Those of us who grew up with Saturday’s Warrior songs in our milieu will recall this lyric sung by the “bad kids” who were shaming Jimmy Flinders for his ginormous Mormon family:
Every day the world is getting smaller by far!
Bursting at the seams, what can we do?
Zero population is the answer, my friend!
Without it the rest of us are doomed!Every day the food supply is shrinking away!
With starvation at our door what can we do?
Licensing of children is the answer, my friend!
Without it, the rest of us are through!Tragedy our oil is depleting each day!
Every baby makes it last a shorter time!
Legalized abortion is the answer, my friend!
Without it, there is no peace of mind!(chorus)
Who can survive? Who can survive?
Not one of us will be alive!
Who can be strong? Who can be strong?
When mother earth is gone!
Project 2025 is also concerned about the fact that we haven’t had a replacement birthrate since 1971 (except a brief spike to 2.1 births per couple in 2006-2007). My personal opinion is that having kids is one of the best things I ever did, and I do think that kids enrich our lives in ways we can’t foresee. But the reasons people aren’t having kids are valid, and those who are most vocally pro-natal are also in most cases the least willing to do anything to remedy these issues. Here’s a starter list:
Economic insecurity. The rising generation suffers from a deadly combination of wage stagnation and rising cost of living. Student loan debt is another factor that often delays family formation. Additionally, the costs of things like childcare, education and healthcare are prohibitive for many young couples. When asked why they aren’t having kids, economic insecurity is the number one reason people cite.
Mental health. Many have seen the toll that parenthood has taken on earlier generations, and rightly or wrongly, they conclude that it’s a burden they don’t desire. This is particularly true for young women who have seen the unequal workload their mothers took on, often while also having a career. Additionally, the pressure on parents to be child-centric makes parenting today a much heavier lift than it was for previous generations of parents.
Education or Career Priorities. While Church leaders might think that scolding students into early marriage and child-rearing is the right approach, in times of economic uncertainty, most people will look around and delay both marriage and childbearing until they feel they can earn enough to support a family. In 1970, the average age for first-time mothers was 21. Now it is 27. The 2025 economy is nothing like the economy of 1970. For starters, one-income households with children in 1970 were the norm (only 31% had two incomes). Today, two-thirds of households with children have two earners. It’s simply a necessity for most families.
Lack of Structural Support. Especially in the US, minimal family leave, childcare assistance, and workplace flexibility mean that having children is extremely difficult to manage, particularly for women, without a substantial loss of economic security. Additionally, the rise of the nuclear family, rather than multi-generational families in which older generations could support the younger ones, have become the norm. Parents often live in different states than their adult children who have moved to find good-paying jobs.
Social Norms. Parenthood is no longer seen as an essential life goal, a milestone in becoming an adult. There is a growing acceptance of childfree lifestyles. I’ll expound a little on the impact of parental norms that have dramatically shifted which add even more reasons young people don’t want to have kids.
Reproductive Autonomy. Greater access to contraception and abortion mean that people can choose when or if to have children. Increased awareness of IVF or fertility issues can also play a role in delaying children, as well as more information about maternal risks.
Climate Anxiety. Many Gen Z and Millennials see a planet in climate crisis and don’t want to bring children into a world that is already dangerous for human life and becoming worse.
Unstable Relationships. There is greater social fragmentation than ever. Dating apps and hookup culture may lead to declining trust in long-term relationships. Many people feel lonely and disconnected from traditional family structures. There are many who prefer different types of relationships than the monogamous heteronormative choices their parents made, leading to completely different types of family formation, co-parenting with exes, and other arrangements that require a lot of coordination that is not supported by the existing structures.
Housing insecurity. Home prices and rising rental costs make it difficult for people to feel they can create a stable home for a family. In urban centers, space constraints are another factor.
Gender Equality. Women have gained career opportunities, but they also see that men are not adapting to become the equal partners in the home that are needed for women to succeed. One solution is for women to refuse to have children so that they don’t lose their financial independence.
One thing in particular that seems to be happening is that older generations are talking past the concerns of younger generations. It’s hard to convince younger people to have kids when the advice is based on a world that no longer exists. Parenting today is a whole lot harder than it used to be. Here’s a quick comparison of how previous generations approached parenting.
- Greatest Gen. Peak parenting years: 1930-1950. The emphasis was on discipline, obedience, and respect for patriarchal authority. Parents were emotionally reserved and used corporal punishment on their own and others’ children commonly. Parents looked to institutions (schools, religion, doctors) to give them advice.
- Silent Gen. Peak parenting years: 1950-1970. Very similar to the Greatest Gen, but with added emphasis on social conformity and reputation. Children were expected to be “seen and not heard.” The rise of the nuclear family was emphasized in media by the government. Traditional gender roles were seen as a hallmark of family success. Dr. Spock published his milestones for “normal” childhood development.
- Baby Boomers. Peak parenting years: 1970-1990. Big changes occurred in this generation due to a rise in divorce rates, embracing child psychology, and building self-esteem in children as a reaction to the way they were parented. Boomer parents softened the authoritarianism but still retained authority boundaries. Some later boomers gravitated toward “helicopter parenting” if they were late parents.
