I’m a stay at home mom who was born in the downtown area of a liberal city… it feels like punk rock rebellion these days to be a sahm, especially a sahm who isn’t trying to start some coaching side hustle.
Oh yes and as Hillary said”what am I supposed to do...stag at home and bake cookies?” the condescention prevailed upon motherhood has been palpable, especially in Democratic circles.
Agree! The stay-at-home-mom is today’s “strong, independent woman” who knows what she wants- a happy family and a better society!
Though I now live near an area with a lot of Catholic families among whom it is totally normal and high-status to be a stay-at-home mom and have at least four or five children. I will say that this is a pretty wealthy area and most of these families are very healthy and good-looking too. It’s kind of the mega-wealthy effect you talked about, brought down one rung of the social ladder.
What I see is these women can handle the “low status” of modern motherhood better because they have a strong social network as well other status items (nice vehicles, clothing, schools, health clubs), but mostly they believe that the Lord sees their work and sacrifices and will reward them for it. I think the men are proud to have beautiful wives, children, and community and are willing to work very hard for them!
One thing I've noticed on social media is that many Catholics (and other Christians) increasingly include the number of children they have in their bio, as a kind of status marker. Very encouraging!
We've moved out to the country as have many in Texas. Away from Houston, Dallas etc. We see a great number of people following us from the hustle of the big cities. Since fertility is a bit higher in rural communities, Should we expect a tick up in fertility with this movement? Hmmm something to think about.
I'm a STAH mom in a suburb outside a liberal city ... I've found that the working moms I know or have randomly talked to are more likely to wish they could STAH or only work part-time than to think less of me for choosing to do so. Finances are a barrier. It's expensive to live here and wages aren't particularly high, even in many traditionally "good" jobs. Lack of part-time jobs available too, especially in female-dominated careers. Most nurses I know want to only work half time to 80%, even the ones who AREN'T moms (yet).
The issue is that there's a discrepancy between what people claim to want and what their practices reveal, so we can't entirely base our understanding of the dynamics at play on what we hear. A majority of people claim to want children, but don't have a significant number even when their wealth allows them to.
That's me. My fourth child will forever remain in the ether. But I'm in one of those religious communities where everyone has a fourth child, and I keenly feel substandard.
The truth is -- and most fertility articles ignore this -- but having children is really not fun at all. When children are the default (as in Orthodox Judaism, Niger, and the Amish communities) then you need to have a reason to stop having them. When birth control is the default (as it is for middle class western women) you need to have a reason to choose the misery of an infant.
I love my three kids, but every time they take another step toward maturity I celebrate it and find it harder and harder to imagine stepping back into sleepless nights and diapers. It would be opting in for depression and torture and marital strife. Nope -- I'm not choosing that.
Maybe the real reason the uber-wealthy have so many children is because they can hire so much domestic labor they barely feel the pain.
You have to sacrifice. You cannot have packages coming in every day from Amazon.
Do you know in 1968 there were no storage outlets ?
You know there are millions today because Americans have filled their homes and garages with so much crap. They don’t use. They have to put it in storage on top of it.
But they have to work full-time both of them so that they can put food on the table, right?!?
Give me a break!! my family made it on a shoestring budget and the kids had everything they wanted. we didn’t go out to eat all the time and when we did, it was McDonald’s or Friendly’s but we made it work.
So easily that I really don’t understand the problem except for people just want to have money in their pocket all the time and be able to send away for crap. They don’t need anytime they want.
I think many middle class people consider it a "need" to give their kids the greased rails of a privileged upbringing. Starting with a Montessori enrichment playgroup up through travel sports, those are very expensive "needs" that lead to the high-status college mentioned in the article.
Yes, this is very true. I think the whole "Society looks down on SAHM's!!!" thing is vastly overstated. Most women would rather stay home, and no one looks down on them - rather, it is viewed as the ideal that too many people can no longer afford but would do if they could.
But… financial incentives don’t increase birth rates. Most sahms I know irl are not rich suburban Trad Caths, they are women who realized that having kids with a man who wants them and who takes care of you FEELS GOOD. And these women have enough risk tolerance to go for it and enough faith to believe it will work out. And are ok with not being high status. Religion can help with that, for sure, but also can having a set.
My first friend from college to become a sahm worked as a waitress, married a good guy in a band who fixed car washes. 20 years later they have three kids, he works at the cable company making 70k and good benefits. She homeschools. They are part of a farm share. Her oldest is going to Notre Dame on a fencing scholarship! They could cross the country year round for tournaments bc she homeschools. They would camp and stay in cheap air bnbs to pursue this. They were always the poorest people at the tournaments. They aren’t religious at all. Her daughter did programs for free college classes for highschoolers and has enough college credits and is entering as a Sophomore. They are Bernie Sanders liberals who did the Dave Ramsey financial model without the religious part. They are HOMEOWNERS. (Another friend from that same college friend group has a PhD and works in tech, makes 200k+, has no children and is constantly complaining that she can’t afford to buy a house. Another friend from that group, actually my best friend who I adore who has high anxiety, with a high paying job won’t have more kids because she can only afford private school and the best of everything for one child. )
Just saying, I think not being able to afford to stay home is a reality for poor women, and women who don’t have a reliable partner or a partner interested in them staying home and raising children. And women who don’t really want to take on all the sacrifices and downgrade in status that having less money entails. Which… fair. But, I don’t have one single sahm rich Catholic friend. All of the sahm I know chose it bc they got a taste of the pleasure of having babies with a truly committed partner, so they felt safe enough to take the risk. Not being able to afford it and being afraid you’re not able to afford it are different things. A lot of people are deathly afraid (some with a variety of good reasons) of being dependent on their mates.
Agree with your take. I've seen these conversations play out over and over -- women claiming they can't afford to stay home when they objectively can.
I think there are a few factors at play, one of them being our view of our baseline material needs has changed a lot -- and I believe part of what we *think* we need is actually status-based, even if we're not aware of it or won't admit to it. An example is I have no idea how working and middle class people afford the fairly new cars they drive, and I can only guess they're paying them off rather than purchasing outright.
Another factor is the fear you mentioned, which when drilled into a bit, I think will have status concerns involved as well. Dependence is seen as weakness. Even if you're in a society in which single motherhood would mean qualifying for welfare and free or cheap childcare (my country); even if you'll have family support; single motherhood is even lower status. I think there's a fear that allowing yourself to be dependent and not having job security is putting yourself at increased risk of being the dreaded poor single mother, even if objectively you'd be supported. (I'm not saying there aren't legitimate fears here, just that status is part of it and we probably don't like to admit it.)
"Another factor is the fear you mentioned, which when drilled into a bit, I think will have status concerns involved as well. Dependence is seen as weakness."
It's not feminist programming. I knew several women in my teens who lost their husbands quite suddenly after being a SAHM for years. The financial struggle after was traumatic. Their kids were all working as teens, not for pocket money, but to help pay the bills. I decided I would never ever put myself in that position. I don't think my husband is going to abandon me, I don't need to be a "strong independent woman" because that's the thing to do, but he could still drop dead at any time.
In part, but not all programming. There have always been bad husbands and there always will be. There are men that abandon their wives with children still at home, this may happen now more with no taboo on divorce, but it definitely happens. There are also men who do hit women. These things do happen and I agree that feminist programming increases fear to a disproportionate level, but I also think that having mothers leave the home has shown us as a society just how important they are, how important present fathers are, and intact families are, for the wellbeing and proper development of children and the maintenance of social fabric and a culture of care.
Dead serious. I've lost track of the number of articles I've read about "We have a big catholic homeschooling family, and so can you!" and "Of course you can afford kids! Just trust God!"... only to see at the end of the article that Dad is a doctor, or lawyer, or financial consultant or something. They can afford to go eat at Red Lobster with 8 kids in tow! At which point I'm inclined to flip them the bird or shout something vulgar at the screen.
I mean, I want that to be true. We went ahead and had the kids without consulting our financial prospects. Just this year, we finally broke through into the median income for our state (not for the country yet). We had a lot of help from relatives to get there... fifteen years into our marriage. Lived on boiled shoestrings and fairy tears for a while there.
But you never see the articles on "How we make it work on one totally median income-- and you can too!" And I'd really like to. I feel like there are a lot of us out here holding it together with baling wire and duct tape, knowing that it is 100% worth the sacrifice, but also... getting a little depressed sometimes when we look around our neighborhood and don't see anybody else even trying.
In our culture, intelligent people who care about their kids' education... and voluntarily accept a lower tax bracket to raise their own kids... there's no cultural slot for that. I finally understand why people spend such absurd money to live in a good neighborhood. Ours is *affordable*.
Nothing's wrong with that. We are doing the right thing for our kids. It's just that the payoff is still years away, when our kids reach adulthood, and it's not financial in nature. And it'd be nice if there were more encouragement and advice out there for us, instead of just rich people being like "Oh, yeah, everybody can afford this! God will bless you if you just trust Him!" which sounds suspiciously Prosperity-Gospel-ish. Trust God and marry a med student, maybe... (wee little eyeroll there).
We need a way to reach out and be visible to each other, those of us who aren't rich and are doing it anyway. Taking the financial hit because our kids are worth it.
I think a lot of online trad stuff is not representative of what most families with sahm look like. “Trad” as a label didn’t exist until like two years ago. I am in my forties. I just called myself a mom. There were sahm before the internet and before all these memes and before the word “based”. And there wasn’t so much ideology attached to it. I get that people need meaning and structure and I am definitely in my post liberal era, but a lot of the trad stuff comes across to me as performative and tricky.
I don't know if it's performative. I think... it's just that people who live on an upper-middle-class income don't actually know anybody who lives on a working-class income, and they simply aren't aware of us. Like we don't exist. And they seem to be the ones writing all the lifestyle blogs. Not to pick on her, but take someone like Leila Lawler, who writes "Like Mother Like Daughter". Beautiful family, a lot of actually-sound advice on homeschooling and housekeeping and stuff... but also, giant old farmhouse, slate countertops, and a bagful of assumptions that only apply to people in her income bracket. I freely admit I see that, and any thought I had of putting myself out there gets shelved. I'm not up to snuff.
I think the mere fact of "lifestyle" media like that kind of damps down people like us getting out there and making connections with each other, because we see that and we're like "well... nobody wants to see my scuffed-linoleum last-update-in-the-70s rental-house kitchen." But that also makes us feel like... maybe we're the only ones, you know? We're thin on the ground, and quiet online. Everybody else who lives on my street is here because they make poor life choices and can't afford anything better, not because they decided to forgo a second income for the sake of their kids.
So, looking around and seeing only... shiny lifestyle blogs by women with rich husbands, it's easy to wonder, just, are we doing it wrong? Are we freaks? Did we miss the fine print in the manual that said "only for people with a household income over $100k"? No, I think we just don't want to stick our heads out and be compared to the slate-countertop moms. Bad enough when it's just your MIL telling you that you're being irresponsible and you need a career and a vasectomy. No need to invite the whole world to do likewise.
I will tell her!!! She does homeschool. She lives in a middle class enclave of a bigger poor neighborhood. The schools are awful. She homeschools and a lot of her neighbors do too.
I can relate! One of the reasons we're doing what we are doing is... even if I'd kept working, we *still* wouldn't have been able to afford a good school district. The only way my kids were getting even an OK education is if we did it ourselves. No other options really. They're doing well, and I'm so glad we did! But dang it's lonely sometimes.
He's great for getting out of debt and sticking to a budget.
When it comes to investment, he advocates buying real estate and becoming a landlord... and the surfeit of wannabe landlords right now is a huge part of what's distorting the market so that ordinary families on the bottom 60% of the income curve can no longer afford a home.
So when it comes to investing strategy... yeah, we've been house hunting for over two years now, and repeatedly getting elbowed out and outbid by investors offering cash-no-inspection. Would be delighted if Ramsey would STFU about REI.
I am a SAHM lucky to have a high earning spouse. I can guarantee that the status hit is real and extreme. I live in a gorgeous community. My spouse travels a lot. I purposely don’t work so that we can have flexibility with holidays and quality family time and I really am that busy managing our life with kids. When asked what I do, I’d rather tell people I have leprosy than admit my role. I’ve given up trying to explain myself.
This is my experience. Most women I know would love to cut back hours or stop working altogether, but the cut in lifestyle is hard to countenance. Especially if you are living in an upper-middle class neighborhood. I was the kid who had a sahm but nothing else -- not the travel camp or the new fad item twice a year or the designer clothing. It isn't easy for anyone.
Weirdly, this isn't new. My grandfather made a secure, comfortable income back in the 50s. Grandmother did the SAHM thing, not because she wanted to but due to health problems. She felt guilty about it, because all the other neighborhood moms worked.
Same same. We are outside of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Being a stay at home mom and homemaker is wild to some. And I laughed at your mention of the coaching side hustle, so exhausting!
I live in Minnesota and have family in that area. They very much look down on me and treat me differently since I am a SAHM and have chosen to be home with my kids over having a career.
This made me chuckle because I’m a sahm mom who is launching a coaching side hustle (to a very specific demographic- high functioning adults diagnosed late in life as being neurodiverse) which was born from doing it for my own kids. I took being a sahm (and still do as my kids are teens) seriously and even though I’m educated and can find work I strongly believe my influence of being here nurturing them made the difference in them thriving versus not. One point I’d make is that I think many would like to be a sahm and money may not even be an issue but it’s not safe to because of the imbalance of power money holds. Society doesn’t support sahm care and doesn’t truly see it as a benefit. We see this by lack of support of the benefits having values brings, ie, the four main virtues like the Stoics discuss. We’ve become a transactional, what’s in it for me society where people simply are losing the understanding of doing the right thing simply because it’s the right thing to do which is another reason more devout sects probably have more children - they believe fulfillment comes from practicing genuine virtue. This was a really good article and I enjoyed it. Thank you.
We can all do our bit in raising the status of SAHM - next time you see a mum out and about with her kids, simply tell her what a valuable job she is doing. Someone took the time to say this to me as I was herding our 3 kids into the bakery queue last week and it lifted me up for the whole day. Such a refreshing change from the 'woah, you've got your hands full' and 'are they all yours' comments people usually make on our outings.
I make a point of always smiling and being friendly to families, especially in situations where they might be embarrassed (kids making noise in church or on flights). Good advice Victoria.
I was passionately waiting for this new piece and you did not disappoint. You dive deep into stuff that I was thinking about, yet was not able to bring it to words like you did.
