only universal experience when expecting. The power of nesting hormones are something to behold, and for nigh 6 months every day at my house has been like orientation at a new job: a never ending cycle of hearing about where to get supplies, which trash bin to use, and ever changing break room rules. It’s funny too, because I can’t remember such things in the best circumstances, much less when it has gone on day after day as my house transforms around me. I will just continue to open every drawer until I find what I am looking for, as I would inevitably do anyway. It’s not like I had half of these things memorized before.

Of course, for the man who is fortunate to have his own home, there is an important male form of nesting: the great nursery remodel. It is the ultimate labor of love. Thinking back to five years ago, which is to say the first time I experienced this, there was certainly a greater degree of magic, depth of emotion, and excitement. It is funny to remember that I had an active Facebook discussion group at the time, and as anyone who has been the admin of anything on the internet will have experienced, I was dealing with one member who would just not give me a break. Not only was he having idiotic arguments with me that he carried across DMs, in group, and on public Facebook, he was also perpetually complaining about other people in the group and wanting me to do something about them. This caused a fair amount of internet drama, and I remember being the most upset about the extent that he was agitating me during the magical time that I was painting my daughter’s room pink. Of course, as with your wedding or anything else, what goes wrong becomes a funny memory more than a bad one. Creating a nursery for your child is an irreplaceable experience. We really aren’t so different from the male bird doing his part, and of course the pregnant woman finds this behavior very attractive: my wife even showed me a comical Facebook video about it, so it’s clearly a universal experience. It is not all the way put together, but still I have done something with our gross and disused storage room, making all of our house nicely habitable and ready for a baby:

There are more pictures including a “before” picture on Instagram…well not all the way before, still after the cleaning.

When your wife is so pregnant she wants help to stand up, it is always something. On Wednesday I hoped to write, but realized this being a second pregnancy that no one had given us freezer meals, and I ended up making a lasagna and two pans of enchiladas. It’s like this every day. My editing here was disrupted to help her put up various shelves and decorations in the boy’s room, though of course we have no genuine need to have these things for quite some time.

It is a lot to think about never doing this again and being through a part of my life. I keep wondering about the last time I will feel my child kick from within my wife’s womb. At the same time, it is not fun when your wife is near term, no matter how she handles pregnancy. Pregnancies are hard on Alexis and by extension our marriage, so not doing this another time is for the best. We are at 39 weeks on Friday; our daughter was born at 41 1/2, but it’s assumed a second doesn’t go like that. My wife is a lovely woman, but a woman in this state is not always pleasant. She is enormous, uncomfortable, irritable, constantly tired, and yet compulsively active, sorting and cleaning. We only recently got the boy’s dresser moved in and had to go through clothing. She sat in the boy’s room bawling as she went through our daughter’s clothes to pick out the ones masculine enough to be appropriate for a baby boy. We are already so distant from our daughter being a baby, and she never will of course never be one again; she’s such a big girl that she just performed in her first ballet recital!

Parenthood is magical; it is the main thing that makes the normal person’s life worth living. My wife and I may be somewhat unusual people, but as married homeowners with two children, we will in other ways reach peak normality in 2024. Really, to an extent being married makes you more normal no matter how strange you are. The Augustus speech cited in the epigraph actually praises the married before attacking the unmarried, and says that a wife can “moderate the madcap nature of youth and soften the crabbed severity of old age” [Cassius Dio, 56.3.] This is certainly true, and it moderates women a great deal as well. Every day Twitter makes me think “adults are supposed to be married” as I watch the insane relationship discourse from people whose solitude is driving them mad. The human brain greatly benefits from having a child to focus on.

While people want to say things don’t work between the men and the women these days, they aren’t worse than ever. Perhaps some people have been given false hopes of a perfect life, but this was always true. It seems the men most impacted are those who can’t choose a wife or simply don’t want to contribute at home. It’s a hard life for women, and one doesn’t help anything by growing complacent to your wife’s happiness and assuming she is content to manage the whole household while you drink beer and play Call of Duty. It isn’t a failing of society that women have expectations. Women can withstand a lot, but have always had their limits: Rome even once had an epidemic of women poisoning their husbands so they could be single and have the increased legal rights of widows [Livy, VI.18¹.]