- Gen X. Parenting peak years: 1990-2010. Encouraged “free range” childhood, emphasizing self-sufficiency (Faber crying to sleep method). Questioned institutions like churches, schools, and experts. Corrected the perceived over-involvement of Boomers. Focused on work-life balance. Expected kids to solve problems while encouraging open communication.
- Millennials. Parenting peak years: 2010-present. Child-centric parenting, including emphasis on “gentle parenting,” attachment theory, and emotional validation of children. Rejection of punitive discipline with a focus on positive reinforcement, mental health, neurodiversity, and trauma-informed parenting. Flexible gender roles and more equal co-parenting expectations, but often caught between progressive ideals and economic hardship realities.
- Gen Z. Parenting peak years: Just beginning. Emphasis on inclusive parenting with input from children, acceptance of children (gender-neutral, body positive, culturally aware), openness to non-traditional family structures, willing to use digital media to inform parental approaches.
So let’s be honest, being a Greatest Gen or Silent Gen parent was a whole lot easier than having to give a damn what your kids actually think or feel. You could literally spank a stranger’s kids in those generations with no consequences [1], which is not good, but today if you lose your temper with a kid who is having a tantrum, even if you don’t lay a hand on them, you might have someone call CPS on you. At least that’s a worry I’m hearing from some of the young people I know. It’s no wonder many of them think parenting requires a lot of skills they might not have. Plus, if you let your kids set the rules, there’s a good chance they are going to turn into little dictators. Kids all start out as narcissists. It takes them a little more life experience to realize they actually aren’t the center of the universe. Prior generations of parents used to beat that out of them, which wasn’t good, but I also don’t recommend going to the other extreme and putting the kids in charge.
- Do you know young people who are having kids? How are they feeling about these choices?
- What do you think of the gentle parenting focus?
- Do you think the way you were raised was a good model? If you have kids, what did you do differently?
- Is this just an example of “old man shakes cane at sky”? Does every generation of parents think that the next generation is screwing it all up?
- Do you find parenting advice from Church leaders to be relevant or evidence that they are out of touch?
Discuss.
[1] This actually happened to me when I was 6 years old. A teacher at the school (not my own teacher) spanked me in the hallway for talking to my friend who was in her class and told me not to talk to her students. When I got home, I burst into tears and told my mom what happened. My mom (born in 1927) was livid. She marched into the principal’s office, told him what this teacher had done, and said that it would not happen again or he’d be hearing about it. So I guess she was actually pretty progressive for her era. Go, mom!
Wheat & Tares 
I think that the “Gentle Parenting” movement in part comes from more of a “Family-Level Harm Reduction” reaction/process to other cycles of parenting. The expectation is that the ways that family members relate to each other will include a recognition of base rights of children, distribute dignity to each family member, and not include levels of sexual, fiscal, mental, or physical abuse that leave lasting trauma. The framework to create this family structure is not necessarily happening during the pre-child years, and isn’t necessarily given a lot of thought to by men in general who don’t do a lot of care-giving.
This “Harm Reduction” structure is also at odds with the patriarchal “Purification” structure which focuses on each individual perfecting their choices aligned with an external moral compass/list of laws and has little to do with the consequences of one’s actions on other family members. A parent loses their temper and yells at a kid in an emotionally out-of-bounds way intending to demolish the child before expressing regret, assigning restitution on the parent’s terms, and completing the “sin-repentance” cycle – there is no space for harm reduction to happen, and the “restitution” step of the repentance cycle doesn’t have to include harm-reduction tactics in the “compensation” step.
As I’ve thought about my family from generation to generation, it’s obvious that each generation does things differently, and I’d like to hope better than the previous generation. This is in spite of the increasing income gap and inability to make ends meet with just one income.
The LDS Church’s Proclamation on the Family seems to point backwards and ignore the changes happening in the world. The members who can make it on one income seem to hold it over those who can’t. Alternative families and single-parent families don’t fit the mold and are hence looked down upon. It creates more of a division based on economics. It does not unify in the name of Christ.
I think of my children (I have eleven, yours/mine/theirs) across Gen X and Millennial groups, and found the single-income Gen Xers have struggled with their children, while my daughter and her wife and my two-income daughter and husband have children who are active, curious, sensitive, intelligent, and artful. By the way, I love them all and love my grandchildren, no matter where they are. I’m just saying one set is stuck in the past, and the other is looking towards the future and adapting.
I had a conversation with my mother, age 90, and mentioned how much better my children are at parenting than I was. She was offended because she felt she did a good job herself. I had to soothe her ego by telling her we all did the best we could at the time we were parents. Good parenting is making sure the next generation is better than the past generation. There should be no blame, put-downs, or regrets. Each of us does our part to make things better with what we know at the time in the times we are doing it. I think she got that, and I think that’s the key to being a good parent. It’s hard in today’s society and while I think the church helped when I was young. It doesn’t as much now.
Instereo, I’m not sure it’s fair to attribute the children’s qualities and skills to whether the parents are dual or single income. It may well be the more difficult children actually needed a parent at home. Certainly in my case, every time I thought things might be settling down, and I could actually return to paid employment, there’d be yet another crisis requiring my presence.