1.) The success thing is important. My wife is a SAHM while I bring home lots of money. One thing I never did: to say "I make a lot of money". It is always "We have success" and "we make money". Because if she was working like me and not doing complementary work with the kids and the household, I couldn't concentrate on stuff like I can do now and we might have less money and more stress. All money is shared equally. If one of us wants to buy something expensive, we BOTH have to talk about it before.
2.) We have to normalize what "normal" is. I have the feeling that Instagram and related cultures ruined us. Nowadays, having/renting a small 2-bedroom appartment, owning a used Skoda and vacationing on a campground in ones own region is not "good enough" any more, yet this is what most people can afford. If people would be ok with that, especially in Europe where health care and schools are inexpensive, they could have more children. The same goes for having an only average looking wife/husband: it is not cool when you have thousands of Instagram-couples that look like models. Yet most women/men are simply average looking.
3.) Furthering the above: we have to be ok with being less "special". I see people being engaged and planning their wedding 2 years in the future "when they can afford it". Because it has to be grandiose, perfect. Those same people could simply get married NOW and have a small but hearty reception at their parents house and concentrate on their life, love and kids instead. I could come up with similar patterns in other areas of life, too.
4.) Love life/marriage/kids is a topic that every culture handles a bit differently and that is calibrated in a way quite sensible to changes. So when we let millions of people into our countries from completely different cultures, our equilibrium of the male/female relationship is disturbed (ok: this is not a factor in Korea, obviously, so take it with a grain of salt).
5.) The Stay-At-Home-Mom is an evil spawn of modernity the same way that the career-woman is and both are about the same age. In the traditional household, most couples were working on the same thing all day long (with different areas of work, though). They would work "on the farm" (whereas maybe the male would be more concerned with wood chopping and similar physical demanding things and the female would be more concerned about food/kids). Together, they would be one. Today, this is different: wife and husband drive to work in different directions, earn their money completely separately while reuniting only in the evening for dinner and Netflix and then, after a few years, be wondering why they have nothing in common.
All excellent points. So important to not weaponize the 'breadwinner' status against your wife (otherwise she will naturally want to secure her own independent income to compete).
There is no “natural equilibrium” of male-female relations in any culture known to man. Constant push-pull in all societies.
No need to scapegoat immigrants to the West for Western social pathologies. The same pathologies covered in your comment.
European elites instituted no-fault divorce on both sides of the Atlantic, and then normalized fornication and divorce among the masses. New immigrants aren’t really to blame for mass secularization and social dislocation.
You and Jeff both make great points. The elites opened the door to normalize all the behaviors that erode fertility. But we can also say that legal and illegal immigration has been a problem too, if we want high-trust homogeneous societies. All the groups that Johann mentioned are isolated homogeneous islands away from the corrosive liberal and multicultural cesspools. Its foolish to expect the people of one tradition to feel at ease when their country is flooded with hordes of foreigners who whether equal, superior or inferior biologically are so antipodal in physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual makeup that harmonious coalescence will eventually be impossible as we see in most Western societies. I highly suggest reading "Bowling alone : the collapse and revival of the American community" by Robert D. Putnam
we have to find ways to get along together once people are in the country. So I personally refrain from ever arguing against the foreign individual. Realistically and no matter what the Right might want, people will not move back. On a personal level, I see no problem with being good friends with immigrants.
But this doesn't mean we should close our eyes concerning the effects that mass migration has on a macro level. Mass migration was almost never a good thing and brings trouble for hundreds of years.
It is never "the immigrants" that are to blame, but our politicians who let them in without thinking about consequences first. So I'd agree that we are victim to our own pathologies, which is, for example, expressed in how we handle immigration.
And I want to disagree with your disagreement on a natural equilibrium. While of course the female/male relationship changes over the time, societies all develop certain rules and subtle behaviors to deal with the tension between the sexes.
For example, all western countries allow to have sexual relationships with any adult person. And it is ok for women to dress semi-nude and men are supposed not to grope them because of it. But, the unwritten rule still is: even a non-married couple usually expects the partner to be faithful for many years.
I found that people from countries with a very restricted sexual behavior think of "sexual freedom" differently than we do because they didn't slowly develop to the status quo we have now. Which is why, for example in discotheques, you suddenly have people from islamic countries NOT following the unwritten rules and getting everyone into trouble. Which in turn changes the behavior of all involved.
I'd say it's also the fault of buisnesses. By wanting to get as much money as possible they make work conditions (hard/exploitive work for shitty pay) that the locals don't want to take the job, but a desperate person from another country is willing to take it. Some buisnesses even transport the immigrants themselves, so that they would work for them.
Buisness search for cheap labour and usually immigrants provide that cheap labour. Thus buisnesses are interested in immigration.
I do not know where you live in Europe, but where I live health care is rather good and available and for kids it is essentially free (in terms of: the parents pay, but by that the kids are covered). The statistics I have about infant mortality in France show no sign of a situation that worsens, so I‘d say: please check the data again.
Let’s embrace “homemaker” or even “housewife” and stop using “stay-at-home mom” to describe women who choose to prioritize home and family. Language matters in assigning or denying certain roles status.
You might even go more modern/fancyer and say something like "household manager". It might even sound more "professional" and could even give some "status points" in the mind of others (as "manager" tends to have a higher status that a common worker).
I'm good with homemaker. I'm not a manager, even though I orchestrate the entire thing. From decor to meals to the scent and cleanliness of the home, My goal for two decades has been to create a shelter from the storm for our family. Home is where the heart is, it's also beautiful, nourishing, and loving. Not sure I need status points for that work, since it's also been beneficial to my own mental, spiritual, and physical health. As a 52 yo, status means nothing to me, love and health are what I'm banking on as I grow older.
I used to tell people I was the CEO, CTO, and CFO for a domestic company grossing $X. Usually took a moment before they figured out I was “the chief cook and bottle-washer” as my mother would say!
Me, too, I like the term "homemaker", as that is what she is, a maker of the home for Dad, Mom and children they make or adopt. HOME, what a wonderful place, or hope to be!
I like full-time mom because it triggers a lot of women they don’t like to be called part-time mom, which is the reality. a kid just got baked to death in his own car because neither the mother or the father top priority. It happens all the time.
This is a hard one. I’ve taken to telling people I’m the lead parent. Our society now requires so much justification for wanting to raise your kids and elevate your family life that I routinely obscure my language. I understand this only reinforces the crap place we are in but I’m just so tired of being made to feel like a sell out loser. By the way, I use to have a live in maid nanny in my former life and I gave it up so I could raise my kids myself. I was tired of the incursion in the most important and intimate part of my life. Making this decision also made me a pariah amongst my monied friends.
You will find your people. When I became a stay at home mom in 2018 after the birth of my first child is certainly brought about judgment from some others. I let them go, and have found in our new community (we left the city for a third ring suburb) a great community of others moms (many/most who stay home).
This is so important. For the first ten years or so, I felt so alone-- didn't know any other homeschooling moms. Now I belong to a church where we are just one of like six homeschooling families with dedicated non-workforce moms and it feels so blessedly *normal* now.
I have an alternate hypothesis which would use most if not all of the same evidence as yours about the status. It is that when children can be used for net financial gain you'll get more of them and when they are a net financial loss you'll get less of them.
The central difference in the two hypothesis is this line:
"If striving for status is causing people to forgo having children, we would conversely expect to see those people who have less reason to strive to have more children. To denote this new group, I will use the term ‘status secure’"
In my opinion status tends to be a lagging indicator for some other factor, whether it be wealth or fame or something. We already see the status of the college degree degrading rapidly as it no longer confers wealth like it used to. It also has some oddities with your thesis since the ultra-status don't have ultra amounts of kids. A random nobody ghetto mom has more kids than Bill Gates and Elon Musk combined, which seems a major outlier needing some explanation. I think that the 'if more kids = more money you get more kids' fills it in.
Some data supporting the thesis about kids financial impact being important:
•Welfare families get more money per kid and they have more fertility
•Amish people can engage their kids in productive farm labor, just like we all used to, and they have more fertility. Historically kids used to be a net-money-generator for the family and the current costly-kids is an aberration.
•In the West people talk about kids exclusively in 'how much they will cost'. https://shorturl.at/j06rM "The report’s conclusion is that a middle-income family of four is expected to pay $233,610 per child from birth to age 18." Presumably in ye olden days, or in modern Somalia, a child is a net gain rather than a net drain. It's the difference between owning a liability vs. owning an asset. A child who only drains money makes you second guess getting more while a child who prints money makes you want more and more.
•https://shorturl.at/O2dYn "Child labor is prohibited in Korea. According to the Labor Standards Act, children 15 or older can be employed for paid labor. Approximately 7.7% of children between the ages of 15~19 participate in economic activities. Children spend an average of 18 minutes a day on household chores. Parents’ expectation for children to participate in household chores is not high. This expectation does not greatly vary by child gender"
To contrast Re: Somalia
•Fertility rate: "6.31 births per woman (2021)"
•https://shorturl.at/LP0O8 "Children in Somalia are subjected to the worst forms of child labor, including in armed conflict."
Data that you have that fits this thesis too:
•Orthodox jews are major welfare queens, so more kids = more free shekels. There are many examples but even Israel considers them leeches. Here's a western example https://shorturl.at/1ElTK "Raids in New Jersey town target ultra-Orthodox Jews accused of welfare fraud"
•Amish are allowed to engage children in productive labor and they are a net benefit. "The Amish community has exemptions to federal child labor laws that allow children to work as apprentices in traditional industries after completing their formal education"
•Money can get status, so more kids = more money = more status.
•For celebrities and the ultra elite, more kids does not equal more money because of how they are rich, and so they don't have them. Contrast that to ye olden royalty where more kids = can take over more land or can marry them off to foreign royals and they made more.
•Urbanization and white collar service work tends to mean children become a cost, while rural life tends to mean children become a gain.
So in conclusion I think that children as asset vs liability is a stronger cause of fertility rates.
I think the biggest specific economic factor driving down birthrates is the rise of financialization and particularly government-funded pensions and elder care. Before those programs, the quality of your old-age care depended on the number and quality of your children and grandchildren. Absent that, it was charity, a miserable poorhouse, or dying on the street. That makes having kids not so much a source of cheap labor for a few years, but your best, and indeed only, retirement plan.
My parents were Amish, so I have more insight into Amish culture and the factors behind their fertility rate than most people are able to get. The status factors the author describes definitely play a big role. But to add to your economic point, the Amish have an exemption from Social Security. They don't pay into it, and aren't eligible to collect it. They requested the exemption because they consider it the family's responsibility to care for their elderly parents, with help from the community in the rare circumstances where the immediate family isn't able to do so.
That provides the strongest economic incentive to high fertility, even more than the cheap labor. That's definitely a factor though. Income earned by Amish teenagers typically goes to their parents until they get married or turn 21, whichever comes first. So that's an incentive both to have more kids, and for the young people to get married and start their own family as early as possible.
This is a useful framing, and interwoven with my own thesis since there's a strong correlation between wealth and status. Many good points.
However, I maintain the primacy of status since:
1) If people have to choose between wealth and status they will choose status (many studies on this and fairly broadly accepted, ie. people choose college even when it makes no financial sense, will choose more prestigious job titles over pay rises, and will irrationally avoid well-paid but low-status working class jobs).
2) This is reflected in the studies I cite, with Georgia showing the strongest fertility deviation in the West (broadly construed), entirely caused by status and not economic factors.
From another comment, put here for convenience, "It's problematic to base analysis on underclass behavior because their behavior is irrational in many domains due to lower intelligence and higher social/personal dysfunction. Many aren't capable of strategic family planning."
Estimates of the US that are considered "lower class" range from 29%-45%. That's not an insignificant amount of the population. To show two handy charts see the following:
The federal poverty level, which is where you get the welfare gibs, fluctuates from $15k-$25k based on family size with $15k being if you are childless and alone and $25k when you get to 3 kids and such. The first chart shows the birthrate plateau and dropoff around that range.
The second chart is far more clear on the effect of poverty and fertility and, presumably, the strength of more welfare/money = more kids. Admittedly it's a more laborious task to break down if the true underclass is a lot of people or vanishingly few people but I hope you can forgive that considering the charts above. It's at least 11% population.
"Georgia showing the strongest fertility deviation in the West (broadly construed), entirely caused by status and not economic factors."
I quite enjoyed reading the Georgia article, thank you. However it's not very conclusive in dividing your argument from mine.
"Georgia is the 2nd Cheapest Developed Country in the World to Raise a Family"
So while South Korea which has the lowest fertility has the most expensive child rearing, Georgia is very low on the child rearing cost scale with a coupled high fertility. The second lowest cost in the developed world.
Checking in on their child labor laws, which I use as a loose proxy of if children can be used to make money for the family, "In this chapter, the main findings of the practical research and present respondents’ opinions will be reviewed together with experiences relating to child labour. The problems raised during survey indicate that children in Georgia often have to perform work that is inappropriate for their age or development, dangerous to their health, which violates their best interests and individual needs.
The survey made it clear that in cases of involuntary child labour, the responsible state agencies do not have an effective mechanism to tackle this issue and achieve positive results; the pandemic has made it even more challenging to meet the needs of families living in poverty; the risks of child labour have been further increased."
Now, I also checked in on the political system and going-ons in Georgia to see what else was happening around 2008 with the Orthodox request for children and hoo boy, it's a real shit storm over there. The following are quoted from Wikipedia here and there:
•"Georgian wine has been a contentious issue in recent relationships with Russia. Political tensions with Russia have contributed to the 2006 Russian embargo of Georgian wine, Russia claimed Georgia produced counterfeit wine. It was an "official" reason, but the instability of economic relations with Russia is well known, as they use the economic ties for political purposes."
•"In 2007, a series of anti-government protests took place across Georgia. The demonstrations peaked on 2 November 2007, when 40,000–50,000[1] rallied in downtown Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia.[2] People protested against the allegedly corrupt government of president Mikheil Saakashvili."
•"On 8 November 2007, President Saakashvili announced a compromise solution to hold an early presidential election for 5 January 2008. He also proposed to hold a referendum in parallel to snap presidential elections about when to hold parliamentary polls – in spring as pushed for by the opposition parties, or in late 2008.[5] It is said to have been the worst political crisis in Georgia since the Rose Revolution in 2003 that brought Saakashvili's government to power in the first place"
•"The Open Society Institute (OSI), funded by George Soros, supported Mikheil Saakashvili and a network of pro-democratic organizations."