Still, we do feel lucky to be together and to have met when we did. Alexis and I started dating in the window where they had Grindr for gay people but there was not yet Tinder for straight people. As has been commented, hearing about modern dating does kind of feel like we caught the last chopper out of Saigon. However, all the normal ways to meet people still exist: you could flirt with the cute cashier or talk to a woman who goes to happy hour with her co-workers or simply be involved in your community. I assure you that the people giving constant bad relationship advice on Twitter are primarily single because they’re insufferable and spend 10 hours a day in Twitter spaces instead of going outside [that even made my first annual Festivus Airing of Grievances.] It’s a matter of speaking to people and not thinking that what women put on Tinder when asked to divide a man into discrete parts is a reflection of reality that actually applies in the physical world: I can assure you the vast majority of women will date men under six feet tall.

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Something I am always thinking about in my studies of history is the extent to which things have always been the same, even if there are different social customs and vastly different technology. I often think about Herodotus having been impressed by the man who let his daughters choose their own husbands [VI.122,] which goes to show no one is obligated to follow the practices of his time and can always do better than the society he lives in. Periodic social manias notwithstanding, the same ideas have always been around in one way or another. One encounters people who have never read an ancient text who hold to the idea that things were so different as to be irrelevant to modern life, which of course is a sign of horribly incomplete thinking and education. One reading of something like Aristotle’s Politics and it will be impressed upon you how complex society already was and in so many ways the same. This is why the plays Lysistrata and The Assemblywomen by Aristophanes remain so amusing, because their portrayal of gender relations are still accurate. Humans have tendency of thinking the past was better and that things are getting worse, a premise mentioned by Plutarch, Montaigne, and many others. Part of the issue is the human capacity for nostalgia. Another is simply not having experienced the past beyond your own memory. Another, perhaps greater, issue is that your parents shield you from the wrongs of the world, so unless your parents are degenerates or you grew up in a warzone usually your childhood will seem more innocent time than your life as an adult. People want to believe things are so dangerous now, but though there has been a lockdown era increase in crime, society is much safer than it was in the “golden eras” we look back on. Admittedly, helicopter parenting, safetyism, etc are surely part of the cause of fewer child abductions and the like, despite that we use such statistics to say those behaviors are irrational because the world is so much safer now.

Augustus Caesar’s lecture to the public from the epigraph is quite long, several pages, and shows Rome in a similar era to ours: one where people have become more concerned about enjoying their own lives than continuing their race, and where the patriotic duty of bringing on the next generation to improve the world is shunned by many. In this time there were even childless people treating their pets as children, “fur babies” as they are now cringe-inducingly called, something Plutarch criticizes multiple times, in one instance attributing it to Augustus,

“Caesar once caught sight of some wealthy foreigners in Rome, who were carrying about young monkeys and puppies in their arms and caressing them with a great show of affection. He then asked, it seems, whether the women in those countries did not bear children, thus rebuking in a truly imperial fashion those who squander upon animals that capacity for love and affection which in the natural order of things should be reserved for our fellow men.” [Prologue to Pericles and Fabius Maximus, 1]

This is a particular example of how everything has been done before, since it is commonly said we are the only culture in history where people would have dogs instead of children, though this irritated Plutarch as much as it irritates any modern internet commenter.

One thing that is mostly unique in our era is the idea that women should establish their careers and then take breaks to have children. Of course, there is no formula for a perfect marriage or family, but viewing this as the ideal is completely upside down. Some years ago I heard Camille Paglia and Jordan Peterson discuss this on a podcast, and say what you will about them, but I feel Paglia was correct in this instance to explain all the reasons this is irrational. We have developed the idea that it is bad for children to grow up in poverty, when in reality what is bad is alcoholism and abuse: seeing your parents struggle and become more successful over time is good for children. Our country is sufficiently prosperous that children with conscientious parents of any income level are going to be provided for. Even so, we all know people whose bad parents inspired them to be profoundly sober and responsible, and alternately people whose parents were honest and hardworking people who gave them every opportunity and they amounted to nothing.