Add in that as the eldest of seven children, a child in the 70s, my own parents were both working when my children were young, and in any case we lived several hundred miles away. It is my youngest siblings who were able to make both parents working work for them. By that time my parents were retired, and were able to step in and help with child care from time to time, which meant they were able to establish careers far more easily. And indeed when they moved further away, my mother has travelled down to help out with child care when that was needed.
Saturday’s Warrior: perhaps the most cringeworthy piece of theater ever created.
It seems there is a happy medium with number of children per female. Europe and East Asia are in a dire position. People need to start reproducing more, or else… In sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, and Yemen the number of children per female is very high, so high that it comes at the expense of women’s health, education, and freedom in ways we would never now accept in the developed world. Additionally infant mortality rates are very high in Africa. In terms of strains on resources, however, population growth in sub-Saharan Africa is not having nearly the ecological and climate impact that such growth would have in the West since Africans generally get by on very little and leave a very low carbon footprint. But climate change will have the largest impact on Africa since people are barely getting by as is and a low rain year can cause serious strain on food supply. In Africa, children tend to be seen as assets. In the developed world, they are seen as liabilities. I’m not sure how to change that while keeping children’s and women’s rights. The trad wife movement isn’t helping. They are simply a gimmicky outgrowth of the MAGAverse driven by a deep irrational rage and resentment against some liberal boogeyman.
I think having my two boys was very rewarding and am enjoying being a parent. That said, I couldn’t imagine having more kids. I started at 34. It was a lot of stress and anxiety. Will the baby be premature? Will my child have autism? Will my child have some sort of rare disease that is very expensive to treat? As for when or if my boys will have kids, I simply don’t know. I think it would be very difficult for them in this environment. Buying a house? Forget about it. Getting a prestigious career that actually pays reliable money? That will take lots of time and will be very hard to do if you start having a family young.
Instereo:
Well said!! I’ve always thought my children did/and are doing, a remarkably better job than their parents, even though we did our best. I considered that to be our best success!
I also think we did a better job than our parents or grandparents- with all their corporeal punishment, verbal abuse, and stereotype prejudices.
And, yes, I believe the Family Proclamation values, are going in the wrong direction.
Hedgehog: I agree it’s much more complicated than one parent or two parents working. It’s attitudes and expectations, parents have, coupled with enough income to make things work. In my case, both single-income families made good money, so the children didn’t want for anything. They were also good parents who were good for their children.
I may not totally understand the Gentle Parenting movement ( I am old), but I have watched parents try to distract instead of saying no. In the adult world we have to deal with disappointment almost every day, and the children who do not learn that as children struggle when they are adults. They also need to learn as children that actions have consequences. I am not advocating spanking but they must learn that there are negative consequences when they do something they should not do.
As an aside, there is a service dog organization that has been very successful in turning out high quality dogs. In recent years they want their puppy raisers to distract the puppy instead of it learning the word no.(‘We want happy dogs’). It has resulted in lowering the quality of their dogs. Clients who have had a succession of their dogs (based on the fairly short life of a dog) have commented that recent ones do not know what they should know.
IMO the rules of parenting and puppy raising are pretty much the same…..love them, and teach them that there are rules that make their lives better.
I am not the least bit worried that we as a species will reach sub zero population replacement and thus become extinct. I think the low birth rate is partly due to overcrowding and that leads to lack of housing with housing being prohibitively expensive. I think we would do best to shrink the total population to a more sustainable level.
There are politicians who want constant growth because that supports a good tax base. But it has to be more and more growth to keep up that nice cushy tax base. But constant growth is not at all sustainable. We need to start looking at sustainable earth life, not constant growth and constantly increasing population, just because constant growth keeps taxes down.
Let’s get the world to some kind of sustainable level everywhere on earth. Leta’s bring the up the survival level of children worldwide and end starvation before we start worrying about keeping the population at present levels let alone keep insisting on constant growth. We have a limited earth, with limited resources and limited land with which to grow crops. With global warming that limited land is actually shrinking because sea level is going to rise. The land currently is use will become too hot and dry, so because of human short sightedness, our resources are actually shrinking. Areas that are currently livable will become too hot or covered in water, which means the people living in those areas need to move to higher ground or cooler climates. Smaller total earth population would be a huge advantage to combats global warming and feed the current population with shrinking water due to drought and shrinking farm land due to hotter climate.
There is no reason that earth’s population needs to keep increasing, in spite of panicking politicians.
When earth’s total population is down to more sustainable levels, then we can look at ways to encourage more children, but right now we still have an over populated earth so it is way premature to worry about the birthrate level dropping below replacement levels. Right now, I see the low birth rate as the best option for long range human and environmental well being.
I have four adult children aged 23-30. Not one of them can even imagine having four children of their own. They have expressed amazement that my wife and I raised four of them. I don’t know how many kids they will have. If I had to guess I’d say two each.
Their world is different than the one my wife and I experienced as parents from 1994 on (as parents). One obvious difference is that we were active LDS and they are not. SO while we felt pressured to have many kids they do not. But it goes way beyond this. They feel like the pressure to stay ahead economically and financially require education, job experience, and duel incomes that perhaps my wife and I did not experience. And the relative cost of everything (housing, food, etc.) is just plain higher.
If religious / right leaning folks are lamenting the fact that we aren’t having enough children as a society, maybe they should start supporting public policy that make it more affordable. I don’t blame my kids at all for feeling like they can’t do what we did even if they wanted to.
Anna, absolutely.
I had a very unusual experience in 2012 when we were in Beijing. We did a hutong tour (the older style communal neighborhoods in the center of the city where multiple families share courtyards and bathrooms), and we had tea with a Chinese woman who introduced us to her daughter (one child). I grew up aware that China had a “one child” policy to curb overpopulation, so that was no surprise to me (I in turn introduced her to my three children who were with us). What did surprise me was that we were both youngest daughters in our own families of seven children. So in just one generation, her family went from 7 children per couple to just one. Those raised under one child policy also have another interesting facet of family life: they have no aunts, uncles or cousins. The words for these family roles are out of use among many of them. The very idea of multiple children in a family makes you sound extravagant and exotic.
I think that for some people, having children is seen as an extension of themselves, a way to be immortal, a way to continue living in the world after we die through our DNA and family stories. And others see their children as independent people in their own right. Realistically, we probably all see them as both at different times. Parenting is a complex idea.
When church leaders and politicians talk about not waiting to have kids, having large families, etc. I always have to ask myself who is the beneficiary of this advice. Usually it’s the ones counting on the kids to boost membership numbers or tax revenues or to fill jobs that may not even exist by then thanks to evolving technologies. The ones they never consider in the equation are the women whose rights and choice and education fall to the wayside and who are not represented in making the decisions.
As soon as we started to see anti-discrimination laws that allowed women to finally support themselves financially en masse and laws against child labor, this was always going to become a two-income economy. Kids don’t earn wages, and very few people make enough on one income in an economy based on two to support a family with children. This is just simple math. If they don’t see it, it’s willful blindness.
On the parenting advice from the church. Church leaders are most interested in furthering their own interests. Members having lots of kids benefits the church more than it does the individual members themselves. Members who marry young and start having a family young seem more likely to become reliant on the church system and network. They are more likely to experience a sunk cost feeling and entrench themselves even more deeply in the church. They are more likely to settle into the familiar rhythm of regular church attendance and activity and not have time to “explore themselves” or entertain new ideas. Plus raising a new generation of followers is much easier than finding converts.
I grew up in Provo. My dad was a BYU professor. On my street there were 10 houses. In every house there was a child almost my age give or take two years. The smallest family had four kids. Most families were 6-10. I knew multiple families in my ward with 10+ kids. My parents bought their house in the early 1970s. It was about 2,500 sq ft. Houses were relatively cheap back then. All the fathers had middle class jobs. The mothers almost all stayed at home. Many worked at BYU in some capacity. It seemed really rare to hear of people who left the church, particularly adults. Even among the kids who grew up with me, I honestly know maybe one or two out of 30 or so off the top of my head. Of course, I haven’t kept up with them in a while, but occasionally when I’ve bumped into them, they still mostly seem active.
I left the church (well, mostly). I’m extremely liberal. I’m not sure how I emerged from that environment.
“Do you think the way you were raised was a good model? If you have kids, what did you do differently?”
My parents provided food, shelter, swim and piano lessons, and a basic car to share once we were 16 to get to high school. Grandma generously paid for our missions. Otherwise they made it no secret that they expected us to move out at 18 and take care of ourselves. Lucky I procured a scholarship to BYU and worked part time to pay for the cheap housing in Provo circa early 2000s. In some ways I appreciate that I was forced to do hard things for myself. The system back then supported this type of parenting.
And. I didn’t raise my kids that way. My kids were given a lot more opportunities to experience team sports and arts growing up. The 529 plans I started during the financial crisis of 2008/2009 have bloomed such that my kids should be able to get an undergrad degree without student debt. I’m glad my kids have had more experiences as I think they are more well-rounded people. I wish I could just tell them to figure out how to finance university but it’s too expensive to do it on their own and I don’t want them to become subject to the predatory student debt industry. My oldest will be a university freshman in the fall and so I’ve told her tuition is covered but she needs to pay for books and the parking pass. She works about 12-15 hours a week at a counter service restaurant and I hope that is teaching her the value of hard work. I think I’ll compromise and tell them they are on their own once they graduate university. =)
“What do you think of the gentle parenting focus?”
My parents were big proponents of the because I said so persuasion. I viscerally disagree and try to tell my kids why I’m requiring them to do certain things. Expectations exist but there is flexibility. I try to follow the Angela Duckworth/Jonathan Haidt model to give kids expectations and teach them the who/when/where/why of quitting. No quitting until the season is over or until the next performance and when you quit you will have time to try something else. Quitting something does not mean more screen time at home. I hope it’s teaching them valuable things.
“Do you find parenting advice from Church leaders to be relevant or evidence that they are out of touch?”
I’m not super in touch anymore but if the Q12 still claim that the commandment to multiply and replenish the earth is still in effect, from the 20 somethings I know, they completely missed the memo. Because it’s none of my business, I don’t ask them about their procreation plans. As fun as it was being asked that question by Mormons I hardly knew 25 years ago, I’m not paying that forward.
I grew up in a big family; none of us went on to have big families of our own. That’s the trend I’ve seen among my generation — the ones who were kids in the 70s and 80s with many siblings. None of us want that many kids because we saw firsthand what it cost our parents, and also us. I was in the older group and always thought the parents had too many kids and knew I wasn’t going to get much parental attention. I found out as an adult that the youngest sibling felt like the parents were done parenting by the time he was in his teens and he didn’t get much parental attention either. Too many kids. I can’t imagine how much more difficult it would have been if any of us had had special needs or health problems. There just aren’t enough hours in a day, even with my mom at home full time.
I am a much gentler, more patient parent than my parents were. One of the reasons it that I have fewer kids and more time. Another reason is that my children’s temperaments are entirely different from what mine and my siblings’ temperaments were. If the parents yelled at us, we hopped to it and then made sure to never make that mistake again. I started out as a yelling parent, but my children did not respond to yelling in any way that would encourage me to keep yelling. I had to retool my attitude and become a much gentler and more patient parent or I would have entirely destroyed my relationship with my kids. I’m pretty sure my sibs have made this same change in varying degrees with their own kids too. And since everyone is done with Dad and no one wants him around, I guess he should have figured out how to parent a bit more gently too.
I agree with Anna that a lower birth rate is not a big deal and politicians should shift their focus from raising the birth rate to working on a society that can support an aging population. The world is fine, and if the population levels out at 6 billion a century from now, that’s fine too. It just depends on society’s focus. Plan for not having an eternally growing tax base. It can be done.
The message from the Q15 on having children is interesting. Nelson famously has ten children, Oaks and Eyring each have six, and two other apostles have five. The rest of the Q12 have much smaller families with 1-4 children (fairly typical even for non-Mormon families). The older members have more “traditional” large families, the newer members have clearly not felt the need or pressure (or, perhaps, ability) to do so. Yet the message to college students and recently returned missionaries is that they need to get started quickly with marriage and families, finances and education be damned. Why? As a couple of people have mentioned above, it probably has a lot to do with maintaining and growing the number of committed members of the Church and to mitigate the departures and attrition that have occurred recently (and, a cynic might point out, keep that tithing base robust). This is especially true as convert baptisms dipped over the past decade–although those numbers rebounded slightly this year.
On a related note, think about when the senior members of the Q15 were raising their children–primarily in the 1950s & 1960s, an extremely different time economically, socially, and culturally in the United States. That absolutely skews the way that they perceive this issue (and, obviously, many others). Add to that the fact that many of them raised their families in the bubble of Utah–and certainly many of their children and grandchildren experienced the same bubble–in relative economic security, it is no wonder that there is a lack of appreciation for contemporary challenges.
I’m a geriatric millennial. Had my kids (two) late by most standards and certainly by LDS standards (32 and 34). Both still elementary school age. One of them is on the autism spectrum, and you know what I have realized? 25%+ of my siblings were too (to say nothing of my parents’ generation) but never got a diagnosis. Why?
Because who cares if Billy didn’t say a word until he was three? He spoke eventually!
Because little Mary outgrew her crippling shyness, didn’t she?
Because Betty’s obsession with horses is normal for a little girl. It’s cute how she lines the toy horses up through the living room.
I kind of envy my parents and grandparents. Supporting my special needs kiddo is exhausting: three different kinds of therapy, 504s, extracurriculars catered to her unique needs, pediatric specialists. And the worry that her neurotypical sibling isn’t getting the attention and resources they need for themselves and for the challenges of living with a neurodivergent sibling.
I wonder all the time how my under-resourced siblings and aunts/uncles/parent turned out as well as they did when I see how mightily my kid struggles. And I’ve come to these conclusions:
-they actually suffered a LOT as children and still do to varying extents as adults
-extended family who lived nearby provided heroic levels of support
-Church did more socially for families back then than it does now
-today’s culture demands much, much more of parents, especially mothers, and extra-especially moms of special-needs kiddos, who are much more likely to be identified and diagnosed now
I’m so tired. All the time. And I have not one but two heavy-lift callings, and I work full time. I love my life. I’ve no regrets but also 0 misapprehensions about why somebody might look at what I’m doing and say, “Nah. Pass.”
Some of my kids have told me it’s unethical to bring children into the world in its current state. While every generation has its (sometimes enormous) challenges, today they seem insurmountable sometimes. I have four kids and think we’ll be lucky if we have 4 grandkids.
Laws of economics are less obvious and less immediate than the laws of physics but they are real nonetheless. We are collectively gifting our children and grandchildren the delayed effects of poor economic and public policy decisions. Same in the church. One income, many kids, 10% tithing is an effective way of nudging families in the direction of poverty.
Life is beautiful and it’s also painful. Gentle parenting is fine but kids will learn the painful aspect sooner or later. I believe it’s my job as a parent to teach children reality, not cynicism, but also not Pollyanna-ism.
Oh, and Saturdays Warriors should relegated to the same space as Miracle of Forgiveness and Mormon Doctrine. Julie Hanks (de Azevado) has publicly apologized for her Dad’s part in Saturdays Warriors.
Good to hear from you, Margie. I’m also a “geratric millennial” and raising a special needs kiddo; I feel your exhaustion, and wish you and your family all the best.
My wife and I grew up in different U.S. states, in different circumstances with different family systems/dynamics. Yet we grew up in the same Church, for better or worse, and all that comes with it. And we both were raised by overtaxed boomer parents. We have found a lot of common ground in our marriage over the years by commiserating and bonding over our respective parents’ failures in child-rearing, which had many similarities despite being so far apart culturally and geographically. We acknowledge that they were doing the best they could with what they knew then, and with constrained resources, while now we commit to doing a better job raising our own kids, though we admit we don’t always get it right ourselves. But if my mom ever hears even the slightest indirect suggestion from me (or anyone, really) that her parenting job was less than perfect, hold on to your f***ing hat; she will let loose an angry diatribe about “the sacrifices we made for you”, make a long list of said sacrifices, and other guilt-tripping nonsense. She knows very well that she made mistakes as a parent (and I have physical and emotional scars to prove it), but she is also chronically allergic to taking responsibility for her own shortfalls, a condition which befalls many of her generation. It’s sad, because it’s really her refusing to give herself grace, and instead she chooses play the role of martyr. Her behavior is frustrating, but I can’t change it; all I can do is try not to be so hard on myself in my own parenting failures.
I don’t know much about “gentle parenting” but I try to be fair with my kids, and take pains to avoid being unnecessarily cruel or temperamental, which my parents sometimes were (due to lack of self-control and poor emotional boundaries). I am aware of some LDS families that go to lengths to teach their kids to “do hard things” and put them through artificial hardships to teach toughness and “grit” (there are whole parenting trends around this term). Youth pioneer treks seem to be built on this premise. Also, I know one guy in my stake, a well-off dentist, who bought an unprofitable hobby farm so he could force his kids to do farm chores every weekend. He calls it “building character”, I call it exploitation/unpaid child labor/tax sheltering, but I suppose every family has a different approach. As much as I enjoy so-called teachable moments, I’ve found that life throws enough real problems at us that we don’t need any additional made-up ones.
The current trend of right-wing sponsored pro-natalism is disturbing, because it is rooted in racism (encouraging only the “right” kind of people to increase their reproduction, while vilifying immigrants and their American-born children) and misogyny (treating women as breeding stock and glorifying the tradwife lifestyle), and the LDS Church seems to be perfectly fine with it. If anything, they were preaching it before it was cool.
Margie has a great point. Expectations of parenting have changed. I grew up in a working class ward/neighborhood. A few were better off and might have been fully middle class. But zero kids had things like gymnastic, dance, or sports of any kind. Few even had music lesson and those were “taught by mom” music lessons because mom’s part time job was teaching kids music lessons. Families were 4-7 kids. Some moms worked part time and the kids were latch key kids. I was latch key starting in kindergarten. I remember coming home and making myself scrambled eggs for lunch on the gas stove. If dad was home, he was asleep because he was working midnight to nine. Then I went outside to play alone until my siblings and the rest of the neighborhood got out of school.
We didn’t have car seats, or anything more than a cheap fold up stroller for taking small children out. I remember my baby brother laying in a bundle of blankets flat on the car seat. His bed was a big basket at home. The special equipment needed for a baby was much simpler then than now. Nobody used throw away diapers, but rags that were cut and sewn into cloth diapers and washed. Baby wipes and all the disposable stuff of today didn’t exist and people would have laughed at throwing out diaper, wiping cloths, and everything that today are considered *essential* even for babies in the homeless shelters. We just couldn’t afford to buy and throw away wash cloths for babies bum, let alone diapers.
As I got older, I met other kids from better off neighborhoods. They maybe had things like little league or dance lessons, that poorer families could not afford. But mostly sports were through public school and so were all other lessons. The rich kids got new bicycles and we got ours used. Yes, used toys from DI for Christmas. Homemade toys our grandfather made, such as play tables and child sized furniture. This was common for working class. My brothers’ minimal scout uniforms came from DIs and if they needed anything more than shirt and neck scarf, they just didn’t get it. But it was the same with our neighbors, so you only noticed if you met up with a scout troop that lived on the “east bench” where everyone had full uniforms.
Kids were not diagnosed with “special” needs, they were just labeled stupid. My kid brother had all the exact symptoms of my grandson. My grandson was given all kinds of early intervention for autism spectrum. My kid brother was the weird kid who was struggling, bullied, labeled and persecuted. Who had the better outcome? Obviously my grandson who was given so much extra care and driven to appointments and special school. Yes, it took a lot more work for raising my grandson. My brother was kind of turned over to me to raise after he was about 5 and didn’t got to the baby sitter while mom worked.
Kids were expected to share bedrooms, not just with one other sibling, but 4 or 5 in one room. My husband remembers as a teenager, sharing one bedroom with all six of his siblings. It was just normal to live with what you had.
We were in many ways terribly neglected by today’s standards. We boomers were dime a dozen and herded like sheep. Individual needs were simply not allowed because there were too many of us to get individual attention.
Standards of childcare have changed. We were sent out to play. Now children are watched and not running wild from about 4 up. Special lessons and sports have become so common even for working class that they are just expected and if your child isn’t into some organized activity besides school, they are seen as neglected. Nobody but nobody does cloth washable diapers. And even poor kids are expected to have supervision and a 5 year old latch key kid would have child protective services come knocking.
It is just plain much more expensive to raise children now days. While things like disposable diapers have made parenting so much easier, other things….like actually meeting the kids needs have made it more work.
My older sister (who is a boomer) was once driving from Atlanta to Chattanooga with our mom and my infant nephew who needed to be nursed before the two hour drive. My mom insisted that this was a waste of time since my sister was the passenger, that she should just nurse in the car. My sister said, “Mom, that’s illegal and not safe! He has to be buckled into a car seat!” My mom took this as a huge criticism and defensively ranted “Oh it’s a WONDER any of you kids SURVIVED my terrible parenting!” So yeah, this seems like a pretty common experience for those of us raising kids with changing cultural norms from prior generations. It’s true that as kids we were literally never buckled, we often crawled over the seats while the car was speeding down the freeway.
One of my favorite storybooks as a child was Mary Poppins, but looking back as an adult I realized that she is drugging those kids! They appear to be healthy kids, but at bedtime they are given a pink medicine which I always assumed must be like that delicious Azithromycin that they gave you if you had an ear infection. Yet no mention is made of them having an infection. Just what is she giving those kids? Mother’s little helper? Benadryl? Benzedrine? My oldest sister (different than the nursing one above) had kids who were “hyperactive” and she gave them Ritalin. Did they need medication or were they just active kids? Since I was a child at the time, I can’t say (although they sure seemed hyper still to me since I was a few years older). When my own child was diagnosed with ADHD, the medication was $4 per daily pill. They hated the side effects, and it didn’t really seem to be making a difference in their grades, so at some point I said “Why am I paying $4/day for you to get Ds and feel weird when you could get Ds for free and feel better?”
This is an interesting topic and one I believe is very challenging to get an understanding of. One reason being is the subject is greatly distorted by personal bias. I see this distortion within my own family and how can that be? My siblings had the same parents I had!!!!
My perception as a Gen-X kid with Silent Generation parents is I had the best childhood any kid could have. My Mom was an attentive mother – almost always at home and I knew she loved me – and my Dad provided not only a steady presence but he shared his modest adventurous spirit with his family. I also had a community of friends and their parents and teachers that was supportive. I was a free range kid but never abandoned or left entirely to my own peril.
As a teenager my relationship with my parents changed but I don’t blame them. Reality was is that the cares and concerns of teenage boys are very different than those of prepubescent boys. I was never sure my parents understood me and I most certainly did not understand them. But even in this cloud of ambiguity, my parents helped me along, even when I made it difficult for them to help. At 18 I doubt there could have been a more self-centered person in the world than me, and yet my parents still loved me and I knew they loved me even if I created so much distance in our relationship.
So how did my perception of my upbringing shape me? (1) I desired a wife and a family. I distinctly remember these desires forming in my mind as a teenager and the goal was realized in my early 20s. (2) I married a woman who could be an engaged mom to our young kids but also had aptitude for relating to teenagers. Of course I could not know this for sure when I married but this bet paid off. (3) I realized that staying emotionally involved with growing children is very hard and this resulted in me not pushing for an extra large family – we stopped at 4 kids which was the norm at the time for my peer LDS family friends. Another reason for stopping having more kids is as a teenager I saw my father as a tired, old man and I did not want to be that for my kids. I still ended up being a tired old man but not until my youngest got out of high school.
My short answer for why fewer people are marrying and why families are smaller is (1) the financial costs and risks are real and daunting and (2) there are way more personal opportunities and distractions now than ever before. I see these factors with my 4 kids. My daughters seemed to have embraced the values of their parents and both have embraced family and motherhood, having married men with incomes sufficient to afford supporting a family. My sons, on the other hand, have taken a liking to women who are are interested in more than just being moms. Thus, my sons becoming fathers, and even married in one case, has been delayed.
Lastly, I think it must be appreciated by those who are LDS that the church has greatly changed its messaging in the past dozen years. The latter half of the 20th century was all about eternal families and any LDS kid of that time had this message pumped into them all the way through college. This emphasis has been softened in that I don’t see the youth getting this drilling the way my generation did. And guess what! Advertising matters and I think the church pushing marriage and family less on its youth results in a lower overall demand for marriage.
Something that I think is new with societal expectations of parents is that you have to be watching your kids at all times, or personally know who is watching them. And not just infants or toddlers, but pretty much for all ages. It’s exhausting. There’s no such thing as letting kids wander around the neighborhood or latch-key kids. There are regular news stories about parents getting in trouble for being reported because their kids didn’t have an adult with them when out of the house.
I came from a very large family. I think my parents did great, yet I’m doing a lot of things differently. Smaller family, started later, less strict about church stuff. Also my parents ran a family business and brought us in as employees. They paid better than your average fast food job, the work wasn’t particularly pleasant, but we learned a lot of great practical and life skills from it. I suppose it’s the suburban Gen X equivalent of “growing up on the farm”. I’m grateful for everything it taught me, but I just didn’t have the inclination to try to replicate that, though a couple of my siblings have. I like the income stability of my corporate job, it turns out. I hope my kids will eventually learn all of the same life lessons I did in different ways. For me part of parenting was making peace with the fact that there always seems like a better way of doing something in hindsight, and my kids have personalities of their own and don’t necessarily want to be molded into a copy of me, so my best effort is going to have to be good enough.
