A permanent Me Generation

The implications of Post-America not having kids

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A CBS News report this morning confirms with up-to-date statistics what we have known for decades: people in our country put personal convenience, ambition, preferences, and tastes in gratification way above fostering strong community bonds, beginning with the most basic community of all, family:

Almost a quarter of millennials and Gen Z adults without children say they plan to stay that way. The reason? Money. 

About 23% of these adults, ranging from 18- to 43-years-old, said their financial motivation to remain childless boils down to two issues: valuing the financial freedom that comes from not having kids, as well as concerns about their ability to foot the bill for raising children, according to a new survey from MassMutual. 

The findings come as the annual U.S. birth rate has slowed to a record low. Other research also points to how financial factors are influencing the decision to start a family. In a July survey, Pew found that Americans under 50 without children said they opted against kids for both lifestyle and financial reasons, such as wanting to save for the future or having more time for hobbies and interests. 

And to be sure, it's increasingly expensive to raise a child, with one study finding parents typically spend about $240,000 on each kid from birth to age 18. That's a 20% increase from 2016.

"Raising a family is a financial commitment. It has always been," Paul LaPiana, certified financial planner and head of brand, product and affiliated distribution with MassMutual, told CBS MoneyWatch. "We are all faced with choices every day, and there is likely room for improvement when it comes to balancing decisions about immediate gratification with long-term happiness and financial security."

Consider the generational delineation regarding motive:

Pew's study found that older generations — those over 50 — were most likely to say they never had kids because it just didn't happen, such as never meeting the right partner. By contrast, people under 50 were more likely to cite financial, lifestyle or ethical concerns, such as worries about raising children due to environmental issues. 

Let me dispense what this post won’t be dealing with. It’s true that the reason child-raising is more expensive now is that government debt is increasingly crowding out capital, raising the inflation rate and stifling the innovation that could provide private-sector forms of amelioration. Child tax credits and daycare subsidies, ostensibly put forth to address this, are, in a rich bit of irony, exacerbating the problem. But the public-policy level of looking at it must come later. We need to do a cultural deep dive first, or we’ll keep coming up with more silly “solutions” that give the state a yet bigger role.

I will point out that this is a Western problem generally:

For Emmanuel Macron, more babies are vital to maintain France's national vigour. Italy's Georgia Meloni has made encouraging more Italian women to give birth a top priority.

But, demographers and economists say, Europe's attempts to boost its flagging birth rate are missing the mark. They urge a rethink - including a change of tack to accept and embrace the economic realities of an ageing population.

"It's very, very difficult to increase fertility," said Anna Matysiak who, as associate professor of labour market and family dynamics at the University of Warsaw, has observed years of under-achieving pronatalist policies across central Europe.

Europe's fertility rate has been stuck around 1.5 births per woman for the past decade. That is above the lows seen in East Asia, but far short of the 2.1 needed to maintain population levels - a rate Matysiak and other experts interviewed by Reuters see as highly unlikely to be attained in the foreseeable future.

European governments are already spending billions of euros on top of basic welfare provision to fund pro-child measures ranging from outright cash incentives for children to tax breaks for larger families, paid parental leave and child benefit.

But even countries such as France and the Czech Republic, which in past years have had relatively lofty fertility rates around 1.8, are now seeing those fall. Across the continent, the reaons are varied and in some cases not fully understood.

Marta Seiz, Madrid-based university professor of family sociology, demography and inequalities, said factors such as soaring housing costs and job insecurity were linked to Spain's fertility rate, at 1.19 second lowest in Europe after Malta's.

"People would like to have children and they would like to have them earlier but they have not been able to do so for structural reasons," she said.

Such economic constraints are felt everywhere. But there is also evidence of a shift in deeper cultural attitudes towards parenthood.

Norway - a wealthy country with strong family supports and job security - saw its fertility rate plummet from 2 in 2009 to 1.41, its lowest on record, by 2022.

In a 2023 country review, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) suggested reasons for the fall including changing gender roles, greater focus on careers and even how social media can amplify a sense of insecurity. It concluded, however, that the slump remained a conundrum.

Finnish demographer Anna Rotkirch has also observed deep cultural changes in surveys assessing a similar drop in fertility in her country, with many young adults now seeing a fundamental trade-off between parenthood and other goals.

"This goes right into what is a desirable, pleasant and attractive life path, lifestyle, and broader values and ideals," said Rotkirch, research professor and director of Finland's Population Research Institute.

"No one really knows what kind of family policy would work in this new situation to promote fertility."

And, per the mention of East Asia in the excerpt above, it is a testimony - of some sort - to the impact of Western models of work and life - globalism, if you’d like - on the rest of the world that that region is experiencing this phenomenon as well.

Longtime Precipice readers know that I set great store by the analysis Carl Trueman laid out in his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. He insists that we have to go back to Rousseau’s man-was-good-in-a-state-of-nature-before-he-corrupted-himself-by-getting-civilized argument. Then we have to stop by the Romantic era in European arts, when poets and painters taught us to emphasize how being in nature makes us feel. And we need to pay particular attention to the disdain Percy Shelley had for the institution of marriage, about which he said that it constrained people’s natural urges and the range of outlets for satisfying them. Trueman takes us on through the “contributions” of Marx, Freud and Dewey, and on up to Hugh Hefner, and the rise of modern feminism as a reaction to that.

Read some Trueman. His columns regularly appear on the Ethics and Public Policy Center website.

After digesting his book, I wanted to explore the question of how we got here further. My next step was to read Community and Power by Robert Nisbet. That’s actually the title of the second edition, which came out in 1961. I find the original 1953 title, The Quest for Community, a more specific indication of what Nisbet is looking at. It’s a prescient work. For all the mythologizing about the 1950s as a time of picket fences and stable norms, the currents presently at work were underway then. It’s kind of a precursor (by fifty years) to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. Nisbet detected erosion of the institutions - churches, civic organizations, a general societal orientation toward family - that most were taking for granted at the time. To put it succinctly, that era was when we began to prioritize ways in which we as individuals or interest groups might amass power over belonging to each other.

Then I read Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, the first edition of which came out in 1988. It was a collaboration among a group of sociologists, and they updated their findings a couple of times, the latest being 2012. Throughout their editions, they followed various people in various lines of work and from various parts of the country to see how their attitudes about what makes for a worthy life played out.

Relevant to the present matter is the fact that one of the sociologists, Robert N. Bellah, coined the term “expressive individualism,” which Trueman and others have employed in their takes on contemporary life:

When defining expressive individualism, it might be best to start with the slogans behind the movement:

• You be you.

• Be true to yourself.

• Follow your heart.

• Find yourself. 

Slogans orient us to the philosophy in popular culture. History points us back to where it comes from. Robert Bellah and the sociologists who wrote Habits of the Heart trace the origins of expressive individualism back into the 1800s. The authors point to the writer and poet Walt Whitman as one of the best representatives of the philosophy.

And here’s another relevant book mention (from the article immediately excerpted above). I haven’t read it yet, but I check out anything I come across by the indispensable Yuval Levin:

Yuval Levin in The Fractured Republic describes it well:

That term suggests not only a desire to pursue one’s own path but also a yearning for fulfillment through the definition and articulation of one’s own identity. It is a drive both to be more like whatever you already are and also to live in society by fully asserting who you are. The capacity of individuals to define the terms of their own existence by defining their personal identities is increasingly equated with liberty and with the meaning of some of our basic rights, and it is given pride of place in our self-understanding.

Consider what Charles Taylor has to say about “authenticity”:

There’s a similar definition given by the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor, who uses “the age of authenticity” as a descriptor. We could define “authenticity” in different ways. When we’re talking about “authenticity” as the opposite of “hypocrisy,” then striving for authenticity becomes a good thing. (Jesus had a lot to say about hypocrites and the deceit that masks inauthenticity.)

But Taylor does not use “authenticity” as a synonym for integrity or honesty. He uses the term in a way that pits authenticity against conformity. Here’s Taylor’s definition:

I mean the understanding of life which emerges with the Romantic expressivism of the late-eighteenth century, that each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority.

The key here is that the purpose of life is to find one’s deepest self and then express that to the world, forging that identity in ways that counter whatever family, friends, political affiliations, previous generations, or religious authorities might say. (Many a Disney movie has followed a narrative plot line of someone finding and forging one’s self-identity in opposition to the naysayers.)

Now, a low-hanging-fruit-type charge could be leveled against my delving into this topic, namely, that I don’t have kids.

I am in the over-50 demographic mentioned in the CBS News report, and a short explanation of my childlessness could be that group’s it-just-never-happened explanation. (I am married, but that happened after my wife and I were pretty much beyond the family-starting stage. I do have stepchildren.)

But to leave it at that would be pretty lame. I attribute it to some degree to the fact that my formative years coincided with the mainstreaming of expressive individualism.

You may recall my June 2022 post here titled “on Entering Adolescence During the Tectonic Shift.” It was a reflection on turning 13 in the year 1968. Why would that have been a big deal? Well, 13-year-olds are pretty impressionable, and here’s what went down that year:

1968. The sunny vibes of the above-mentioned Summer of Love were giving way to New Left radicalism, manifested in such occurrences as the shutdown of classes and administrative-offices takeover at Columbia University the week before finals, and the riots outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August. With Martin Luther King's assassination, the integrationist chapter of the civil rights movement came to a close and the rise of the Black Panthers filled the vacuum. CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite took the occasion of the Tet Offensive to opine to the public that America was bogged down in a quagmire in Vietnam.

Currents afoot would have effects that last to this day. The National Organization for Women was founded two years earlier. The Stonewall Inn riot would occur the following year. The Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision would be handed down five years later.

Now, a further charge could be leveled against me, along the lines of “That’s on you. A lot of your contemporaries formed stable families, careers and civic associations and heeded what their parents had taught them about upright living.”

Fair enough. But early on, I demonstrated a right-brain orientation, something that my father, who owned a small manufacturing company and was in fact a trade-association poo-bah, could only awkwardly deal with. How was he supposed to compete with Jimi Hendrix, marijuana and Ram Dass?

So I spent some years adrift. I did graduate from a well-rated liberal-arts college with a degree in English. I did much better while working on my master’s in history, because that was after my conversion experience. When I became a conservative, I immersed myself in the thinkers such as Hayek and Frank S. Meyer, whom my father had tried to expose me to in my youth. And from there, I have worked my way through much more of that canon. One of the things I’m doing here at Precipice is working out how I am coming home to some basic truths after decades in the expressive-individualism trenches.

So, yes, I consider myself qualified to weigh in on this subject, by virtue of my quest to find the permanent, transendent, beautiful and truthful. That, and the fact that, despite my father’s boneheaded form of didacticism, I grew up in a supportive family where the mom’s and dad’s commitment to each other and us kids was beyond questioning.

Dwindling families is only one manifestation of Western decline, but it’s arguably the most important. It’s where, ideally, we learn such tools for thriving as loyalty, supportiveness, team effort, respect, delight in others, humor, and reverence for the transcendent order.

If you’re not equipped with those when you get to school age, you’re going to be just another headache for your teachers. And you’re not going to know how to navigate the world of work - or find a mate.

And the era of expressive individualism has led us to our current political juncture, at which neither of our current presidential candidates understands the importance of normal-people families, and at which they try to split hairs regarding policy on things like abortion and day care, assuming that the new paradigm is a given and that the correct policy-tweaking will make a sale with the public.

Here’s where we are, folks. Nothing so far has reversed the trends that have been in place for - well, in Trueman’s telling, 400 years.

Any ideas?