You Had Kids To Keep Up With Your Friends
The social relevance angle of new life can't be ignored.
I’ve sat next to many a dude at many a bar and contemplated the vagaries of the universe with them. Some of these conversations are illuminating and some are pointless and drunken and come back to the 2006 White Sox faster than you’d imagine. Here is one such story of the former.
I had a friend who used to live down the hall from me. He was a nurse at the time. On Good Friday of (I think) 2018, he got wasted day-side at a bar near our apartment complex, and when I got back from walking the dog, he was in my (unlocked) apartment urinating in my sink, then passed out on my bed. It was scary and weird at the time, but hysterical looking back. He’s a good dude.
A few years later, he was in a new relationship and I met him at a bar on a Thursday for happy hour. He says, with a small degree of resignation: “Well, it’s like that point now where everyone you know is having kids, so to keep in the loop, you have to too…”
I haven’t talked to this kid in a few months, but to my knowledge he doesn’t have kids. It could be on the horizon, though. Who knows? And if it is, good for him. I hope it brings him much self-actualization and tremendous memories and (quiet part out loud) someone to wipe his ass when he’s older.
The one-off comment does bring up a major question of society, though: for generations upon generations, kids were ostensibly an economic necessity. You needed them to work from a relatively-early age. Post-WW1 or maybe more post-WW2, they became more of a “nice-to-have.” Naturally, you would see fertility rates drop when you didn’t need six kids on the assumption that 1–2 might die and you had a farm or a cobbler store to run. Still, we did well for a while. Heard of the, uh, “Baby Boom?” Recently we’ve started to wane, which is a true moral panic.
But it all begs the question: why do people have kids, and is there truly a good reason?
This is a literal core question of human existence, and yet it’s not really discussed that openly, to be honest. Downstream of this question, these days, we have all these videos about how awful Generation Alpha is behaving, and how they can’t read. You’ve seen a few, I bet.
This is a very hard question to unpack in a Medium blog post, but I will do my best to kinda skirt the edges of the discussion.
The first thing you need to realize is that the answer varies tremendously by person and couple. What’s that thing I heard once from an esoteric Substack writer? “Every child begins as a story that a woman told herself about who she is.” Goddamn! That’s like a line of cocaine to a self-aware brain. WHOA! Gimme another hit.
OK, I’m high as a kite now. Let’s roll.
If you go talk to some Bible-thumper, they will tell you they had kids in “God’s image” or according to “God’s will.” I believe in God and everything, but I don’t think God enters your bedroom, then enters the female reproductive system and pulls the sperm into the egg and then makes sure the carrying of the child is viable. God is maybe a construct in these situations, but pregnancy and all that is biology, and honestly it’s a huge amount of luck (another thing we don’t discuss).
If you talk to someone who gets pregnant when their husband opens his email at work, they will say something else.
So it’s all very unique.
But we can’t ignore the fact that kids were once an economic necessity and now they’re closer to an economic burden. Look at child care, for chrissakes.
In that chasm between “needed them for the farm” and “they help my Instagram look cuter,” should we have this discussion:
Are kids more a form of social capital than we admit?
Again, varies by couple and single moms and everything else. Also: I live in Texas, and most of my friends are vaguely affluent, or at least not worried about their next burrito. It’s a performative culture where faith is sometimes the most performative piece. That colors my understanding of all this stuff. Plus, my own sperm sucks. That also colors me.
So, caveats aside and realizing that each “use case” of parenthood is different, here’s what I’d unpack about the social value of kids:
Most people (I think or would hope) enter into the “We are trying” discussion realizing that this is a big cost. 2–3 kids is a bigger cost. I think people realize there is money that will be spent.
Usually when you’re gonna spend $300,000 to over $1M for 18 years on something, you want to vaguely understand the ROI of this decision.
The default is usually “It will make my parents happy” or “Friends are doing it” or “Our house needs more love” (edit: dogs are also very lovable) or something about God. There’s also the famed “biological clock” argument, which holds a lot of water. I live that particular one almost every day, having been married at two separate points to females in their early-to-mid-30s.
Within these discussions and debates, assuming the pregnancy wasn’t automatic or immediate, it usually creeps in that other people are having kids, you’re seeing them less, your IG feed is all kids doing cute things or answering questions or first-day-of-school pics (God, I have so many takes on first-day pics), or this nagging idea of “being left behind.” I get it. I’ve been there for over a decade.
Then you start going to events, i.e. parties and weddings but also kids’ first birthdays, and you realize that mostly, people just discuss their kids and their various milestones and accomplishments. Then you feel more left out, even though you really shouldn’t because these same people made it 30 years with hobbies and interests besides their children, but you do.
So then the kid becomes social capital.
Now go downstream of all this and look at, say, youth sports. That’s become a cluster-f*ck in the last 20 years. And why? Because maybe (just maybe) people had kids for a social capital reason, or an extension of self reason, and they carry that to the ballfield.
Or what about all these stories about seven year-olds not being able to read? I got a dude at my church who sold his company for $40M. His kids go to private school. I went to private school, dogg. I could read books by kinder. This guy’s second-grader did a Bible reading a few months back and she couldn’t read a sentence. It was very sad.
Why can’t kids read, assuming you believe that’s true?
If you want to go the ideology route, you can say “stupid liberal teachers” or “conservatives are banning books.” Whatever.
The real reason a kid can’t read by 7 is crappy parental involvement. Normally, we assigned that to “the working poor.” But now we see it among affluent families.
Maybe they can’t read, in part, because their parents had them to stay socially connected — and not because they really wanted the responsibility and drive of shaping additional lives (and readers).
Again, maybe.
You can bring in “Snowplow Parenting” here, which is a cousin of “Gentle Parenting,” whereby everything is paved/plowed over and there isn’t a lot of “No” being heard.
It all factors in.
But if we begin from a base case of “This kid was produced in the name of FOMO, Joneses, or social relevance…,” then how exactly would a kid brought into the world to extend a story their parents had about themselves be an effective reader or citizen at age five? The building blocks aren’t right.
It’s easy to crap on millennials and Gen Z. We all do it. And we know this Plato quote too:
Actually, that’s Socrates. Same difference.
This is a long-running narrative, thus. We don’t really have all the answers. But if social relevance is an increasing reason for parenthood, then a lot of the societal issues we’re discussing on — ironically — TikTok are all downstream of that.
Am I misguided here?
I had my two children because I deeply wanted to be a mother. Best thing I ever did. If other people are having kids for any other reason, that’s goddamn stupid.