Younger parents are also less neurotic about the safety of their children. It takes all types, but we do not want a society exclusively made up of only children born to parents in their late 30s who live in constant fear of losing the one child they will ever be able to have [of course, to be a parent is to always worry.] Big families are good. Gender relations are better when boys and girls grow up together. Though my wife and I expect to stick to two children, there are serious downsides to the model of investing large amounts in a small number of children instead of having several children and figuring things will work out for some of them, as has historically been done by the poor. Of course, when you have nothing to leave your kids, you don’t have to worry about dividing your estate into pieces which are too small to be valuable, something that is a problem for the wealthy [King John, of Robin Hood fame, was known as “John Lackland” because even a King wasn’t expected to have a meaningful inheritance for his fourth son; of course this can cause all sorts of conflict, for one example, Edward III having six children created the circumstances leading to the War of the Roses.]

Younger women are also more fertile and have easier pregnancies. It should be noted that fertility treatments can be so overwhelmingly expensive that any money you saved in the time of waiting until 35 to be “financially comfortable” before having children could be wiped out just having a child who might have been conceived by normal methods 10 years earlier. A woman making the plan of waiting until 5 or 10 years into her career and then either taking a break for 5 years or having repeated maternity leave is nonsense compared to having children younger and starting a career in your early 30s, leaving the women a full 30 years of an uninterrupted career. Both my mother and mother-in-law started their current careers in their 30s or early 40s and are immensely successful, in fact much more so than our fathers. At the same time, If a woman takes a break to raise kids in her 30s, this leaves a previously two-income household with only one income. This can destroy her husband’s chance to change careers if he desires to do so while he is still young enough to be energetic and have the remaining working years to get a pension, whereas a wife going back to work at this time makes the household much less dependent on his job.

I should emphasize again that there is not only one way to live your life, but our society has decided that one thing is “responsible” and has landed on the wrong way to go about it. I myself struggled with my wife thinking we had to be completely “established” to have kids, but if you wait until things are perfect to have children they never will be. At the same time, we did make some important life improvements before becoming parents, but mostly regarding things that had gotten worse over the prior 5 years of being married without children, which is to say, we partially recovered from problems created while we were living listless and unfulfilling lives. It’s hard to imagine anyone who has kids past 30 does not ultimately wish to have become a parent earlier in life, after experiencing it.

The big objection to this all is the idea that young people will make bad decisions in terms of choosing a spouse. In reality, by 25 you should be as able to pick a partner as you would be at any point in the future. You can’t spend your whole life waiting to be more mature: you live your life and maturity comes from experience. Further, it becomes immensely hard for two people who have been single for many years of adult life to then combine two lives into one coherent household. One sees first marriages that happen in peoples’ 30s or older rapidly fail because it is so hard to become one family. It is easier to learn to be married in your 20s. Alexis and I did not have post-college lives apart from each other and thus have only been proper adults together. It’s strange people will say you shouldn’t get married young because you might get divorced, when this could happen at any age. Regret is broadly a pointless emotion [though one I constantly struggle with] but few people regret the marriage that brought them children even if it didn’t work out. Obviously some people are egregiously bad and abusive spouses but one can’t live life with the attitude “you shouldn’t try because you might fail.” Is that advice given anywhere else? It’s very strange. One other objection to young marriage I have heard is that people from religious fundamentalist homes are indoctrinated into marrying too young which by extension means all of society should advise against young marriage. All I can say is that one of the worst things about religious fundamentalism [whatever that poorly defined term is taken to mean] are the people who leave the faith and then constantly say nothing in society can ever be done in a reasonable fashion due to the need to protect people from fundamentalist backgrounds. But yeah, for clarity, when I say it’s better that women have children young I don’t mean a 16 year old being married off to a 50 year old man in her church.

I believe there are two main ways in which people have been scared out of having children. The first is this sort of nonsense:

