Not for long will our culture have to wonder what it’s like having no children. Large swaths of our demographic landscape are already devoid of boisterous, energetic newborn life. Outside of freak enclaves like Mormon clusters, Hasidic neighborhoods, and Traditional Roman Catholic parishes, a flock of ordinary children is a spectacle. A mere three children in the supermarket has become for many people an object of fascination. Such groups of children are described as “a whole herd,” which is odd coming from members of a generation in which families of five or more were still fairly standard. Salt-and-pepper retirees will tell you smilingly about how many children they had or how many children their mother had, thinking nothing of how common their experience was then and why that similar phenomenon is now so noteworthy. How quickly we forget!
Raising children benefits greatly from living memory, the continuous and ongoing practice of raising children in community. Looking at those weird outlying communities with all their cultural baggage, you can find helpful perspective about how a young group of people looks. What is most noticeable in the relatively healthy communities with many children is that children are not treated first and foremost as individuals but instead as part of a cohesive family unit. This may seem callous and unkind to so many post-moderns, but it is not. In a healthy family, the child can be most fully himself within the family. To the outside world, she is a member of a tribe with clear structure and characteristics.
In a culture that is dwindling, we’ve turned identity on it’s head. Now, we need to fly pride flags to show strangers we don’t know or care about that we “know and care about them.” We are told that we can conceal our true identity from our bigoted, backward family and become most truly ourselves on our own unfettered path into the great wide world of strangers. Is it any wonder our model of child-rearing has become so warped?
This shows up from the earliest stages of education when children are sequestered practically from birth into same-age groups, a nonsensical category from a family perspective. From there, the child grows in a world of increasingly single or dual-child families, or families of half-siblings separated by many years and parent’s divorce or two. The default, then, becomes increasingly individualistic. School programs and extracurriculars are increasingly expansive, filling lonely hours without siblings and treating the child as autonomous.
Even in families that buck the trend and have three or more children, the day-to-day life of their offspring can be surprisingly sparse on sibling interaction. Going from school to sports to band to bed, the children are in their own track of development, gliding alongside but out of reach of their brothers and sisters.
Loads of people talk grandly about family togetherness and quality time, but that presents a truncated view of human bonding. Much of human life takes place in mundane, repetitive rhythms, not tropical vacations and holidays. Scheduling a family game night is certainly better than nothing and can do everyone good. How much more so an impromptu board game between siblings too bored to find anything else to do? That’s where real bonding occurs.
For the parents in our hyper-individualized, atomized world of child development who dare to have more than a couple children, the options are choose an alternative or suffer a hellish life of shuffling children to activities without their siblings. With the child-as-individual mindset, every activity comes with a separate internet portal and log-in, mandatory parent volunteer hours, unique uniform, and aggressive scheduling. The outliers in such a model will suffer.
As it turns out, despite what social pressure dictates, extracurriculars are optional, and some families simply choose not to do them. Others crave more. That seems to be part of the attraction to homeschooling, as experienced mothers will tell you. A child who is trained to think only of himself as he goes about his day learning age-appropriate lessons and eating the entirety of his self-selected meal is likely to struggle reintegrating with younger siblings and household responsibilities. Toddlers are, after all, rather loud and annoying sometimes. Completing a task that benefits the whole family with only tangential benefits to the atomized self is perhaps more likely to produce eye-rolling in the child who has spent the whole day fending for himself.
For a family engaged fully in daily life together as a unit, there is a chance that these things will come more easily. Younger children have the opportunity to listen to stories well beyond their comprehension and the chance to develop the skills to sit through it. Older children can, when there is basic civility and maturity on the part of their parents, develop skills in caring for themselves and others, cooking family meals and looking after troublesome, and of course occasionally delightful, younger siblings.
Whether siblings spend every waking hour together or not, thinking of them less as individuals on separate planes of existence is beneficial. They can be seen more as members of the same body working together to achieve harmony; as difficult as it is, it is a worthy goal for which to strive.
For inspiration, there are the communities of mothers and fathers who were one of many children raising families of many. Here, key ingredients of human flourishing are on display. Mothers do not sacrifice needlessly; they do not immolate themselves on the altar of their child’s success and every whim. They simply wouldn’t be able to. Children do not range about in unrelated activities but often spend more time together, get away with more together, and share bedtime stories (and beds!) more.
A fictional but believable example comes from Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family (these days not to be confused with All Kinds of Families and the like). The family of five girls display the whimsical fun of loads of children in a family of limited means. On the subject of end-of-day rituals, one passage reads:
“Bedtime came early for Mama’s girls. The children were sent to bed at the same time regardless of age. Mama had found that to be much the best way for all. In the first place, the children had no feeling of separation from each other as they would have if they went to bed at different times. And it meant that Mama could have a few quiet hours for reading or knitting or even just chatting with Papa without being disturbed by her little ones.
As for the children, bedtime was something to which they looked forward. Bedtime was when Ella and Sarah, who slept together, built their imaginary house and decorated the beautifully rich and colorful make-believe rooms. Bedtime was when Charlotte made up fanciful stories to tell or thought up games to play with her bedfellow, Gertie. Bedtime was when Henny planned some special mischief she could carry on the next day in school or at home. Planned all by herself, because she did not like sharing a bed with anyone.
They slept, all five of them, in the one room and that made for plenty of company in the dark. And what was the best of all, Mama never minded their talking to each other. ‘It’s early enough and they’re resting their bodies anyway,’ she said. ‘They’ll fall asleep when they get tired.’”
Many nuggets to ponder. How far from the madness of a chaotic family bed in which spouses estranged from each other are beholden to the sleep whims of overgrown and unkempt toddlers. How far from the late-night activity marathon of your average school-age child. How different from the individualized, television dominant wind-down time of the average child of so many suburban neighborhoods.
There are subtle ways in which our expectations shape our behavior. When we expect to have only a couple highly talented children, the way we raise children changes. The steady decline in the fertility rate in many nations is reinforced by how miserable our culture has made it to have children. Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire, spoke to the Wall Street Journal about the reason for the continued decline. He said, “It’s not just Covid. It’s the fact that the birthrates never recovered from the Great Recession. I’ve been waiting for years to see a big jump in fertility to women in their 30s and it hasn’t happened.”
Absent a miracle, the trend is unlikely to reverse. If you are sitting around expecting women to adhere to current social standards and have more than two children, you should ask why on earth you think they would want to.
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