•"The August 2008 Russo-Georgian War, also known as the Russian invasion of Georgia,[note 3] was a war waged against Georgia by the Russian Federation and the Russian-backed separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The fighting took place in the strategically important South Caucasus region. It is regarded as the first European war of the 21st century"
•"Opposition parties have accused Saakashvili of concentrating power to himself, using riot police to crush opposition rallies in 2007 and for the disaster of the 2008 South Ossetia war. "I don't think that it should be a surprise that after we lost 20% of Georgian territory and have no democracy in the country, we are asking for the resignation of the president," opposition leader Nino Burjanadze said"
So you have a George Soros color revolution government, wars, a war they lost, protests, economic embargos at a minimum AND they're next to Russia and Ukraine. I am so unfamiliar with Georgia beyond this initial look and there is so much going on over there, especially in that timeframe around 2008, that I can definitely say there's too much for me assess the impact of the Orthodox Church's request vs everything else. I do believe it's fair to say that there's more going on affecting fertility than only that request, though.
Edit: There was so much going on in Georgia that I even wondered if their increased fertility was in line with war = fertility above anything else. Combined with Somalia's high fertility, I even considered tossing out my own thesis about kids=money as well for violence=fertility! Luckily for me the pacifistic Amish were there to rescue my argument from turning into a recommendation for societal ultra violence to produce children.
"1) If people have to choose between wealth and status they will choose status (many studies on this and fairly broadly accepted, ie. people choose college even when it makes no financial sense, will choose more prestigious job titles over pay rises, and will irrationally avoid well-paid but low-status working class jobs)."
My reply to this is separate because it is a bit anecdotal. I think people don't have a choice but to get status over money. Think about the workplace and how pissed off people get when they are told, "So here's your new title and extra responsibilities...but you don't get any additional pay". It's a well known meme that this is both abuse and common in the US workplace.
In that reasoning the workplace has concluded that status is cheaper than money and pay raises. The employer would rather call you a vice president and give you $0 while it's probably safe to say the employee would rather get $1000 and no title chance, but the employee has no leverage and thus no choice.
I liked all the info about Georgia, and even the new hypothesis about “violence=fecundity”, but this comment about people not having a choice between status or money doesn’t hold water in my opinion.
Most likely economic, status, and violence incentives are all at play, and finding the extremes of each case will throw off any alternate theory
Oops forgot to reply to your comment about choices of status vs money. I always took it for granted that employees would rather have a raise over a promotion and that any promotion is only as useful as the raise it gets you when you hop companies, especially in the era where the $5 Subway sub is now $15, but let's see together:
"In the latest revealing survey of 4,510 office workers from several countries, seven in 10 respondents indicated that they'd pass up a promotion in favor of the opportunity to work from anywhere, any time."
Well that's certainly a new one to me. So time & freedom > status.
"Promotions Preferred to Pay Raises, Professionals Say"
So one for status.
"Career advancement remains one of the strongest signs for salaried employees that they are appreciated and valued—and moving forward at work—although a promotion and pay raise would, assuredly, be even better. And if pay isn't increased eventually, promoted employees are likely to seek employment elsewhere."
Very interesting that the survey is for salaried workers. Incidentally from some site on Google the split between wagies and salaries are close, "According to the latest Labor Department Data, 82.3 million workers ages 16+ were paid at hourly rates. That's a whopping 58.1% of all workers in the US, while the other 41.9% makes up the rest of the full-time salaried workforce"
"A recent survey conducted by HR consultancy Korn Ferry revealed that 55 percent of employees prefer a raise with no promotion. However, 45 percent of them are just fine with a new title and no salary bump."
One for raises.
"[...]bottlenecking, or having nowhere to go, were the biggest likely reasons respondents said they were passed over for a promotion. If passed over, 31 percent of respondents said that they would start searching for other job opportunities."
It's increasingly looking like promotions is more a proxy for not-being-fired-or-outsourced-soon rather than pure status, though admittedly both are linked. In the tumultuous Great Depression II we live in reliable employment is very valuable, I think, though that lends towards my monetary value over status value.
Now the cultural aspect, I'll post blurbs and questions of my choosing from a casual internet search which will be very familiar to any american:
•"DO YOU HAVE TO QUIT YOUR JOB TO GET A BIG RAISE?"
•"Considering a dry promotion? The pros and cons of promoting without a pay increase. Would you take on additional work without additional pay? Probably not."
•"Their model shows that it can be cheaper to motivate workers with career advancement rather than with cash. This is surprising, because one of the main reasons why workers value promotions is that they come with a pay bump. A key insight of Li, Powell, and Ke’s model is that the higher pay in higher positions serves two purposes: it motivates the higher-level employee to work hard to keep that job, and it motivates lower-level workers to work hard to eventually get that job."
•"my employer has stupid rules for raises when you get promoted"
•"Why Getting A Less Than Desirable Raise Can Actually Be A Good Thing"
•"How can I respectfully step down from a dry promotion after accepting 6 months ago?"
•"New Employee Is Being Paid More Than Me. Is That Legal?"
It's difficult because a confounding factor with money vs status is the hyperinflation we're living through. People are actually becoming financially stressed which means they want more money but just because a Big Mac suddenly jumped $10 doesn't mean I'm right it just means people are suddenly impoverished. I do think the rest of my points still stand, though.
Of course we’re talking in generalities, which is fine, but also there will be lots of variation among people in terms of motivations. I recommend, if you haven’t already read it, an endlessly fascinating series of articles on the three categories of corporate worker by Venkatesh Rao called “The Gervais Principle”: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/
Yes, you are correct that there are going to be many levers for an outcome as output-oriented as fertility. It's likely, imo, that things like economic/status/violence measures all have a minimum threshold of benefit for fertility where you get diminishing returns after. However I do think that the economic, which expanded from the gentleman with Amish parentage, would be the economic-human productivity-retirement factor is both the strongest lever and the one with the highest practical ceiling before diminishing returns.
We both know we're only one google search away from a woman with zero status and zero money that has 13+ kids. And while Elon has quite a few children, 12 according to Google, he is definitely not having kids consumerate with his status.
If the status theory were true then let's say average ghetto mom has 5 kids, would you say that Elon is only 2-3x the status level of the average ghetto mom? That would be about 10-15 kids. Or would his status imply that he should have Genghis Kahn levels of kids?
I was going to discuss this in the article but it got too lengthy. It's problematic to base analysis on underclass behavior because their behavior is irrational in many domains due to lower intelligence and higher social/personal dysfunction. Many aren't capable of strategic family planning.
In addition, they have their own subculture and "mimetic infrastructure" which is affected by the fact that their status is positively affected by having children via increased welfare etc.
I just found it strange that you chose Elon Musk as your example when he's one of the few people in his social strata who actually can compete with "ghetto moms" on fertility. I would be surprised if you could find many such people who *actually* have 13 kids, that is a lot to have when abortion is so accessible. It would probably be easier to find "ghetto" men who, like Musk, have accomplished that by going between multiple women.
Anyways, I imagine these hypothetical "ghetto" people could fairly be classified as a separate sub-culture, largely isolated from the broader liberal paradigm. Some black woman that dropped out of school in 6th grade and got pregnant for the first time at 14 is operating in a sphere where going off to college and getting some white-collar spreadsheet job might as well be something aliens from another planet do.
"I just found it strange that you chose Elon Musk as your example when he's one of the few people in his social strata who actually can compete with "ghetto moms" on fertility."
I didn't know anything about Musk when I said it, and 12 kids is quite good, but it's certainly not a number befitting one of the most famous men in the entirety of human history if status = kids. Especially when you consider that Elon is a man and can impregnate hundreds and he's getting numbers that are merely competitive with attractive poor black men, attractive poor muslims and so on.
Again, recall that the question is regarding if status = kids or something similar. Surely you can agree that the gulf of status between Elon Musk and an attractive poor black man is of such magnitude as to be nearly unmeasurable? If the thesis is true shouldn't this gulf show itself vis-a-vis children in some form in this extreme circumstance? Either Elon would have a magnitude more children, which is unlikely since the host's theory is that Elon is too important to even care, or the attractive black man or the black women* would have incredible status acquired from the children. Which is also not the case, what with the struggle with child support payments. That's not even including that Elon himself is on of the highest child-having members of his cohort.
Edit: Well, in any case, feel free to uphold Elon as the strongest steelman against my thesis or substitute him for the typical few-child elite. I am confident the argument holds up in either case.
The relationship between wealth and fertility seems to follow an U-shape curve, with higher IFR in the lowest wealth population, so even if the search for status matters, the wealth will remain an important independent factor.
The effect between status and fertility should be bidirectional. Once above some level of incomes it is likely that status positively influence fertility. But how do fertility affect status? This is much more complex and depends a lot on the age. Even nowadays, there are very few things that affect more negatively the status than a teenager pregnancy. But on the other side of the age spectrum, after menopause, remaining childless also confers worse status
In the industrialized west, it's actually a *legal* problem these days. I traveled a bit in my youth, in the developing world, and made friends with whom I keep in touch. My kids are fantastically expensive compared to theirs. Nobody's going hungry or anything, but... they can load three kids and two parents onto a motorbike and roll off to visit grandma. I am legally required to have all of mine in a closed vehicle with seatbelts and car seats, AND they can only ride in the back. This is new. Sure it saves a few, but it also adds to the expense of having children. Even my parents were not subject to that expense. We (family of six) rode around in a sedan with one kid in the middle of the bench seat in front. Because that was before airbags could kill you. My grandma grew up with seven sisters. They slept three or four to a bed and lived in a house made of tarpaper. With an outhouse. You'd get a visit from social services and code enforcement if you did that now, but somehow they all grew up to be productive non-criminal members of society.
You know how nobody in the bottom 60% of the income curve can afford to buy a house these days? There are implications to that, which hardly anyone thinks about unless they are down here, making median-or-lower income, with kids. Where I live, fire regulations allow landlords to discriminate against you by family size. Let's say you have four little girls, and a baby who sleeps in a crib in your room. You've got two bunk beds, the bigger girls could all share a room, and so you only need a two-bedroom house, which you could afford to rent. But you will not be able to rent a two-bedroom house unless you have a relative who's a landlord. Why? Because landlords don't like kids. They dig holes and color on the walls. They can do as much damage as pets, but you can't charge extra for them. Fire safety rules here say that you don't have to rent to anyone if they've got more than *two people per bedroom* without reference to the size of the house or the age of the people. If, as a landlord, you don't want to rent a four-bedroom house to a large family, all you have to do is remove two closets (that's what makes it a bedroom, legally), and now you're renting a TWO bedroom house with a home office and a craft room, and you can limit occupancy to four-- and that can be four single adult roommates who are using the home office and craft room... as bedrooms. Family of seven? Good luck finding an affordable four-bedroom to rent. I'm not sure that exists.
Status is far from the only thing going into that equation.
I think you are right in what you say in this essay, and I can put in my direct experience with it. Briefly, I was raised Christian (Protestant), came from a family of 3 and always knew I wanted kids. However, I lived a pretty non-Christian lifestyle through most of my 20s, had a somewhat “cool” job, was around a lot of people with no kids and similarly cool jobs, went out a lot, etc. My husband and I married around 30 and started having kids right away. I had a sort of awakening about what was important, so I expected it, but when I quit my job as our first was born, I still totally felt the loss of status. It wasn’t that people were mean, maybe I get some teasing once in a while from friends, but it was more like feeling isolated, and being unable to have the same life or participate in conversations, plus offhand comments people would make (“I could NEVER stay home!!” Etc) Finding other moms helped a lot.
We now have 3, and have been homeschooling since the beginning. I had another awakening when meeting people and realized that the ones who had their heads on straight about all of this are the faithful Catholics. I converted several years ago and am part of a catholic homeschool co-op where it is normal and high status to have 6, 7, even 8 children.
Being around a cohesive, functional, smart group of people for whom part of status is having a lot of well bred children has really, really changed my perspective. I no longer think 7 kids is insane, and to have women around me homeschooling so many, often with a child in college or high school and another that’s a baby with everything in between- it’s amazing. It would be very hard to be in this for the long haul without that.
The status problem of motherhood seems to be complicated by mass immigration. In my area at least, daycare workers and private nannies are usually recent Hispanic arrivals (high-income families choose the au pair route). It reinforces a notion that childcare is low-paid immigrant work. Then, of course, there’s the “return on investment” problem for college-educated women: what did you blow that insane amount of tuition money on if not to earn?
I think this is actually one of the ways that small family perpetuate themselves. I grew up the oldest of 5 children and I think that I'm much more prepared to run a household and handle children than friends of mine who are only kids or one of two. Large family, especially extended families where children help care for their cousins and niblings, are a much needed apprenticeship to running a household and raising children.
Imo a *good* liberal arts education (hard to come by, I know) is the best education for motherhood because you know a little about everything and it's the stuff that actually matters in life (philosophy, music, math/logic, etc). That's the stuff you pass to your kids. If you go to a college that purports to be job training, then, yeah, not much of a point.
College is a wonderful way to improve your mind, and meet appropriate men to date and potentially marry after graduation. That is a perfectly good "return on investment". Never again in most people's lives will they be surrounded by so many potentially suitable mates (unless someone chooses a college that is a very bad fit for them, I suppose.) Unfortunately, the skyrocketing cost of a college education in America, has prevented that from being reasonable for many people. It's really really unfortunate. People should be able to attend a state university without going into debt for decades.
I know someone a generation older than me who went to Yeshiva University's Stern College for Women, and she told me that at the time the saying was that to have a good life you need to get your letters in the right order : BA, MRS, MA
There’s something to be said about the college/grad school-educated European heritage women relying on non-Euro nannies and daycare workers to take care of Euro heritage babies. Strange thing that is NOT commented on in polite company. I know too many Irish/Italian/WASP-American NYC moms with a Caribbean or Filipino nanny. So interesting this is NOT widely discussed!
I’m a SAHM that’s taken my kids to playgrounds all around Brooklyn and NYC when we lived there, and for the last 5 years around my town. I have seen many, many of these nannies, they are almost always foreign and often speak bad English. Often I was/am the only mom at a playground. The nannies are often either staring at their phones, or conversely, too restrictive. Lots of giving the kids devices too. The only nanny I’ve ever befriended is a live in, very long term one that considers herself part of the family. Just putting this in to say that nannies are not a good substitute from what I can see.
I’m a former software engineer turned SAHM. It was a choice my husband and I knew would reduce our household income by about 40% but would be well worth it for our children and family life. We’re firmly in the striver class, so this next part probably isn’t surprising but I was shocked when I found myself wanting to tell people that I “used to be a software engineer but now I’m a SAHM” when asked “what do you do?”. Like I had this need to let others know I am capable of being “high status” I just opted out. It was a struggle to contend with this ugly side of myself, to recognize what pride I had about my social position when my personal values are that being a SAHM is not only preferable in every way to being a normie tech slave but an amazing privilege. In other words: perhaps the low status is also coming from inside the house via SAHM self-deprecation. We should wear our SAHMness with smug self-congrats if only to combat that inner (and societal) voice that says “you’re not high status enough”.
That's fascinating - encouraging to hear such a direct reflection of my thesis. Thank you for commenting, and I think your point about the need to project confidence and pride is absolutely correct.
I just wrote about this (well, shared a post I wrote years ago) -- about how so many women qualify their SAHM position in this way. Me formerly included. I totally agree with your "inside the house" analysis. Once I worked on my own stuff (pride, ego, YEP) I now embody confidence in my role, a totally different vibe
When I meet people and tell them that I raise and homeschool my three children, they then ask me what I used to do before I did that. I don't usually lead with that info because I didn't like my work before I had kids and don't consider it as part of my identity at all, but I can tell people are searching for some sort of information beyond my current status that they can use to categorize me or connect with me.
I agree that there's a lot of SAHM self-deprecation; it's easy to absorb from the wider society even if we genuinely believe that our chosen lifestyle is a good thing. When I sense some sort of negative judgment about my current stay at home or homeschooling status, I feel the social awkwardness that arises in the interaction very acutely. So it's very tempting to try to smooth over that mini-conflict by somehow trying to meet the other person at their negative perception instead of defiantly digging my heels and and having an unapologetic air of, "That's right! Deal with it!"
Reasonably valid hypothesis and structural argumentation - the piece would benefit from a more extensive treatment of alternate analyses fitting the same evidence. The strongest point, in my view, centers on the connection between intrinsic human needs (in this case, to be valued) and the behaviors that result from those needs. The weakest point lies in the proffered prescriptions meant to combat our society’s wrongheadedness concerning these issues. A few (12 and 13 in particular) would in fact require a distinct backtracking on the part of liberals - they would be considered existentially dangerous and fundamentally wrong. Similarly, any attempt at all to push women out of the educational and professional world as it has been established in the 20th (leading into the 21st) century would be perceived as (and, I suspect, in practicum lead to) an actual devaluation of women. Since, at this moment in time, our society values material professional achievement, physical dominance, and overt intellectual accolades, any action that obviates the separation of women from those opportunities is likely to backfired spectacularly. In more basic terms, I suspect the ship of society can’t be righted by feeding the latent misogyny/misandry of the Very Online via state action or inaction. We have a cultural problem and it can only be fixed culturally. Historically (at least so far as the past 200 years or so are concerned) this has to be led by women - not the male coded structures of government/financial force. If you want to raise the status of homemakers, women and their female coded structures have to be at the forefront of it.
This is not to say that men have no part in the undertaking (nor that I fundamentally disagree with every prescription suggested), but simply that the aim might be better served when looked at from a different starting point. Anecdotally, I am a “stay at home mom” of seven - I grow/raise a goodly portion of our food (down to the slaughtering and processing myself) and homeschool almost entirely on my own as my husband is out of town quite often. Yet, my female mentors from grad school (where I excelled) lament my absence from academia as being existentially limiting, and most of the males of my acquaintance treat me as if I’m incapable of tying my own shoes. If, as the right in America argues, women naturally desire children, the way to value a woman’s fertility is to, in everyday life, VALUE it. Treat them not as lesser individuals but grudgingly necessary wombs, but as honored, capable, wise, and strong helpmeets (in the truest understanding of the word by which Jehovah God describes himself). The desired end won’t be served or achieved by rants about feminism and women in general, legislating removal of women from the public sphere, or, similarly, women screaming at other women about their “internalized patriarchal oppression.” In truth, women have been infantilized (and infantilized themselves) during the modern era, and they must lead in their own (and society’s) maturation.
Indeed. My great grandma raised eleven children during the Great Depression. Grew vegetables, fished, gigged frogs, shot ducks, cooked possum, raised chickens, pigs, and a family cow. She did not go to college, but her children and grandchildren (and that's a lot of people!) revered her almost as a saint. Mother. I never met her but she loomed large in all my family's stories. Eleven kids and not a bad apple in the bunch. I remember them fondly.
Fast forward a few decades, and we have women in the family with masters' degrees, careers, even some high status jobs, as well as some who went the keep-house-and-raise-kids route. And not one of them has a place like Hers. Because what she did was heroic, and what the rest of us do is just living in the modern world, one way or another.
One wonders if the main problem isn't status, but rather the lack of hardship, the lack of epic occasions to rise to, challenges to overcome or fail.
I think the future will be full of such opportunities. Will we have the fortitude to take them?
This reminds me of the problems that have arisen from instilling democracy in countries that didn’t earn it for themselves. I used to conceive of Iraq, for example, as a battered wife, who looks for what’s familiar.
The question then in either case is: how do we help these people help themselves? I guess all we can do is think of incentives and areas in which we are complicit (and pray)
One issue I think is that being a good SAHM is harder than being an office drone.
You also can't hide it. If your a crappy SAHM all your loved ones will see it.
If you job consists of pointless meetings and fetch emails all people will see is your paycheck.
And while your average 30 year old woman has a lot of experience being an office drone, she probably doesn't even cook for herself and has no understanding of how to manage scarce time or discipline a child.
I work for a big corporation, at a modest blue collar level. Most of the roles I've had are not as demanding as what my wife does with our children.
I think the "slipping through the cracks" isn't necessarily something people consciously look for, but the whole point of a corporate office wirner is that you just show up and they assign you a laptop, some meetings, and a few reports. You do what you're told and get the check you were promised. As a parent, there is no employee manual, there's no boss to push decisions to, etc. You have to decide what to do all day, and evaluate your performance. For lots of middle class people, they never have to do that in a job. So people with much lower agency can go to work and do better than they would as a full time homemaker.
So true. For years after I left the workforce, I fantasized about just... going back to work. Because it was cleaner and easier. Nobody cried or expected me to clean up poop or vomit. I didn't have to manage other people or be creative or come up with a budget. Somebody could just tell me what to do, and I could do it, and then I could go home. I still get a twinge of nostalgia for it now and then.
I just had my third baby last week. A nurse told me “you poor thing.” Like, I’m not the one going home to an empty apartment every night? It was a weird exchange and reinforced how, even in chit chat, our culture negates childbearing as something meaningful.
Haha! When we got married, I informed my husband that three was the *minimum* number of kids we could have, because... what if we were bad parents??? I was one of four, and can report: singletons are spoiled and lonely, and they are totally screwed if their parents are not quite up to snuff. If you have only two the sibling rivalry can get really out of hand. Three is the bare minimum to break up the rivalry dynamic, and after that, every additional kid is a bonus, and gives siblings a bigger built-in social/safety net when they become adults. As an adult, my siblings are some of the most important people in my life! Why would I deprive my kids of that?
No, once you have *any* kids at all, you may as well have three or more, because siblings are one of the greatest gifts you can give a child. The only regret I have about my three is that we couldn't give them *more* siblings (medical reasons. Sigh). They are all pretty great, though.
Next time someone gives you the nosey-parker attitude, I dare you to ask them which one they think you should get rid of ;)
I remember the year I made my parents a laughingstock in the extended family. I was always the academic star of all of the cousins. My aunt hated hearing about my achievements. I was the one with the STEM graduate degree and a promising software engineering career. The year I became SAHM, my mother told me my aunt looked unusually gleeful. Her children, though not as “accomplished” (and still without a stable career), are now far above me in status. At least they HAD jobs. She finally won the sister in law pissing contest. That is, until I had multiple children in rapid succession and she still without grandchildren despite having three kids, and my mother just having me 🤷🏻♀️ She went from, “my son’s high status, PhD girlfriend is not good enough” to “just marry anyone and give me grandchildren”.
Having a family is low-status when you're young but potentially high-status when you're older. When my five children were very young people treated me like a welfare mom. We were well-off and I had my doctorate before I turned 30, but strangers in the grocery store just assume you're dumb and poor if you have kids when you're young.
Humans have a pecking order, just like chickens. Younger women who have small children are just about at the bottom of that pecking order. It's a biological thing. You wouldn't believe the comments and nasty things people say to you when you're pregnant or in public with very small children. Things they wouldn't dare say in front of your husband. There is something obviously vulnerable and fragile in a young mother. Weak people in particular love to feel powerful, so they peck and scratch at heavily pregnant women, or women with toddlers and babies in tow. It was mostly older people who harassed me when my kids were young. The men would comment on my breasts or my fertility in crass ways, and the women would be cruel and discouraging. Hateful.
As soon as my oldest was 12 or 13, however, there was a noticeable change in the pecking order. All of the sudden people were more respectful--I was treated more like a community leader and a matriarch. I think it is actually high-status to be a mother of many children, even outside of religious groups. The status just comes later, after it's clear to people that you've done a good job raising your family, and you've kept your marriage together.
I agree about status being important for fertility. But it's also a significant issue that being a stay-at-home mom is profoundly lonely, especially in an atomized society where children are generally looked down upon, and where many mothers are isolated from their family of origin (often due to the need of the husband to move far or frequently for the job that allows her to stay at home). The loneliest I've ever been was when we had one, two, then three little kids. And I am a highly energetic, active woman who works hard to build community wherever I am. It's still incredibly difficult. We crossed the threshold, and are on the way to five kids, and things are significantly easier. But I'm convinced that a lot of women stop at one or two babies because of how difficult it is to build/find community for those first few years of life, before the babies are big enough to be part of a school or other community. Having a job where you get to engage with other adults, drive where and when you want, meet up with friends, and then turning into a homebound person is very difficult, especially for women who are not introverted. (Car seats and suburban driving hell are also a big part of the social isolation many women experience when they have children.)
Yes, I very much sympathize with these points - we went through the same stage of isolation after our first children. Trying our best to help those that follow us in our community.
Being at home with infants and toddlers suuuuuucks. And nobody warns you about that. That because we live in a car culture, everything's far away, and you can't just walk there. Wanna go somewhere? OK, just pack some healthy snacks, diapers, emergency changes of clothes for four people, a stroller that weighs 35 pounds, drinks, something to do in the car, and then wrangle three small children into car seats that they hate, drive somewhere, try to do something and socialize with other adults (bonus points if you can talk about anything that doesn't involve poop), and then still get home by naptime so everybody doesn't have a screaming meltdown.
Yeah, my youngest is five now, and I do not miss that stage. At all. Even though they were super cute.
Meanwhile, the family I stayed with in rural SE Asia in my youth... seemed to have dozens of aunts, cousins, and godparents in walking distance, constantly in and out of each other's houses, and always some random 12-yo girl to hand the baby to, when you need to get stuff done, and always a couple of relatives you can draft to help with big jobs. Laundry is social. Cleaning floors is social. Cooking is social. Shopping is social. When I had to overnight in the city on my way back to the airport, they would not let me sleep at a hotel alone. It would be too scary, they explained. Ghosts. I don't think any of them had ever slept in a room alone before-- the idea was too awful to contemplate. Social isolation is very American, and it isn't healthy.
Glad to hear that it gets easier with more kids. I'm pregnant with my fourth and my husband works away and it is so so lonely for me! Even though I have friends and contacts it is so hard to arrange any kind of get together because of young children's nap needs and potty training and all the rest of it. I keep telling myself that it must get easier as they get older and the older ones are less needy and can buckle their own carseats and fetch their own snacks and drinks but boy is it ever tough right now
I've seen Feminists in the wild raise this very point. Doesn't get spoken about enough in this discourse and we're giving them free points in the process.
I can’t help but think of how the foundation for all of this to thrive is pride. Without pride (the most ancient defect), the status engine would have no fuel. Something is fundamentally broken when we, as a society, trade a foundational physiological need (reproduction) for a lesser need such as status. It’s certainly worth reflection!
Reminds me of something I heard a stay-at-home mother say more than 40 years ago: "There is no glory in wiping applesauce off my baby's high chair." Thus the loss in status reported by this article has been a trend for a long time. It coincides with the decline in the fear of God in America, for with the loss of the fear of God comes the loss of many other good and wonderful things.
I’m a stay at home mom who was born in the downtown area of a liberal city… it feels like punk rock rebellion these days to be a sahm, especially a sahm who isn’t trying to start some coaching side hustle.
Keep it up. It’s a noble mission, and you’re fighting against the tides of history, which takes real strength.
That’s right I was always very proud to say that I was a FULL TIME mom.
Yes, it triggers them when you say full-time mom because for them being a mom is third or fourth on the list
Oh yes and as Hillary said”what am I supposed to do...stag at home and bake cookies?” the condescention prevailed upon motherhood has been palpable, especially in Democratic circles.
Somebody needs to bake some cookies.
I mean what have they accomplished?
Agree! The stay-at-home-mom is today’s “strong, independent woman” who knows what she wants- a happy family and a better society!
Though I now live near an area with a lot of Catholic families among whom it is totally normal and high-status to be a stay-at-home mom and have at least four or five children. I will say that this is a pretty wealthy area and most of these families are very healthy and good-looking too. It’s kind of the mega-wealthy effect you talked about, brought down one rung of the social ladder.
What I see is these women can handle the “low status” of modern motherhood better because they have a strong social network as well other status items (nice vehicles, clothing, schools, health clubs), but mostly they believe that the Lord sees their work and sacrifices and will reward them for it. I think the men are proud to have beautiful wives, children, and community and are willing to work very hard for them!
One thing I've noticed on social media is that many Catholics (and other Christians) increasingly include the number of children they have in their bio, as a kind of status marker. Very encouraging!
Never realised before that I found it impressive for that very reason. Fantastic.
Love it--too late for me--but love it for the next generation! My two (of three) married daughters have 3 and 4 children.
100%
We've moved out to the country as have many in Texas. Away from Houston, Dallas etc. We see a great number of people following us from the hustle of the big cities. Since fertility is a bit higher in rural communities, Should we expect a tick up in fertility with this movement? Hmmm something to think about.
This happens each generation. I would say illness and stress are at play in the West.
But moving out and becoming self-reliant. Huge plus whether you make more babies or not.
It used to be almost a universally American thing.
I’m curious , what area is this ?
I'm a STAH mom in a suburb outside a liberal city ... I've found that the working moms I know or have randomly talked to are more likely to wish they could STAH or only work part-time than to think less of me for choosing to do so. Finances are a barrier. It's expensive to live here and wages aren't particularly high, even in many traditionally "good" jobs. Lack of part-time jobs available too, especially in female-dominated careers. Most nurses I know want to only work half time to 80%, even the ones who AREN'T moms (yet).
The issue is that there's a discrepancy between what people claim to want and what their practices reveal, so we can't entirely base our understanding of the dynamics at play on what we hear. A majority of people claim to want children, but don't have a significant number even when their wealth allows them to.
That's me. My fourth child will forever remain in the ether. But I'm in one of those religious communities where everyone has a fourth child, and I keenly feel substandard.
The truth is -- and most fertility articles ignore this -- but having children is really not fun at all. When children are the default (as in Orthodox Judaism, Niger, and the Amish communities) then you need to have a reason to stop having them. When birth control is the default (as it is for middle class western women) you need to have a reason to choose the misery of an infant.
I love my three kids, but every time they take another step toward maturity I celebrate it and find it harder and harder to imagine stepping back into sleepless nights and diapers. It would be opting in for depression and torture and marital strife. Nope -- I'm not choosing that.
Maybe the real reason the uber-wealthy have so many children is because they can hire so much domestic labor they barely feel the pain.
You have to sacrifice. You cannot have packages coming in every day from Amazon.
Do you know in 1968 there were no storage outlets ?
You know there are millions today because Americans have filled their homes and garages with so much crap. They don’t use. They have to put it in storage on top of it.
But they have to work full-time both of them so that they can put food on the table, right?!?
Give me a break!! my family made it on a shoestring budget and the kids had everything they wanted. we didn’t go out to eat all the time and when we did, it was McDonald’s or Friendly’s but we made it work.
So easily that I really don’t understand the problem except for people just want to have money in their pocket all the time and be able to send away for crap. They don’t need anytime they want.
I think many middle class people consider it a "need" to give their kids the greased rails of a privileged upbringing. Starting with a Montessori enrichment playgroup up through travel sports, those are very expensive "needs" that lead to the high-status college mentioned in the article.
Indeed: "need" versus "want".
Have you studied how messed up modern women are? And fat? Testosterone is down to some degree because of fat.
What is it doing to women?
Yes, this is very true. I think the whole "Society looks down on SAHM's!!!" thing is vastly overstated. Most women would rather stay home, and no one looks down on them - rather, it is viewed as the ideal that too many people can no longer afford but would do if they could.
But… financial incentives don’t increase birth rates. Most sahms I know irl are not rich suburban Trad Caths, they are women who realized that having kids with a man who wants them and who takes care of you FEELS GOOD. And these women have enough risk tolerance to go for it and enough faith to believe it will work out. And are ok with not being high status. Religion can help with that, for sure, but also can having a set.
My first friend from college to become a sahm worked as a waitress, married a good guy in a band who fixed car washes. 20 years later they have three kids, he works at the cable company making 70k and good benefits. She homeschools. They are part of a farm share. Her oldest is going to Notre Dame on a fencing scholarship! They could cross the country year round for tournaments bc she homeschools. They would camp and stay in cheap air bnbs to pursue this. They were always the poorest people at the tournaments. They aren’t religious at all. Her daughter did programs for free college classes for highschoolers and has enough college credits and is entering as a Sophomore. They are Bernie Sanders liberals who did the Dave Ramsey financial model without the religious part. They are HOMEOWNERS. (Another friend from that same college friend group has a PhD and works in tech, makes 200k+, has no children and is constantly complaining that she can’t afford to buy a house. Another friend from that group, actually my best friend who I adore who has high anxiety, with a high paying job won’t have more kids because she can only afford private school and the best of everything for one child. )
Just saying, I think not being able to afford to stay home is a reality for poor women, and women who don’t have a reliable partner or a partner interested in them staying home and raising children. And women who don’t really want to take on all the sacrifices and downgrade in status that having less money entails. Which… fair. But, I don’t have one single sahm rich Catholic friend. All of the sahm I know chose it bc they got a taste of the pleasure of having babies with a truly committed partner, so they felt safe enough to take the risk. Not being able to afford it and being afraid you’re not able to afford it are different things. A lot of people are deathly afraid (some with a variety of good reasons) of being dependent on their mates.
Agree with your take. I've seen these conversations play out over and over -- women claiming they can't afford to stay home when they objectively can.
I think there are a few factors at play, one of them being our view of our baseline material needs has changed a lot -- and I believe part of what we *think* we need is actually status-based, even if we're not aware of it or won't admit to it. An example is I have no idea how working and middle class people afford the fairly new cars they drive, and I can only guess they're paying them off rather than purchasing outright.
Another factor is the fear you mentioned, which when drilled into a bit, I think will have status concerns involved as well. Dependence is seen as weakness. Even if you're in a society in which single motherhood would mean qualifying for welfare and free or cheap childcare (my country); even if you'll have family support; single motherhood is even lower status. I think there's a fear that allowing yourself to be dependent and not having job security is putting yourself at increased risk of being the dreaded poor single mother, even if objectively you'd be supported. (I'm not saying there aren't legitimate fears here, just that status is part of it and we probably don't like to admit it.)
"Another factor is the fear you mentioned, which when drilled into a bit, I think will have status concerns involved as well. Dependence is seen as weakness."
Feminist programming, potentially?
It's not feminist programming. I knew several women in my teens who lost their husbands quite suddenly after being a SAHM for years. The financial struggle after was traumatic. Their kids were all working as teens, not for pocket money, but to help pay the bills. I decided I would never ever put myself in that position. I don't think my husband is going to abandon me, I don't need to be a "strong independent woman" because that's the thing to do, but he could still drop dead at any time.
In part, but not all programming. There have always been bad husbands and there always will be. There are men that abandon their wives with children still at home, this may happen now more with no taboo on divorce, but it definitely happens. There are also men who do hit women. These things do happen and I agree that feminist programming increases fear to a disproportionate level, but I also think that having mothers leave the home has shown us as a society just how important they are, how important present fathers are, and intact families are, for the wellbeing and proper development of children and the maintenance of social fabric and a culture of care.
I WANT YOUR FRIEND TO WRITE ABOUT IT! PLEASE!
Dead serious. I've lost track of the number of articles I've read about "We have a big catholic homeschooling family, and so can you!" and "Of course you can afford kids! Just trust God!"... only to see at the end of the article that Dad is a doctor, or lawyer, or financial consultant or something. They can afford to go eat at Red Lobster with 8 kids in tow! At which point I'm inclined to flip them the bird or shout something vulgar at the screen.
I mean, I want that to be true. We went ahead and had the kids without consulting our financial prospects. Just this year, we finally broke through into the median income for our state (not for the country yet). We had a lot of help from relatives to get there... fifteen years into our marriage. Lived on boiled shoestrings and fairy tears for a while there.
But you never see the articles on "How we make it work on one totally median income-- and you can too!" And I'd really like to. I feel like there are a lot of us out here holding it together with baling wire and duct tape, knowing that it is 100% worth the sacrifice, but also... getting a little depressed sometimes when we look around our neighborhood and don't see anybody else even trying.
In our culture, intelligent people who care about their kids' education... and voluntarily accept a lower tax bracket to raise their own kids... there's no cultural slot for that. I finally understand why people spend such absurd money to live in a good neighborhood. Ours is *affordable*.
Nothing's wrong with that. We are doing the right thing for our kids. It's just that the payoff is still years away, when our kids reach adulthood, and it's not financial in nature. And it'd be nice if there were more encouragement and advice out there for us, instead of just rich people being like "Oh, yeah, everybody can afford this! God will bless you if you just trust Him!" which sounds suspiciously Prosperity-Gospel-ish. Trust God and marry a med student, maybe... (wee little eyeroll there).
We need a way to reach out and be visible to each other, those of us who aren't rich and are doing it anyway. Taking the financial hit because our kids are worth it.
I think a lot of online trad stuff is not representative of what most families with sahm look like. “Trad” as a label didn’t exist until like two years ago. I am in my forties. I just called myself a mom. There were sahm before the internet and before all these memes and before the word “based”. And there wasn’t so much ideology attached to it. I get that people need meaning and structure and I am definitely in my post liberal era, but a lot of the trad stuff comes across to me as performative and tricky.
I don't know if it's performative. I think... it's just that people who live on an upper-middle-class income don't actually know anybody who lives on a working-class income, and they simply aren't aware of us. Like we don't exist. And they seem to be the ones writing all the lifestyle blogs. Not to pick on her, but take someone like Leila Lawler, who writes "Like Mother Like Daughter". Beautiful family, a lot of actually-sound advice on homeschooling and housekeeping and stuff... but also, giant old farmhouse, slate countertops, and a bagful of assumptions that only apply to people in her income bracket. I freely admit I see that, and any thought I had of putting myself out there gets shelved. I'm not up to snuff.
I think the mere fact of "lifestyle" media like that kind of damps down people like us getting out there and making connections with each other, because we see that and we're like "well... nobody wants to see my scuffed-linoleum last-update-in-the-70s rental-house kitchen." But that also makes us feel like... maybe we're the only ones, you know? We're thin on the ground, and quiet online. Everybody else who lives on my street is here because they make poor life choices and can't afford anything better, not because they decided to forgo a second income for the sake of their kids.
So, looking around and seeing only... shiny lifestyle blogs by women with rich husbands, it's easy to wonder, just, are we doing it wrong? Are we freaks? Did we miss the fine print in the manual that said "only for people with a household income over $100k"? No, I think we just don't want to stick our heads out and be compared to the slate-countertop moms. Bad enough when it's just your MIL telling you that you're being irresponsible and you need a career and a vasectomy. No need to invite the whole world to do likewise.
I was that sahm ( no acronym existed then) 1978-2001.
I will tell her!!! She does homeschool. She lives in a middle class enclave of a bigger poor neighborhood. The schools are awful. She homeschools and a lot of her neighbors do too.
I can relate! One of the reasons we're doing what we are doing is... even if I'd kept working, we *still* wouldn't have been able to afford a good school district. The only way my kids were getting even an OK education is if we did it ourselves. No other options really. They're doing well, and I'm so glad we did! But dang it's lonely sometimes.
Dave Ramsey is definitely a good start when people would like to know what to do with their money.
He's great for getting out of debt and sticking to a budget.
When it comes to investment, he advocates buying real estate and becoming a landlord... and the surfeit of wannabe landlords right now is a huge part of what's distorting the market so that ordinary families on the bottom 60% of the income curve can no longer afford a home.
So when it comes to investing strategy... yeah, we've been house hunting for over two years now, and repeatedly getting elbowed out and outbid by investors offering cash-no-inspection. Would be delighted if Ramsey would STFU about REI.
I am a SAHM lucky to have a high earning spouse. I can guarantee that the status hit is real and extreme. I live in a gorgeous community. My spouse travels a lot. I purposely don’t work so that we can have flexibility with holidays and quality family time and I really am that busy managing our life with kids. When asked what I do, I’d rather tell people I have leprosy than admit my role. I’ve given up trying to explain myself.
It’s a shame that mothers who stay home, consider themselves lucky when it’s shouldn’t be a lucky thing to be able to take care of your own kid.
Try taking a baby from any other mother on the planet any creature. See what happens.
I knew when mothers were putting weeks old babies with strangers, crying that they could get anybody to do anything
Snakes, rats and tarantulas are better mothers than most American women
This is my experience. Most women I know would love to cut back hours or stop working altogether, but the cut in lifestyle is hard to countenance. Especially if you are living in an upper-middle class neighborhood. I was the kid who had a sahm but nothing else -- not the travel camp or the new fad item twice a year or the designer clothing. It isn't easy for anyone.
Weirdly, this isn't new. My grandfather made a secure, comfortable income back in the 50s. Grandmother did the SAHM thing, not because she wanted to but due to health problems. She felt guilty about it, because all the other neighborhood moms worked.
See my above comment anybody can stay home if they want.
You start out with the premise you will not put your kids with strangers when they are a little babies
Then you work from there to make it work. There is no reason for people to both work forty hours. The consumerism is disgusting.
Same same. We are outside of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Being a stay at home mom and homemaker is wild to some. And I laughed at your mention of the coaching side hustle, so exhausting!
I live in Minnesota and have family in that area. They very much look down on me and treat me differently since I am a SAHM and have chosen to be home with my kids over having a career.
Hey: me too in MN. It often feels like the only ones supporting my SAHM status are my husband, my daughter's, and people over 60.
Absolutely based, keep it up.
This made me chuckle because I’m a sahm mom who is launching a coaching side hustle (to a very specific demographic- high functioning adults diagnosed late in life as being neurodiverse) which was born from doing it for my own kids. I took being a sahm (and still do as my kids are teens) seriously and even though I’m educated and can find work I strongly believe my influence of being here nurturing them made the difference in them thriving versus not. One point I’d make is that I think many would like to be a sahm and money may not even be an issue but it’s not safe to because of the imbalance of power money holds. Society doesn’t support sahm care and doesn’t truly see it as a benefit. We see this by lack of support of the benefits having values brings, ie, the four main virtues like the Stoics discuss. We’ve become a transactional, what’s in it for me society where people simply are losing the understanding of doing the right thing simply because it’s the right thing to do which is another reason more devout sects probably have more children - they believe fulfillment comes from practicing genuine virtue. This was a really good article and I enjoyed it. Thank you.
Don’t let my hating discourage you!🙃
My husband called me a unicorn when we lived in DC on one income.
sahm! Now a way to express it! (Was that one 1978-2002).
We can all do our bit in raising the status of SAHM - next time you see a mum out and about with her kids, simply tell her what a valuable job she is doing. Someone took the time to say this to me as I was herding our 3 kids into the bakery queue last week and it lifted me up for the whole day. Such a refreshing change from the 'woah, you've got your hands full' and 'are they all yours' comments people usually make on our outings.
I make a point of always smiling and being friendly to families, especially in situations where they might be embarrassed (kids making noise in church or on flights). Good advice Victoria.
You are doing a good job, both my daughters are stay-at-home and one is home schooling three buys. I support this all the way.
How will those boys ever survive in future America if they don’t go to regular school and discover they’re actually women?
You are doing a great thing for society
Children can come out like Jeffrey Dahmer or mother Theresa and anything in between
To just make sure your kids come out right a heroic effort
You are doing the best job on earth
I was passionately waiting for this new piece and you did not disappoint. You dive deep into stuff that I was thinking about, yet was not able to bring it to words like you did.
1.) The success thing is important. My wife is a SAHM while I bring home lots of money. One thing I never did: to say "I make a lot of money". It is always "We have success" and "we make money". Because if she was working like me and not doing complementary work with the kids and the household, I couldn't concentrate on stuff like I can do now and we might have less money and more stress. All money is shared equally. If one of us wants to buy something expensive, we BOTH have to talk about it before.
2.) We have to normalize what "normal" is. I have the feeling that Instagram and related cultures ruined us. Nowadays, having/renting a small 2-bedroom appartment, owning a used Skoda and vacationing on a campground in ones own region is not "good enough" any more, yet this is what most people can afford. If people would be ok with that, especially in Europe where health care and schools are inexpensive, they could have more children. The same goes for having an only average looking wife/husband: it is not cool when you have thousands of Instagram-couples that look like models. Yet most women/men are simply average looking.
3.) Furthering the above: we have to be ok with being less "special". I see people being engaged and planning their wedding 2 years in the future "when they can afford it". Because it has to be grandiose, perfect. Those same people could simply get married NOW and have a small but hearty reception at their parents house and concentrate on their life, love and kids instead. I could come up with similar patterns in other areas of life, too.
4.) Love life/marriage/kids is a topic that every culture handles a bit differently and that is calibrated in a way quite sensible to changes. So when we let millions of people into our countries from completely different cultures, our equilibrium of the male/female relationship is disturbed (ok: this is not a factor in Korea, obviously, so take it with a grain of salt).
5.) The Stay-At-Home-Mom is an evil spawn of modernity the same way that the career-woman is and both are about the same age. In the traditional household, most couples were working on the same thing all day long (with different areas of work, though). They would work "on the farm" (whereas maybe the male would be more concerned with wood chopping and similar physical demanding things and the female would be more concerned about food/kids). Together, they would be one. Today, this is different: wife and husband drive to work in different directions, earn their money completely separately while reuniting only in the evening for dinner and Netflix and then, after a few years, be wondering why they have nothing in common.
All excellent points. So important to not weaponize the 'breadwinner' status against your wife (otherwise she will naturally want to secure her own independent income to compete).
There is no “natural equilibrium” of male-female relations in any culture known to man. Constant push-pull in all societies.
No need to scapegoat immigrants to the West for Western social pathologies. The same pathologies covered in your comment.
European elites instituted no-fault divorce on both sides of the Atlantic, and then normalized fornication and divorce among the masses. New immigrants aren’t really to blame for mass secularization and social dislocation.
You and Jeff both make great points. The elites opened the door to normalize all the behaviors that erode fertility. But we can also say that legal and illegal immigration has been a problem too, if we want high-trust homogeneous societies. All the groups that Johann mentioned are isolated homogeneous islands away from the corrosive liberal and multicultural cesspools. Its foolish to expect the people of one tradition to feel at ease when their country is flooded with hordes of foreigners who whether equal, superior or inferior biologically are so antipodal in physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual makeup that harmonious coalescence will eventually be impossible as we see in most Western societies. I highly suggest reading "Bowling alone : the collapse and revival of the American community" by Robert D. Putnam
I was thinking about citing Putnam's later work in this piece but it was becoming too sprawling. Good rec.
I want to add:
we have to find ways to get along together once people are in the country. So I personally refrain from ever arguing against the foreign individual. Realistically and no matter what the Right might want, people will not move back. On a personal level, I see no problem with being good friends with immigrants.
But this doesn't mean we should close our eyes concerning the effects that mass migration has on a macro level. Mass migration was almost never a good thing and brings trouble for hundreds of years.
It is never "the immigrants" that are to blame, but our politicians who let them in without thinking about consequences first. So I'd agree that we are victim to our own pathologies, which is, for example, expressed in how we handle immigration.
And I want to disagree with your disagreement on a natural equilibrium. While of course the female/male relationship changes over the time, societies all develop certain rules and subtle behaviors to deal with the tension between the sexes.
For example, all western countries allow to have sexual relationships with any adult person. And it is ok for women to dress semi-nude and men are supposed not to grope them because of it. But, the unwritten rule still is: even a non-married couple usually expects the partner to be faithful for many years.
I found that people from countries with a very restricted sexual behavior think of "sexual freedom" differently than we do because they didn't slowly develop to the status quo we have now. Which is why, for example in discotheques, you suddenly have people from islamic countries NOT following the unwritten rules and getting everyone into trouble. Which in turn changes the behavior of all involved.
I'd say it's also the fault of buisnesses. By wanting to get as much money as possible they make work conditions (hard/exploitive work for shitty pay) that the locals don't want to take the job, but a desperate person from another country is willing to take it. Some buisnesses even transport the immigrants themselves, so that they would work for them.
Buisness search for cheap labour and usually immigrants provide that cheap labour. Thus buisnesses are interested in immigration.
That just means there is only Eternal Misery.
I do not know where you live in Europe, but where I live health care is rather good and available and for kids it is essentially free (in terms of: the parents pay, but by that the kids are covered). The statistics I have about infant mortality in France show no sign of a situation that worsens, so I‘d say: please check the data again.
Let’s embrace “homemaker” or even “housewife” and stop using “stay-at-home mom” to describe women who choose to prioritize home and family. Language matters in assigning or denying certain roles status.
A surprisingly good article on this topic from Time Magazine of all places - https://time.com/59807/stay-at-home-mothers/
Thanks for writing this piece, Johann!
Good advice, and I like the term homemaker.
That's what I tell people when they ask what I do. I'm a homemaker.
You might even go more modern/fancyer and say something like "household manager". It might even sound more "professional" and could even give some "status points" in the mind of others (as "manager" tends to have a higher status that a common worker).
I'm good with homemaker. I'm not a manager, even though I orchestrate the entire thing. From decor to meals to the scent and cleanliness of the home, My goal for two decades has been to create a shelter from the storm for our family. Home is where the heart is, it's also beautiful, nourishing, and loving. Not sure I need status points for that work, since it's also been beneficial to my own mental, spiritual, and physical health. As a 52 yo, status means nothing to me, love and health are what I'm banking on as I grow older.
Top tier.
This is what we write for various joint applications which require Wife's occupation.
Or to seem more "professional" - household manager.
I used to tell people I was the CEO, CTO, and CFO for a domestic company grossing $X. Usually took a moment before they figured out I was “the chief cook and bottle-washer” as my mother would say!
Me, too, I like the term "homemaker", as that is what she is, a maker of the home for Dad, Mom and children they make or adopt. HOME, what a wonderful place, or hope to be!
I like full-time mom because it triggers a lot of women they don’t like to be called part-time mom, which is the reality. a kid just got baked to death in his own car because neither the mother or the father top priority. It happens all the time.
This is a hard one. I’ve taken to telling people I’m the lead parent. Our society now requires so much justification for wanting to raise your kids and elevate your family life that I routinely obscure my language. I understand this only reinforces the crap place we are in but I’m just so tired of being made to feel like a sell out loser. By the way, I use to have a live in maid nanny in my former life and I gave it up so I could raise my kids myself. I was tired of the incursion in the most important and intimate part of my life. Making this decision also made me a pariah amongst my monied friends.
Monied friends are the most judgmental 🙄
Homemaker is the word. Let’s bring it back!
You will find your people. When I became a stay at home mom in 2018 after the birth of my first child is certainly brought about judgment from some others. I let them go, and have found in our new community (we left the city for a third ring suburb) a great community of others moms (many/most who stay home).
That's fantastic
This is so important. For the first ten years or so, I felt so alone-- didn't know any other homeschooling moms. Now I belong to a church where we are just one of like six homeschooling families with dedicated non-workforce moms and it feels so blessedly *normal* now.
Believe me, you are the one who’s going to have an excellent relationship with her children
I use that term now when I fill out forms and it asks for a title or profession.
I prefer "homeschooling mom" ;)
I have an alternate hypothesis which would use most if not all of the same evidence as yours about the status. It is that when children can be used for net financial gain you'll get more of them and when they are a net financial loss you'll get less of them.
The central difference in the two hypothesis is this line:
"If striving for status is causing people to forgo having children, we would conversely expect to see those people who have less reason to strive to have more children. To denote this new group, I will use the term ‘status secure’"
In my opinion status tends to be a lagging indicator for some other factor, whether it be wealth or fame or something. We already see the status of the college degree degrading rapidly as it no longer confers wealth like it used to. It also has some oddities with your thesis since the ultra-status don't have ultra amounts of kids. A random nobody ghetto mom has more kids than Bill Gates and Elon Musk combined, which seems a major outlier needing some explanation. I think that the 'if more kids = more money you get more kids' fills it in.
Some data supporting the thesis about kids financial impact being important:
•Welfare families get more money per kid and they have more fertility
•Amish people can engage their kids in productive farm labor, just like we all used to, and they have more fertility. Historically kids used to be a net-money-generator for the family and the current costly-kids is an aberration.
•In the West people talk about kids exclusively in 'how much they will cost'. https://shorturl.at/j06rM "The report’s conclusion is that a middle-income family of four is expected to pay $233,610 per child from birth to age 18." Presumably in ye olden days, or in modern Somalia, a child is a net gain rather than a net drain. It's the difference between owning a liability vs. owning an asset. A child who only drains money makes you second guess getting more while a child who prints money makes you want more and more.
Re: South Korea
•https://shorturl.at/yanzI "South Korea most expensive country in world to raise kids"
•https://shorturl.at/O2dYn "Child labor is prohibited in Korea. According to the Labor Standards Act, children 15 or older can be employed for paid labor. Approximately 7.7% of children between the ages of 15~19 participate in economic activities. Children spend an average of 18 minutes a day on household chores. Parents’ expectation for children to participate in household chores is not high. This expectation does not greatly vary by child gender"
To contrast Re: Somalia
•Fertility rate: "6.31 births per woman (2021)"
•https://shorturl.at/LP0O8 "Children in Somalia are subjected to the worst forms of child labor, including in armed conflict."
Data that you have that fits this thesis too:
•Orthodox jews are major welfare queens, so more kids = more free shekels. There are many examples but even Israel considers them leeches. Here's a western example https://shorturl.at/1ElTK "Raids in New Jersey town target ultra-Orthodox Jews accused of welfare fraud"
•Amish are allowed to engage children in productive labor and they are a net benefit. "The Amish community has exemptions to federal child labor laws that allow children to work as apprentices in traditional industries after completing their formal education"
•Money can get status, so more kids = more money = more status.
•For celebrities and the ultra elite, more kids does not equal more money because of how they are rich, and so they don't have them. Contrast that to ye olden royalty where more kids = can take over more land or can marry them off to foreign royals and they made more.
•Urbanization and white collar service work tends to mean children become a cost, while rural life tends to mean children become a gain.
So in conclusion I think that children as asset vs liability is a stronger cause of fertility rates.
This is a great point.
I think the biggest specific economic factor driving down birthrates is the rise of financialization and particularly government-funded pensions and elder care. Before those programs, the quality of your old-age care depended on the number and quality of your children and grandchildren. Absent that, it was charity, a miserable poorhouse, or dying on the street. That makes having kids not so much a source of cheap labor for a few years, but your best, and indeed only, retirement plan.
My parents were Amish, so I have more insight into Amish culture and the factors behind their fertility rate than most people are able to get. The status factors the author describes definitely play a big role. But to add to your economic point, the Amish have an exemption from Social Security. They don't pay into it, and aren't eligible to collect it. They requested the exemption because they consider it the family's responsibility to care for their elderly parents, with help from the community in the rare circumstances where the immediate family isn't able to do so.
That provides the strongest economic incentive to high fertility, even more than the cheap labor. That's definitely a factor though. Income earned by Amish teenagers typically goes to their parents until they get married or turn 21, whichever comes first. So that's an incentive both to have more kids, and for the young people to get married and start their own family as early as possible.
Fascinating insights! Didn't know this about SS / sending money to family when young
All the more reason to have as many kids as you can. Social Security and the State Pension is not going to be there for Millennials and Zoomers.
This is a useful framing, and interwoven with my own thesis since there's a strong correlation between wealth and status. Many good points.
However, I maintain the primacy of status since:
1) If people have to choose between wealth and status they will choose status (many studies on this and fairly broadly accepted, ie. people choose college even when it makes no financial sense, will choose more prestigious job titles over pay rises, and will irrationally avoid well-paid but low-status working class jobs).
2) This is reflected in the studies I cite, with Georgia showing the strongest fertility deviation in the West (broadly construed), entirely caused by status and not economic factors.
From another comment, put here for convenience, "It's problematic to base analysis on underclass behavior because their behavior is irrational in many domains due to lower intelligence and higher social/personal dysfunction. Many aren't capable of strategic family planning."
Estimates of the US that are considered "lower class" range from 29%-45%. That's not an insignificant amount of the population. To show two handy charts see the following:
https://shorturl.at/5N5Ll [Birthrate by family income]
https://shorturl.at/YOPBi [Birthrate by poverty level]
The federal poverty level, which is where you get the welfare gibs, fluctuates from $15k-$25k based on family size with $15k being if you are childless and alone and $25k when you get to 3 kids and such. The first chart shows the birthrate plateau and dropoff around that range.
The second chart is far more clear on the effect of poverty and fertility and, presumably, the strength of more welfare/money = more kids. Admittedly it's a more laborious task to break down if the true underclass is a lot of people or vanishingly few people but I hope you can forgive that considering the charts above. It's at least 11% population.
"Georgia showing the strongest fertility deviation in the West (broadly construed), entirely caused by status and not economic factors."
I quite enjoyed reading the Georgia article, thank you. However it's not very conclusive in dividing your argument from mine.
https://shorturl.at/5Yeti
"Georgia is the 2nd Cheapest Developed Country in the World to Raise a Family"
So while South Korea which has the lowest fertility has the most expensive child rearing, Georgia is very low on the child rearing cost scale with a coupled high fertility. The second lowest cost in the developed world.
https://shorturl.at/GB7pz [The UNICF report on Georgia]
Checking in on their child labor laws, which I use as a loose proxy of if children can be used to make money for the family, "In this chapter, the main findings of the practical research and present respondents’ opinions will be reviewed together with experiences relating to child labour. The problems raised during survey indicate that children in Georgia often have to perform work that is inappropriate for their age or development, dangerous to their health, which violates their best interests and individual needs.
The survey made it clear that in cases of involuntary child labour, the responsible state agencies do not have an effective mechanism to tackle this issue and achieve positive results; the pandemic has made it even more challenging to meet the needs of families living in poverty; the risks of child labour have been further increased."
Now, I also checked in on the political system and going-ons in Georgia to see what else was happening around 2008 with the Orthodox request for children and hoo boy, it's a real shit storm over there. The following are quoted from Wikipedia here and there:
•"Georgian wine has been a contentious issue in recent relationships with Russia. Political tensions with Russia have contributed to the 2006 Russian embargo of Georgian wine, Russia claimed Georgia produced counterfeit wine. It was an "official" reason, but the instability of economic relations with Russia is well known, as they use the economic ties for political purposes."
•"In 2007, a series of anti-government protests took place across Georgia. The demonstrations peaked on 2 November 2007, when 40,000–50,000[1] rallied in downtown Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia.[2] People protested against the allegedly corrupt government of president Mikheil Saakashvili."
•"On 8 November 2007, President Saakashvili announced a compromise solution to hold an early presidential election for 5 January 2008. He also proposed to hold a referendum in parallel to snap presidential elections about when to hold parliamentary polls – in spring as pushed for by the opposition parties, or in late 2008.[5] It is said to have been the worst political crisis in Georgia since the Rose Revolution in 2003 that brought Saakashvili's government to power in the first place"
•"The Open Society Institute (OSI), funded by George Soros, supported Mikheil Saakashvili and a network of pro-democratic organizations."
•"The August 2008 Russo-Georgian War, also known as the Russian invasion of Georgia,[note 3] was a war waged against Georgia by the Russian Federation and the Russian-backed separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The fighting took place in the strategically important South Caucasus region. It is regarded as the first European war of the 21st century"
•"Opposition parties have accused Saakashvili of concentrating power to himself, using riot police to crush opposition rallies in 2007 and for the disaster of the 2008 South Ossetia war. "I don't think that it should be a surprise that after we lost 20% of Georgian territory and have no democracy in the country, we are asking for the resignation of the president," opposition leader Nino Burjanadze said"
So you have a George Soros color revolution government, wars, a war they lost, protests, economic embargos at a minimum AND they're next to Russia and Ukraine. I am so unfamiliar with Georgia beyond this initial look and there is so much going on over there, especially in that timeframe around 2008, that I can definitely say there's too much for me assess the impact of the Orthodox Church's request vs everything else. I do believe it's fair to say that there's more going on affecting fertility than only that request, though.
Edit: There was so much going on in Georgia that I even wondered if their increased fertility was in line with war = fertility above anything else. Combined with Somalia's high fertility, I even considered tossing out my own thesis about kids=money as well for violence=fertility! Luckily for me the pacifistic Amish were there to rescue my argument from turning into a recommendation for societal ultra violence to produce children.
"1) If people have to choose between wealth and status they will choose status (many studies on this and fairly broadly accepted, ie. people choose college even when it makes no financial sense, will choose more prestigious job titles over pay rises, and will irrationally avoid well-paid but low-status working class jobs)."
My reply to this is separate because it is a bit anecdotal. I think people don't have a choice but to get status over money. Think about the workplace and how pissed off people get when they are told, "So here's your new title and extra responsibilities...but you don't get any additional pay". It's a well known meme that this is both abuse and common in the US workplace.
In that reasoning the workplace has concluded that status is cheaper than money and pay raises. The employer would rather call you a vice president and give you $0 while it's probably safe to say the employee would rather get $1000 and no title chance, but the employee has no leverage and thus no choice.
I liked all the info about Georgia, and even the new hypothesis about “violence=fecundity”, but this comment about people not having a choice between status or money doesn’t hold water in my opinion.
Most likely economic, status, and violence incentives are all at play, and finding the extremes of each case will throw off any alternate theory
Oops forgot to reply to your comment about choices of status vs money. I always took it for granted that employees would rather have a raise over a promotion and that any promotion is only as useful as the raise it gets you when you hop companies, especially in the era where the $5 Subway sub is now $15, but let's see together:
•https://shorturl.at/KQEQe
"In the latest revealing survey of 4,510 office workers from several countries, seven in 10 respondents indicated that they'd pass up a promotion in favor of the opportunity to work from anywhere, any time."
Well that's certainly a new one to me. So time & freedom > status.
•https://shorturl.at/31IBv
"Promotions Preferred to Pay Raises, Professionals Say"
So one for status.
"Career advancement remains one of the strongest signs for salaried employees that they are appreciated and valued—and moving forward at work—although a promotion and pay raise would, assuredly, be even better. And if pay isn't increased eventually, promoted employees are likely to seek employment elsewhere."
Very interesting that the survey is for salaried workers. Incidentally from some site on Google the split between wagies and salaries are close, "According to the latest Labor Department Data, 82.3 million workers ages 16+ were paid at hourly rates. That's a whopping 58.1% of all workers in the US, while the other 41.9% makes up the rest of the full-time salaried workforce"
•https://shorturl.at/BHEut
"A recent survey conducted by HR consultancy Korn Ferry revealed that 55 percent of employees prefer a raise with no promotion. However, 45 percent of them are just fine with a new title and no salary bump."
One for raises.
"[...]bottlenecking, or having nowhere to go, were the biggest likely reasons respondents said they were passed over for a promotion. If passed over, 31 percent of respondents said that they would start searching for other job opportunities."
It's increasingly looking like promotions is more a proxy for not-being-fired-or-outsourced-soon rather than pure status, though admittedly both are linked. In the tumultuous Great Depression II we live in reliable employment is very valuable, I think, though that lends towards my monetary value over status value.
Now the cultural aspect, I'll post blurbs and questions of my choosing from a casual internet search which will be very familiar to any american:
•"DO YOU HAVE TO QUIT YOUR JOB TO GET A BIG RAISE?"
•"Considering a dry promotion? The pros and cons of promoting without a pay increase. Would you take on additional work without additional pay? Probably not."
•"Their model shows that it can be cheaper to motivate workers with career advancement rather than with cash. This is surprising, because one of the main reasons why workers value promotions is that they come with a pay bump. A key insight of Li, Powell, and Ke’s model is that the higher pay in higher positions serves two purposes: it motivates the higher-level employee to work hard to keep that job, and it motivates lower-level workers to work hard to eventually get that job."
•"my employer has stupid rules for raises when you get promoted"
•"Why Getting A Less Than Desirable Raise Can Actually Be A Good Thing"
•"How can I respectfully step down from a dry promotion after accepting 6 months ago?"
•"New Employee Is Being Paid More Than Me. Is That Legal?"
It's difficult because a confounding factor with money vs status is the hyperinflation we're living through. People are actually becoming financially stressed which means they want more money but just because a Big Mac suddenly jumped $10 doesn't mean I'm right it just means people are suddenly impoverished. I do think the rest of my points still stand, though.
Of course we’re talking in generalities, which is fine, but also there will be lots of variation among people in terms of motivations. I recommend, if you haven’t already read it, an endlessly fascinating series of articles on the three categories of corporate worker by Venkatesh Rao called “The Gervais Principle”: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/
Yes, you are correct that there are going to be many levers for an outcome as output-oriented as fertility. It's likely, imo, that things like economic/status/violence measures all have a minimum threshold of benefit for fertility where you get diminishing returns after. However I do think that the economic, which expanded from the gentleman with Amish parentage, would be the economic-human productivity-retirement factor is both the strongest lever and the one with the highest practical ceiling before diminishing returns.
>A random nobody ghetto mom has more kids than Bill Gates and Elon Musk combined, which seems a major outlier needing some explanation.<
You sure about that? Elon Musk has 11 kids.
We both know we're only one google search away from a woman with zero status and zero money that has 13+ kids. And while Elon has quite a few children, 12 according to Google, he is definitely not having kids consumerate with his status.
If the status theory were true then let's say average ghetto mom has 5 kids, would you say that Elon is only 2-3x the status level of the average ghetto mom? That would be about 10-15 kids. Or would his status imply that he should have Genghis Kahn levels of kids?
I was going to discuss this in the article but it got too lengthy. It's problematic to base analysis on underclass behavior because their behavior is irrational in many domains due to lower intelligence and higher social/personal dysfunction. Many aren't capable of strategic family planning.
In addition, they have their own subculture and "mimetic infrastructure" which is affected by the fact that their status is positively affected by having children via increased welfare etc.
I just found it strange that you chose Elon Musk as your example when he's one of the few people in his social strata who actually can compete with "ghetto moms" on fertility. I would be surprised if you could find many such people who *actually* have 13 kids, that is a lot to have when abortion is so accessible. It would probably be easier to find "ghetto" men who, like Musk, have accomplished that by going between multiple women.
Anyways, I imagine these hypothetical "ghetto" people could fairly be classified as a separate sub-culture, largely isolated from the broader liberal paradigm. Some black woman that dropped out of school in 6th grade and got pregnant for the first time at 14 is operating in a sphere where going off to college and getting some white-collar spreadsheet job might as well be something aliens from another planet do.
"I just found it strange that you chose Elon Musk as your example when he's one of the few people in his social strata who actually can compete with "ghetto moms" on fertility."
I didn't know anything about Musk when I said it, and 12 kids is quite good, but it's certainly not a number befitting one of the most famous men in the entirety of human history if status = kids. Especially when you consider that Elon is a man and can impregnate hundreds and he's getting numbers that are merely competitive with attractive poor black men, attractive poor muslims and so on.
Again, recall that the question is regarding if status = kids or something similar. Surely you can agree that the gulf of status between Elon Musk and an attractive poor black man is of such magnitude as to be nearly unmeasurable? If the thesis is true shouldn't this gulf show itself vis-a-vis children in some form in this extreme circumstance? Either Elon would have a magnitude more children, which is unlikely since the host's theory is that Elon is too important to even care, or the attractive black man or the black women* would have incredible status acquired from the children. Which is also not the case, what with the struggle with child support payments. That's not even including that Elon himself is on of the highest child-having members of his cohort.
Edit: Well, in any case, feel free to uphold Elon as the strongest steelman against my thesis or substitute him for the typical few-child elite. I am confident the argument holds up in either case.
Your average ghetto mom 2.x kids, where X is low to mid.
The relationship between wealth and fertility seems to follow an U-shape curve, with higher IFR in the lowest wealth population, so even if the search for status matters, the wealth will remain an important independent factor.
The effect between status and fertility should be bidirectional. Once above some level of incomes it is likely that status positively influence fertility. But how do fertility affect status? This is much more complex and depends a lot on the age. Even nowadays, there are very few things that affect more negatively the status than a teenager pregnancy. But on the other side of the age spectrum, after menopause, remaining childless also confers worse status
Yes, but. It is not just an attitude problem.
In the industrialized west, it's actually a *legal* problem these days. I traveled a bit in my youth, in the developing world, and made friends with whom I keep in touch. My kids are fantastically expensive compared to theirs. Nobody's going hungry or anything, but... they can load three kids and two parents onto a motorbike and roll off to visit grandma. I am legally required to have all of mine in a closed vehicle with seatbelts and car seats, AND they can only ride in the back. This is new. Sure it saves a few, but it also adds to the expense of having children. Even my parents were not subject to that expense. We (family of six) rode around in a sedan with one kid in the middle of the bench seat in front. Because that was before airbags could kill you. My grandma grew up with seven sisters. They slept three or four to a bed and lived in a house made of tarpaper. With an outhouse. You'd get a visit from social services and code enforcement if you did that now, but somehow they all grew up to be productive non-criminal members of society.
You know how nobody in the bottom 60% of the income curve can afford to buy a house these days? There are implications to that, which hardly anyone thinks about unless they are down here, making median-or-lower income, with kids. Where I live, fire regulations allow landlords to discriminate against you by family size. Let's say you have four little girls, and a baby who sleeps in a crib in your room. You've got two bunk beds, the bigger girls could all share a room, and so you only need a two-bedroom house, which you could afford to rent. But you will not be able to rent a two-bedroom house unless you have a relative who's a landlord. Why? Because landlords don't like kids. They dig holes and color on the walls. They can do as much damage as pets, but you can't charge extra for them. Fire safety rules here say that you don't have to rent to anyone if they've got more than *two people per bedroom* without reference to the size of the house or the age of the people. If, as a landlord, you don't want to rent a four-bedroom house to a large family, all you have to do is remove two closets (that's what makes it a bedroom, legally), and now you're renting a TWO bedroom house with a home office and a craft room, and you can limit occupancy to four-- and that can be four single adult roommates who are using the home office and craft room... as bedrooms. Family of seven? Good luck finding an affordable four-bedroom to rent. I'm not sure that exists.
Status is far from the only thing going into that equation.
I think you are right in what you say in this essay, and I can put in my direct experience with it. Briefly, I was raised Christian (Protestant), came from a family of 3 and always knew I wanted kids. However, I lived a pretty non-Christian lifestyle through most of my 20s, had a somewhat “cool” job, was around a lot of people with no kids and similarly cool jobs, went out a lot, etc. My husband and I married around 30 and started having kids right away. I had a sort of awakening about what was important, so I expected it, but when I quit my job as our first was born, I still totally felt the loss of status. It wasn’t that people were mean, maybe I get some teasing once in a while from friends, but it was more like feeling isolated, and being unable to have the same life or participate in conversations, plus offhand comments people would make (“I could NEVER stay home!!” Etc) Finding other moms helped a lot.
We now have 3, and have been homeschooling since the beginning. I had another awakening when meeting people and realized that the ones who had their heads on straight about all of this are the faithful Catholics. I converted several years ago and am part of a catholic homeschool co-op where it is normal and high status to have 6, 7, even 8 children.
Being around a cohesive, functional, smart group of people for whom part of status is having a lot of well bred children has really, really changed my perspective. I no longer think 7 kids is insane, and to have women around me homeschooling so many, often with a child in college or high school and another that’s a baby with everything in between- it’s amazing. It would be very hard to be in this for the long haul without that.
I think this will be an inspirational for many readers of this Substack. Thank you for sharing.
Your story is so similar to mine!
The status problem of motherhood seems to be complicated by mass immigration. In my area at least, daycare workers and private nannies are usually recent Hispanic arrivals (high-income families choose the au pair route). It reinforces a notion that childcare is low-paid immigrant work. Then, of course, there’s the “return on investment” problem for college-educated women: what did you blow that insane amount of tuition money on if not to earn?
If you don't have kids till 30 something, you're very unused to the running of a household.
I think a lot of women are afraid to be SAHM because they don't have the skills.
Yeah. It's one of those things you just have to dive into and learn on the job. Nothing can fully prepare you beforehand.
I think this is actually one of the ways that small family perpetuate themselves. I grew up the oldest of 5 children and I think that I'm much more prepared to run a household and handle children than friends of mine who are only kids or one of two. Large family, especially extended families where children help care for their cousins and niblings, are a much needed apprenticeship to running a household and raising children.
You learn as you go, though.
Imo a *good* liberal arts education (hard to come by, I know) is the best education for motherhood because you know a little about everything and it's the stuff that actually matters in life (philosophy, music, math/logic, etc). That's the stuff you pass to your kids. If you go to a college that purports to be job training, then, yeah, not much of a point.