There is a sickness in this Tweeter’s head that is widespread in our society. Great thinkers from Herodotus onward said that every man preferred his own culture, and historically every man was proud of his people’s history. I don’t know where it started, but it is more or less a “mainstream,” belief in the United States that both our culture and our history are uniquely morally bad. Perhaps most of our country also believes that global overpopulation is a major problem, though it is insane to believe that and think you yourself not having children is the solution. This climate claim about the planet being “cooked” bears further inspection. Besides national suicide due to losing self confidence- exactly what this Tweeter promotes- the two things which commonly do collapse a civilization are the instability which comes from changing climate and soil degradation. I don’t believe in anthropogenic global warming, but it is obviously important to care for the land we rely on and some pressing environmental issues due exist. However, it’s funny the extent to which the global warming alarmists overshot alarming the public. It is the same as with the covid dead-enders [which this person also is, of course] that once they started the panic they couldn’t stop it. The people who actually study climate change and are experts in this field usually believe there are a variety of important steps to solve the problem, some of which have been taken: the actual “experts” do not usually find the situation hopeless. What gets me, though, is these lunatics believe that over the course of several decades humans would not take basic mitigation actions, such as when they claim people in northern cities will all die of heat stroke in the 2070’s which implies that no one will install air conditioners over the course of 50 years. Similarly they say this about sea levels rising, despite that the technology to live below sea level has existed since antiquity and building a few feet of sea wall provides no technical challenges [in fact, there is already a shipping lane spanning the entire Eastern seaboard, which was surely much more difficult to build than some sea wall around low lying areas.]

Even if you are somehow duped into thinking heavy-handed global government and harming key aspects of the economy to change the weather is a good idea, those goals are also going pretty well. It’s a bizarre defeatist attitude that completely ignores how adaptable humans really are. I have become increasingly convinced that the belief that the world will be destroyed by global warming in our lifetimes regardless of what anyone does explains many things about what is wrong with this group of people [such as their lack of fear of nuclear war and thus willingness to antagonize Russia.] To extent overpopulation exists the real problem is the one made famous by the movie Idiocracy: population growth springs from people who don’t have the skills or education to fix any of the world’s problems. Any normal person is supposed to have optimism that their children can help make a better future and be some sort of net positive to humanity. In places where people have real problems, like Africa and Palestine, birth rates are very high. It is only among those with “Affluenza” that the idea that things are too bad to have kids ever arises. Thinking that if life will be difficult it is better to not exist is not a rational thought pattern: it is depression. Frankly, while we don’t need more neurotic leftists, people who are conscientious about the future of mankind are the ones who should be having children.

The second primary issue is that women have been terrified of pregnancy and childbirth. I cannot be sure of all of the reasons, being as childbirth has become substantially safer than it used to be. I think, though, that because of the “sexual revolution” and political fights over abortion and to a lesser extent birth control, they have simply had to present a baby as something that ruins your life. It is no longer that premarital sex lets the devil in, or that you will get stuck married for life to any guy who happens to get you pregnant. There has been a concerted effort to disconnect sex for pleasure from procreation and to do this they had to convince women that getting pregnant isn’t the point of sex and will also ruin their lives. There has always been a place in society for women who don’t want to have children- the Convent- but the fear of of pregnancy and childbirth should not be nearly as common as it currently is. My wife hates being pregnant but loves the result of being a mother- and indeed a newborn is the ultimate reward. However, plenty of women like being pregnant, or at least don’t mind it.

It is far from guaranteed that pregnancy is a miserable experience. It is a funny thing, my wife and I have always disagreed on abortion, though agreed personally we would not get one besides for severe medical issues. Having a child made us both more moderate: me, because I saw what a woman goes through in pregnancy and childbirth and am hesitant to make any woman do that who doesn’t want to, and Alexis because she realized the extent to which an unborn child is an individual human through the experience of carrying one. Alternately, I have a cousin [who passed away last year] who gave birth to five children, all at 37 weeks with 3 hour labors: she was extremely against abortion, but also fundamentally didn’t understand what women who have 40 hour labors at well past 40 weeks goes through.

A family scene from Ancient Athens.

Having a baby is incredible, despite all the high school classes trying to tell you how miserable it would make you. It’s certainly true that teen pregnancy is not ideal, but it is also does not inherently ruin your life or your child’s. Plenty of people who had children before finishing high school benefited from the shock forcing responsibility on them and were home with a baby as their peers were living dissolute lives and perhaps becoming addicted to drugs [in fact my cousin, the daughter of the one mentioned above, had a child at 16 and is great.] It speaks volumes about our society that what they place the highest value on is how you will miss sports games and raves and college parties, as if those are of supreme importance in a human’s life. Anyhow, youth is wasted on the young; it is not obvious to me that one would have less fun overall in life having children at 18 and an empty nest at 40 than being childless until you are 35 and not getting children out of the house until you are around 60. Of course, there is the risk that feeling as if you missed out on youth leads one to resent one’s marriage and family and everything else, but there is no formula for everything working, and one could just as easily get addicted to alcohol and promiscuous sex between the ages of 15 and 25 and then never be happy in a marriage. One of my friends got married at 18 and I thought she was crazy at the time and she has like 7 kids and is very happy: that was almost 20 years ago. Life is complicated. One way or another, it is a funny thing that so little people are taught in school sticks, yet fearing parenthood does. That fear doesn’t stop people from having promiscuous sex, it just makes them not want children until they are over 30. Of course, it is scary to become a parent, but in the same way anything positive and exciting is: these are the moments life is made of.