I can’t say much of anything the leadership of the church says about parenting sounds like actual parenting advice to me. There’s complaining about people having fewer babies these days, and there’s telling parents to check off Mormon boxes, as if having family prayer and scripture study is going to guarantee some kind of desired outcome (spoiler: it’s not). Is it out of touch? To a degree, yes. There’s definitely some evidence that older generations don’t understand present day realities, but mostly it all just seems irrelevant to me.
I’m experiencing a major generational disconnect with my kids right now. My oldest is starting college soon and resents that we are “making” him go to BYU-I (i.e., we are paying for it and telling him he can pay the difference if he wants somewhere more expensive). At 16 I paid my own tuition, and once I turned 18 I paid rent to my parents.
My 18YO has had a couple typical teenager part-time jobs that were short lived (he’s either quit or been fired) and complains about how much he hates working. My parents paid us a dollar an hour, which even in the 80s and 90s felt like almost nothing, and then fined us $10 for various infractions, so the only real incentive to work was to not get yelled at. I found a janitorial job the moment I turned 16 and was so excited to get that $5 or $6/hr.
I have fond memories of swimming in the local spring, playing in the trees or the creek of a horse pasture behind my house, and creative play inside with my siblings and our thrifted toys. The TV was my dad’s when he was home, so we didn’t rely on that. Now my teenagers are on their phones all day. I blame this in large part on the societal expectation that kids be under the direct supervision of their parents at all times; they never learn to entertain themselves. When they were younger I felt like I always had to be entertainining my kids, and it was exhausting. And as teenagers they transitioned from relying on their parents to relying on their phones and other screens.
I feel like I’m uncomfortably sandwiched between two generations that expected/expect me to do everything for them. I am in full-on shaking-cane-at-sky mode. Forgive me the rant; my resentful-about-us-paying-his-BYUI-tuition son recently rolled his unemployed butt out of bed to ask me what I was making for dinner while I was in the middle of an all-day project, and while I didn’t lose it, I’ve been seething ever since.
I love this statement:
“Kids all start out as narcissists”
In large part, “maturity” is learning that other people have their own interests and that they are valid. It’s a struggle for every generation.
Laurel: I had a younger brother whom my parents paid out-of-state tuition to attend my father’s alma mater. He got straight A’s in the first semester, but for some reason, he either grew tired of school or living up to his dad’s expectations, or was partying a bit too much, and decided to teach his dad a lesson. How he got that in his head, I have no clue. Bottom line, he got D’s and F’s in his second semester and flunked out. My dad gave him a second chance, but at the local community college. My brother repeated the same thing with his grades being good first semester and terrible in the second semester, and he flunked out again. He may have gone back to the community college his third year, but he was paying for it himself, and the whole thing was too big for him to see a way out it, so he didn’t finish college. Now he’s 56, and I make twice what he does in his job with just my retirement income. He has enough quarters working to get Social Security, but when he finally gets it, it will be significantly less than mine because of how much he’s paid in. He’s intelligent, charming, and happy working as a groundsman at a golf course because he can golf whenever he wants, which is what he loves. My parents gave him a springboard. He had to land, though, and be on his own. I hope your son “gets it” when he finally leaves home. Many kids do. My parents still love him, but he’s not managing their wills.
Instereo- Thanks for sending hope my way. I don’t know if college really is for my son, but I don’t want to pay thousands more at the school he prefers (only bc his friends are there), just for him to find out it’s not! I like that your brother ended up happy in what he’s doing. I hope my son finds the same, whether or not it requires a college degree.
Laurel: I feel you. It feels like my parents made me figure everything out on my own and yet the world changed and now I’m the one figuring out everything for my kids. It’s freaking exhausting and no amount of touching grass or getting a good night’s sleep is going to cure it. Just today I had to spend close to two hours with my kid, where they logged into their school account then simply watched me upload proof of vaccination, proof of insurance (otherwise the school requires insurance for the low low price of $4K per year which is insane for one healthy teenager), set up direct deposit from the 529 plan to their tuition account, all so THEY can attend university in the fall. I suppose the internet shifted this responsibility to me because all this stuff is online whereas 30 years ago everything required phone calls which my parents pushed to me. My kid at least seems excited and grateful for the opportunity to go to university, but still. I’m ready for school to start already because enough with the admin. I know my kid can do their own homework.
jader3rd: We are so lucky right now that our street has three nine year old boys (including my son) who enjoy playing together. Their parents are rather free range like us and it’s so refreshing to just let the kids play. Sometimes no one knows where they are, and sometimes a well-meaning but misguided neighbor stops and interrogates them, and a few neighbors have gently had to inform us of some age-appropriate behavior that was bothering them which was totally fair (ie “I love that your kid plays soccer but can he avoid letting the ball hit my garage door over and over” is a fair ask). Finally my kids gets to play and I don’t have to extend my entire bandwidth entertaining him. It’s been divine.