College is a wonderful way to improve your mind, and meet appropriate men to date and potentially marry after graduation. That is a perfectly good "return on investment". Never again in most people's lives will they be surrounded by so many potentially suitable mates (unless someone chooses a college that is a very bad fit for them, I suppose.) Unfortunately, the skyrocketing cost of a college education in America, has prevented that from being reasonable for many people. It's really really unfortunate. People should be able to attend a state university without going into debt for decades.
I know someone a generation older than me who went to Yeshiva University's Stern College for Women, and she told me that at the time the saying was that to have a good life you need to get your letters in the right order : BA, MRS, MA
Brilliant insight.
There’s something to be said about the college/grad school-educated European heritage women relying on non-Euro nannies and daycare workers to take care of Euro heritage babies. Strange thing that is NOT commented on in polite company. I know too many Irish/Italian/WASP-American NYC moms with a Caribbean or Filipino nanny. So interesting this is NOT widely discussed!
I’m a SAHM that’s taken my kids to playgrounds all around Brooklyn and NYC when we lived there, and for the last 5 years around my town. I have seen many, many of these nannies, they are almost always foreign and often speak bad English. Often I was/am the only mom at a playground. The nannies are often either staring at their phones, or conversely, too restrictive. Lots of giving the kids devices too. The only nanny I’ve ever befriended is a live in, very long term one that considers herself part of the family. Just putting this in to say that nannies are not a good substitute from what I can see.
I’m a former software engineer turned SAHM. It was a choice my husband and I knew would reduce our household income by about 40% but would be well worth it for our children and family life. We’re firmly in the striver class, so this next part probably isn’t surprising but I was shocked when I found myself wanting to tell people that I “used to be a software engineer but now I’m a SAHM” when asked “what do you do?”. Like I had this need to let others know I am capable of being “high status” I just opted out. It was a struggle to contend with this ugly side of myself, to recognize what pride I had about my social position when my personal values are that being a SAHM is not only preferable in every way to being a normie tech slave but an amazing privilege. In other words: perhaps the low status is also coming from inside the house via SAHM self-deprecation. We should wear our SAHMness with smug self-congrats if only to combat that inner (and societal) voice that says “you’re not high status enough”.
That's fascinating - encouraging to hear such a direct reflection of my thesis. Thank you for commenting, and I think your point about the need to project confidence and pride is absolutely correct.
Exactly and then being told you are privileged for staying home after making status and financial sacrifices to do so.
I just wrote about this (well, shared a post I wrote years ago) -- about how so many women qualify their SAHM position in this way. Me formerly included. I totally agree with your "inside the house" analysis. Once I worked on my own stuff (pride, ego, YEP) I now embody confidence in my role, a totally different vibe
When I meet people and tell them that I raise and homeschool my three children, they then ask me what I used to do before I did that. I don't usually lead with that info because I didn't like my work before I had kids and don't consider it as part of my identity at all, but I can tell people are searching for some sort of information beyond my current status that they can use to categorize me or connect with me.
I agree that there's a lot of SAHM self-deprecation; it's easy to absorb from the wider society even if we genuinely believe that our chosen lifestyle is a good thing. When I sense some sort of negative judgment about my current stay at home or homeschooling status, I feel the social awkwardness that arises in the interaction very acutely. So it's very tempting to try to smooth over that mini-conflict by somehow trying to meet the other person at their negative perception instead of defiantly digging my heels and and having an unapologetic air of, "That's right! Deal with it!"
Reasonably valid hypothesis and structural argumentation - the piece would benefit from a more extensive treatment of alternate analyses fitting the same evidence. The strongest point, in my view, centers on the connection between intrinsic human needs (in this case, to be valued) and the behaviors that result from those needs. The weakest point lies in the proffered prescriptions meant to combat our society’s wrongheadedness concerning these issues. A few (12 and 13 in particular) would in fact require a distinct backtracking on the part of liberals - they would be considered existentially dangerous and fundamentally wrong. Similarly, any attempt at all to push women out of the educational and professional world as it has been established in the 20th (leading into the 21st) century would be perceived as (and, I suspect, in practicum lead to) an actual devaluation of women. Since, at this moment in time, our society values material professional achievement, physical dominance, and overt intellectual accolades, any action that obviates the separation of women from those opportunities is likely to backfired spectacularly. In more basic terms, I suspect the ship of society can’t be righted by feeding the latent misogyny/misandry of the Very Online via state action or inaction. We have a cultural problem and it can only be fixed culturally. Historically (at least so far as the past 200 years or so are concerned) this has to be led by women - not the male coded structures of government/financial force. If you want to raise the status of homemakers, women and their female coded structures have to be at the forefront of it.
This is not to say that men have no part in the undertaking (nor that I fundamentally disagree with every prescription suggested), but simply that the aim might be better served when looked at from a different starting point. Anecdotally, I am a “stay at home mom” of seven - I grow/raise a goodly portion of our food (down to the slaughtering and processing myself) and homeschool almost entirely on my own as my husband is out of town quite often. Yet, my female mentors from grad school (where I excelled) lament my absence from academia as being existentially limiting, and most of the males of my acquaintance treat me as if I’m incapable of tying my own shoes. If, as the right in America argues, women naturally desire children, the way to value a woman’s fertility is to, in everyday life, VALUE it. Treat them not as lesser individuals but grudgingly necessary wombs, but as honored, capable, wise, and strong helpmeets (in the truest understanding of the word by which Jehovah God describes himself). The desired end won’t be served or achieved by rants about feminism and women in general, legislating removal of women from the public sphere, or, similarly, women screaming at other women about their “internalized patriarchal oppression.” In truth, women have been infantilized (and infantilized themselves) during the modern era, and they must lead in their own (and society’s) maturation.
Indeed. My great grandma raised eleven children during the Great Depression. Grew vegetables, fished, gigged frogs, shot ducks, cooked possum, raised chickens, pigs, and a family cow. She did not go to college, but her children and grandchildren (and that's a lot of people!) revered her almost as a saint. Mother. I never met her but she loomed large in all my family's stories. Eleven kids and not a bad apple in the bunch. I remember them fondly.
Fast forward a few decades, and we have women in the family with masters' degrees, careers, even some high status jobs, as well as some who went the keep-house-and-raise-kids route. And not one of them has a place like Hers. Because what she did was heroic, and what the rest of us do is just living in the modern world, one way or another.
One wonders if the main problem isn't status, but rather the lack of hardship, the lack of epic occasions to rise to, challenges to overcome or fail.
I think the future will be full of such opportunities. Will we have the fortitude to take them?
This reminds me of the problems that have arisen from instilling democracy in countries that didn’t earn it for themselves. I used to conceive of Iraq, for example, as a battered wife, who looks for what’s familiar.
The question then in either case is: how do we help these people help themselves? I guess all we can do is think of incentives and areas in which we are complicit (and pray)
One issue I think is that being a good SAHM is harder than being an office drone.
You also can't hide it. If your a crappy SAHM all your loved ones will see it.
If you job consists of pointless meetings and fetch emails all people will see is your paycheck.
And while your average 30 year old woman has a lot of experience being an office drone, she probably doesn't even cook for herself and has no understanding of how to manage scarce time or discipline a child.
True. It involves real pressure and sacrifice - two things we've become allergic to in the 'century of the self'
To push back, there must be an advantage to working with people whom you love and who love you (as SAHM).
Though it is true that in a corporate bureaucracy it’s possible to slip through the cracks. That this may appeal to some is a disturbing thought
I work for a big corporation, at a modest blue collar level. Most of the roles I've had are not as demanding as what my wife does with our children.
I think the "slipping through the cracks" isn't necessarily something people consciously look for, but the whole point of a corporate office wirner is that you just show up and they assign you a laptop, some meetings, and a few reports. You do what you're told and get the check you were promised. As a parent, there is no employee manual, there's no boss to push decisions to, etc. You have to decide what to do all day, and evaluate your performance. For lots of middle class people, they never have to do that in a job. So people with much lower agency can go to work and do better than they would as a full time homemaker.
So true. For years after I left the workforce, I fantasized about just... going back to work. Because it was cleaner and easier. Nobody cried or expected me to clean up poop or vomit. I didn't have to manage other people or be creative or come up with a budget. Somebody could just tell me what to do, and I could do it, and then I could go home. I still get a twinge of nostalgia for it now and then.
I just had my third baby last week. A nurse told me “you poor thing.” Like, I’m not the one going home to an empty apartment every night? It was a weird exchange and reinforced how, even in chit chat, our culture negates childbearing as something meaningful.
Totally. You poor thing, can we help you figure out birth control? So unbelievably condescending
Me: idk I did it on purpose 🤣
Haha! When we got married, I informed my husband that three was the *minimum* number of kids we could have, because... what if we were bad parents??? I was one of four, and can report: singletons are spoiled and lonely, and they are totally screwed if their parents are not quite up to snuff. If you have only two the sibling rivalry can get really out of hand. Three is the bare minimum to break up the rivalry dynamic, and after that, every additional kid is a bonus, and gives siblings a bigger built-in social/safety net when they become adults. As an adult, my siblings are some of the most important people in my life! Why would I deprive my kids of that?
No, once you have *any* kids at all, you may as well have three or more, because siblings are one of the greatest gifts you can give a child. The only regret I have about my three is that we couldn't give them *more* siblings (medical reasons. Sigh). They are all pretty great, though.
Next time someone gives you the nosey-parker attitude, I dare you to ask them which one they think you should get rid of ;)
Omg I get this like, every other day. 🙄
I remember the year I made my parents a laughingstock in the extended family. I was always the academic star of all of the cousins. My aunt hated hearing about my achievements. I was the one with the STEM graduate degree and a promising software engineering career. The year I became SAHM, my mother told me my aunt looked unusually gleeful. Her children, though not as “accomplished” (and still without a stable career), are now far above me in status. At least they HAD jobs. She finally won the sister in law pissing contest. That is, until I had multiple children in rapid succession and she still without grandchildren despite having three kids, and my mother just having me 🤷🏻♀️ She went from, “my son’s high status, PhD girlfriend is not good enough” to “just marry anyone and give me grandchildren”.
Having a family is low-status when you're young but potentially high-status when you're older. When my five children were very young people treated me like a welfare mom. We were well-off and I had my doctorate before I turned 30, but strangers in the grocery store just assume you're dumb and poor if you have kids when you're young.
Humans have a pecking order, just like chickens. Younger women who have small children are just about at the bottom of that pecking order. It's a biological thing. You wouldn't believe the comments and nasty things people say to you when you're pregnant or in public with very small children. Things they wouldn't dare say in front of your husband. There is something obviously vulnerable and fragile in a young mother. Weak people in particular love to feel powerful, so they peck and scratch at heavily pregnant women, or women with toddlers and babies in tow. It was mostly older people who harassed me when my kids were young. The men would comment on my breasts or my fertility in crass ways, and the women would be cruel and discouraging. Hateful.
As soon as my oldest was 12 or 13, however, there was a noticeable change in the pecking order. All of the sudden people were more respectful--I was treated more like a community leader and a matriarch. I think it is actually high-status to be a mother of many children, even outside of religious groups. The status just comes later, after it's clear to people that you've done a good job raising your family, and you've kept your marriage together.
This tracks totally for me and is super insightful
Fascinating perspective!! Thanks for sharing this.
As you've alluded to, you ostensibly go from irresponsible to respectable. Definitely keeping that in my back pocket. Thank you.
I agree about status being important for fertility. But it's also a significant issue that being a stay-at-home mom is profoundly lonely, especially in an atomized society where children are generally looked down upon, and where many mothers are isolated from their family of origin (often due to the need of the husband to move far or frequently for the job that allows her to stay at home). The loneliest I've ever been was when we had one, two, then three little kids. And I am a highly energetic, active woman who works hard to build community wherever I am. It's still incredibly difficult. We crossed the threshold, and are on the way to five kids, and things are significantly easier. But I'm convinced that a lot of women stop at one or two babies because of how difficult it is to build/find community for those first few years of life, before the babies are big enough to be part of a school or other community. Having a job where you get to engage with other adults, drive where and when you want, meet up with friends, and then turning into a homebound person is very difficult, especially for women who are not introverted. (Car seats and suburban driving hell are also a big part of the social isolation many women experience when they have children.)
Yes, I very much sympathize with these points - we went through the same stage of isolation after our first children. Trying our best to help those that follow us in our community.
Bingo!
Being at home with infants and toddlers suuuuuucks. And nobody warns you about that. That because we live in a car culture, everything's far away, and you can't just walk there. Wanna go somewhere? OK, just pack some healthy snacks, diapers, emergency changes of clothes for four people, a stroller that weighs 35 pounds, drinks, something to do in the car, and then wrangle three small children into car seats that they hate, drive somewhere, try to do something and socialize with other adults (bonus points if you can talk about anything that doesn't involve poop), and then still get home by naptime so everybody doesn't have a screaming meltdown.
Yeah, my youngest is five now, and I do not miss that stage. At all. Even though they were super cute.
Meanwhile, the family I stayed with in rural SE Asia in my youth... seemed to have dozens of aunts, cousins, and godparents in walking distance, constantly in and out of each other's houses, and always some random 12-yo girl to hand the baby to, when you need to get stuff done, and always a couple of relatives you can draft to help with big jobs. Laundry is social. Cleaning floors is social. Cooking is social. Shopping is social. When I had to overnight in the city on my way back to the airport, they would not let me sleep at a hotel alone. It would be too scary, they explained. Ghosts. I don't think any of them had ever slept in a room alone before-- the idea was too awful to contemplate. Social isolation is very American, and it isn't healthy.
Glad to hear that it gets easier with more kids. I'm pregnant with my fourth and my husband works away and it is so so lonely for me! Even though I have friends and contacts it is so hard to arrange any kind of get together because of young children's nap needs and potty training and all the rest of it. I keep telling myself that it must get easier as they get older and the older ones are less needy and can buckle their own carseats and fetch their own snacks and drinks but boy is it ever tough right now
I've seen Feminists in the wild raise this very point. Doesn't get spoken about enough in this discourse and we're giving them free points in the process.
I can’t help but think of how the foundation for all of this to thrive is pride. Without pride (the most ancient defect), the status engine would have no fuel. Something is fundamentally broken when we, as a society, trade a foundational physiological need (reproduction) for a lesser need such as status. It’s certainly worth reflection!
Reminds me of something I heard a stay-at-home mother say more than 40 years ago: "There is no glory in wiping applesauce off my baby's high chair." Thus the loss in status reported by this article has been a trend for a long time. It coincides with the decline in the fear of God in America, for with the loss of the fear of God comes the loss of many other good and wonderful things.