There is often discourse about why parents are offended by the childless, because of course the childless are always defensive. Well, it must be admitted, it is unpatriotic to not continue your people, and is in many ways selfish. It’s also a bit rich when such people insist they care a great deal about the future but don’t have their own progeny who will be living that future: realistically at least one of my children will most likely live until 2100. The US and Europe do languish under many childless political and “intellectual” leaders who show brazen disregard for the future. There is an annoyance about a lack of “skin in the game.” But it isn’t that which bothers people about childless. When Alexis was pregnant the first time I was given the advice “your life doesn’t really begin until you become a parent” and it is true. Parents, by instinct, feel bad for the childless. I didn’t have a daughter until I was 31 [which was later than I wanted, always having wanted children; as said above, it was a challenge to get my wife to initially agree we were “ready” to have children] and nothing in my life that happened up to that point besides the things which led me to having a child- meeting Alexis, marriage, getting a house, etc- have any meaning to me. It is depressing for me to imagine the part of our marriage before we had children, even if we did have fun together at the time. The childless don’t get it, but parents are not, in general, jealous of their “freedom.” We, in fact, could generally do whatever thing it is they are doing if we were so inclined, but we instead prefer to spend time with our children. We use our children as an excuse to not accept invitations, but our children rarely actually prevent us from doing so. I can see how this creates the impression that parenthood is oppressive, but that which is the most rewarding will of course also have its price, and no one claimed being a parent is easy.

Parenthood is not for everyone. Some people hate children. Others are so inclined to homosexuality that even in a society where it is not presented as an option they could never make a procreative marriage work [however, we all know people who might not exist if homosexuality was socially acceptable 40 years ago, and people who “came out” later in life are almost always profoundly glad to have their children.] Still others are infertile and for various reasons are unable or unwilling to go through the difficult process of finding a way to have or adopt a child [and it should be noted that even 50 years ago it was generally assumed if you didn’t have kids that “God didn’t want it to happen” and accepted it.] For some people it just never works out, and they find other ways to be happy, or don’t. Still, it is at our own peril that we live in a society that has such a negative view of the experience of marriage and parenthood. A man is meant to have a wife and family.

As it remains in most places in the world, having children should be the social expectation placed on the individual by society. It is important, and most of all it is joyous. It is perverse that our society has placed the highest premium on vice and degeneracy and now often sees a settled family life as something which comes between you and fleeting pleasure. Freedom from the responsibility of leading a family and continuing society is not the kind of liberty a man is meant to want. I think we are returning to an equilibrium where there is at least some admiration of virtue instead of a society which holds no higher value than vice and immediate pleasure. This makes it all the more important to express just how wonderful it is to be a parent instead of one of the angry people on the internet explaining all of the reasons modern society makes it impossible for marriage to work. Sure, there are new challenges in our era, but in other ways, parenthood is easier and safer than ever.

I will leave you with another quote from Augustus Caesar,

“Is it not a joy to acknowledge a child who possesses the qualities of both parents, to tend and educate a being who is both the physical and spiritual image of yourself, so that as it grows up, another self is created? Is it not blessed, on quitting this life, to leave behind as successor an heir both to your breed and your property, one that is your own, born of your own essence, so that only the mortal element of you passes away, while you live on in the child who succeeds you? In this way, you do not fall a victim to the foreigner as in war, nor perish utterly as in pestilence. Such private blessing are the reward of those who marry and beget children.”
[Cassius Dio, 56.3]

And with that, I return to awaiting the birth of my son.

Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. My main articles will always be free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. I also have a tip jar at Ko-Fi. I am now writing regularly for The Libertarian Institute. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.

1. It should be noted that the extent to which this episode was a “Witch Trial” sort of social panic is unclear. It is memorably discussed in the section “The Slow Poisoners” in the classic text Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay.