When the Bough Breaks

Well it turns out that when your Friday edition of Understanding America arrives late in the evening, you are more likely to open it, more likely to read it, more likely to click on its links. I had figured you’d all be out at the club, but perhaps I don’t know my readership as well as I thought. Or… or!… maybe you don’t even hit the club until two or three in the morning and you’re looking for something to read while you get ready. I suspect that’s the case. 

Regardless, your Friday U/A will now be an evening affair. So let’s get started with your one thing to read, this New York Times feature on “The Unspoken Grief of Never Becoming a Grandparent.”

The story is important for its direct sociological implications: “A little more than half of adults 50 and older had at least one grandchild in 2021, down from nearly 60 percent in 2014. Amid falling birthrates, more U.S. adults say they’re unlikely to ever have children for a variety of reasons, chief among them: They just don’t want to.” One might pair this with the recent observation by a nursing home operator (unverified, perhaps an outlier, but the sort of thing that makes you think about what we do and do not choose to track and pay attention to in our society…) that, “we care for 1,250 elderly people. Average age 84.5. Roughly 30% of them have not received a single visitor this year.”

But, I am most interested here in the meta-sociological question of how this story gets told, what the reporter and the experts assume, and what the subjects either truly believe or else believe they should and should not say:

“Like every parent interviewed for this article, Jill Perry, 69, said her two daughters — both in their 30s and child-free — should be able to make their own choices about parenthood, and they have her full support.”

“They understand at an intellectual level that their children do not ‘owe’ them a family legacy.”

“…particularly when a parent who has dreamed of grandchildren fails to separate any personal disappointment they feel from a sense of being disappointed in their children.”

The idea that each individual in each generation is born only with rights and privileges, free of any duties or obligations, is the apotheosis of decadent liberalism and it reaches its most perfected and dangerous form in the assertion that whether to raise another generation at all is itself merely a matter of personal preference and convenience. It’s one thing to see this view expressed in our politics. If both the progressive Left and libertarian Right want to have conniptions at the mention of family policy putting a public finger on the scale for encouraging or assisting those who are raising kids over those who are not, there’s at least a colorable “role of government” debate to be had. But this falls apart when the question is whether the culture, or families themselves, should express a point of view.

The counterpoint to the apparently universal “understand[ing] at an intellectual level that their children do not ‘owe’ them a family legacy,” to which the New York Times could find absolutely no one to say out loud, is one I tried to articulate in my First Things lecture earlier this year, first by quoting from A Story of Us, a wonderful book by Lesley Newson and Peter Richerson that traces the parallel cultural and genetic evolutions that have produced modern humanity. At one point, the authors say:

Over the course of human evolutionary history, there may have been some independent-minded women who thought things through and decided to avoid the pain and risks of motherhood. These women are not our ancestors. There may also have been families that decided to do away with the rules and customs that encouraged the raising of children. Our ancestors didn’t belong to families like this. Our ancestors were part of families that believed in the importance of children and worked hard to produce the next generation. That’s why we exist.

The lesson, in my own words, is this:

The narrative of personal autonomy that dominates both the progressive left and the libertarian right regards each individual as inherently free of obligations and constraints, beyond respect for everyone else’s autonomy. But that’s nonsense. Each of us owes his life to the long line of ancestors stretching back beyond the beginnings of recorded history, most of whom made sacrifices we can hardly imagine in order to bring forth a next generation, who in turn brought forth the next generation, and on and on to our own time. Most immediately, we have from conception through the early years of our lives made extraordinary demands on our own parents and on many others who willingly took responsibility for our upbringing, and without whose efforts we obviously could not exist nor survive, let alone thrive.

We begin our lives with an incalculable debt. That we did not choose this debt is of no moral import—it is inherent to our existence. And we have only one way of repaying it: to work equally hard to bring about the next generation.

It is hard to see how our civilization sustains itself if we lose this idea—or if, judging from the Times, it is good and lost—how we succeed without recovering it. The Times ends almost on a positive note, with a man who “reminisces about his grandfather, who immigrated from Sicily and was, in some ways, more of a father figure to Dr. Cox than his own dad was. ‘I think we both would have loved to pay that gift of unconditional love and guidance back in spades if we were grandparents,’ he said, speaking of himself and his wife.” Finally, someone grasping at the concept of mutual obligation and an intergenerational compact without which people cannot flourish. And then it concludes with his sigh of resigned powerlessness: “But, not to be.”