A poll released on Wednesday (1/25/2023) by Pew Research Center found that 90% of parents “prioritize financial stability and job satisfaction” over marriage and family for their children. While not so surprising itself, it’s the finding that 30% of mothers and fathers responded that being a parent is the most important part of their identity, while 57% said that it’s one of the most important parts of their identity which makes one scratch their head. Why is it, as Time Magazine notes, that parents, who ostensibly feel parenthood is the most meaningful aspect of their lives, would rank other goods like financial stability and job satisfaction as more important for their children?
Failure to Pass on the Sources of Self
It seems that American parents, while ensuring their children are able to secure satisfying work and financial independence, may have contributed to the thoroughly modern attitude that traditional sources of the self – place, family, and community – matter less when it comes to identity than that which expresses a self-referential notion of authenticity. On the whole, it’s safe to say that most parents have good intentions when it comes to raising their children. However, it is also true that every person and every generation has its blind spots, and this generation of parents surveyed is no exception. Gen X’ers, Millennials, and Gen Z’ers, though quite different from one another, are all inheritors of the Enlightenment’s radical philosophical break with traditional religion and culture, as well as the massive changes wrought by Industrial Revolution on economic activity and family life. Furthermore, they are experiencing the radical tectonic shifts in culture and society due to rapid technological changes in the twentieth century – particularly the Sexual and Internet Revolutions. These more recent changes have further broken down traditional sources of meaning and connection, offering a build-your-own-adventure version of the self in exchange for what previously helped defined generations of people – the physical world and its realities, as well as nation, tribe, and family.
A Hedge Against One Type of Uncertainty
As Allen Sabey, a professor at the Family Institute at Northwestern University pointed out in Time, “parenting provides both joy and stress, but then considering the biggest parental worries of anxiety and depression, being economically stable and comfortable may be viewed as more likely to ease stress as adults.” The parents who prioritize these things for their children are at least dimly aware of the massive challenges their children and grandchildren might face, having personally experienced some of them already. While these parents have hedged against the economic insecurity likely to afflict their children as prices rise and jobs and housing grows scarce, they have not hedged against the universal effects of time and age to which humanity is always subject. University of Virginia professor and Director of the Institute for Family Studies Brad Wilcox notes that parents may be reinforcing the “broader shift away from family life…across the developed world,” where fewer children are being brought up by their mother and father in the company of siblings and cousins, under the watchful gaze of aunts, uncles, grandparents, and neighbors; where estrangements have become commonplace, particularly among the white middle and upper-middle classes; where loneliness and mental illness have become pressing public health crises in just a few short years; and elder demographics increasingly face death alone. In light of these cultural changes, Wilcox sees a need for parents to recognize the value of social priorities in addition to economic ones – placing “eulogy virtue” on a greater plane than “résumé virtue…and short-term career building.”
The Work of Family Life Today
So, to choose marriage and family today, as they were traditionally understood, means hedging against a future of deep demographic, cultural, and political instability, the effects of which we are only beginning to glimpse. It means rejecting principles that have become widely accepted in our time – namely that law and culture should defer to the supremacy of individual self-will; that our desires, sexual or otherwise, are what define us; that biology and physical reality, along with fundamental mathematical principles, are oppressive constructs. In marriage as in family life, man and woman learn quickly that these are not mere constructs, but brute facts of nature to which culture either does or does not adequately respond, and it is the work of a healthy marriage to take up the associated challenges as an assistance to both spouses in the crucial work of growing in virtue and loving truly. Moreover, it’s the work of family life to pass on humanity’s desire for the good and for community, for the benefit of the world. With fewer couples and families around to perform these crucial functions, less overall societal trust and fewer social supports to help parents raise a family, it is becoming more difficult for those families who wish to do the work well. However, the livelihood of future people ultimately depends upon our willingness to serve within the context of the family, and to rebuild the loss of human capital which worsens the state of society.
Marriage and Family: Sources of Renewal
Thankfully, as the UK-based writer Mary Harrington observes, there is hope yet for marriage and family in these uncertain times. In a thought-provoking essay for The Hedgehog Review, Harrington suggests that a postindustrial “blurring” of the boundaries between home and work might be the recipe to fostering “long-term solidarity” between spouses who work side by side to cultivate home as a place not of consumerism, but of real work and meaning-making. While she posits this possibility as a response to the industrial-feminist critique of so-called women’s work as “unacceptably in thrall to patriarchy,” Harrington’s counter also suggests a growing recognition among those who are pursuing marriage and family that dependence and vulnerability can be strengths. Despite the precariousness of the future, younger generations of parents are aware of these blurring boundaries and are using them to their advantage. A small but meaningful number of them are getting married for practical reasons in addition to love – out of a shared dedication to raising a family together, finding ways to cut back on the frills and embracing what’s most important, as well as rebuilding the types of communities upon which previous generations of parents relied. They are rejecting the build-your-own-adventure version of identity creation promulgated by society and social media, opting to embrace the brute realities of life as parents, and seeking to pass on a shared life which values eulogy virtue over résumé virtue. These are all hedges against the uncertain future which every generation must face, making room for what is truly human over what is truly temporary.
