Glorification of Motherhood
A significant driver behind plummeting birth rates around the world involves pop cultures’ glorification of young, single life with lots of sex, travel, and freedom. To a great extent, female figures in modern pop culture cease to be figures worthy of adoration once they have children. It makes a lot of sense that soft cultures evolved this propensity.
Recall that while hard cultures need to increase the fitness of the individual to survive, pop cultures only need to hijack already-living people and convert them. Given every individual’s evolutionary drive to breed, the average person will pay more attention to a young, single male or female who is sexually available than one with kids. So, if you are trying to sell something or get someone’s attention, you are usually better off showcasing young, single, sexualized individuals—however, if a culture is to survive through many generations, it needs to subvert this script.
If a young girl grows up and sees her mom and people like her overburdened, unloved, and ignored by society, why would she choose to have kids herself? Why would she aspire to that? While we can’t fix this at the societal level, we can address this problem with intentionally-designed cultures. If you want to create a durable culture for your family and inspire your children to have kids of their own, one of the best things you can do is ensure you have a strong relationship with your spouse.
For our family, this means ensuring daughters see their mothers glorified, appreciated, and even deified within family culture for the sacrifices they make while also demonstrating that none of those sacrifices require foregoing a career or stepping back from public life. Moreover, setting this example for sons increases the odds that they do the same for their wives and have granddaughters who contextualize prolific motherhood as a sign of uniquely high achievement instead of great sacrifice.
In our House, having kids is just part of the yearly routine. While Simone is appreciated for it, she never hints that it would be justified for her to use pregnancy or childbirth as an excuse to step back from work. The productive glorification of motherhood requires never giving in to society’s tendency to conflate gratitude and approval with justification to winge, whine, indulge, or lean out. For example, nothing about being pregnant or a mother makes women fat, other than that society has built norms that allow for indulgence as a form of gratitude. That it’s “normal” for women to not return to their pre-pregnancy weights is one of those lies society spreads which is objectively not true.[[100]](#_ftn100)
**Toxic gratitude—the type that encourages women to become indolent, selfish, and entitled when pregnant—often has the opposite of the intended effect, causing mothers who let themselves go to feel worse about their path to motherhood, which in turn leads their daughters to believe that motherhood entails a loss of beauty, grace, and personal efficacy.** Mothers whose partners wait on them hand and foot and give in to their every demand throughout their pregnancies almost never end up having a lot of kids whereas women who learn to treat pregnancy as a normal routine have a much easier time with it. We suspect this is part of that phenomenon where if you tell someone something is going to be painful, they will literally feel more pain (to the extent that you can even see that heightened perception of pain show up in fMRI scans—this is not just an illusion).[[101]](#_ftn101) If you constantly tell someone pregnancy is this huge, difficult thing, it becomes just that.
While I, Malcolm, am as grateful as a person could be for what Simone goes through to produce the kids we hope to have, I show my gratitude by working my hardest to move us toward our shared goals and treating her with respect—not by walking on eggshells around her and acting as though she is an invalid. We are so intense about this that it has caused some problems with one of our company’s board of directors, as they keep wanting Simone to take maternity leave and don’t understand why we are so culturally against the idea.
Note: Just as it is important to avoid coddling mothers in a way that makes normal pregnancy seem herculean and trying, it is equally important to not regard harrowing attempts to conceive, trying pregnancies, and difficult delivery experiences as excuses to stop having kids. We, personally, have had troubles with fertility, complicated pregnancies, and far-from-ideal delivery experiences and seeing as fertility is declining with every generation, we expect others and our own descendants alike will encounter plenty of setbacks themselves. As such, we should regard these hardships as par for the course and not as justification to give up. The best way to do so is to lead by example, demonstrating to children that these challenges are a normal part of life.
Just as a strong culture will suffer if it only glorifies the young and sexy, it will also rot if it acts like a woman has pulled off some amazing miracle just by getting knocked up and having a kid. Mothers are celebrated for the dignity and intentionality with which they approach the challenges of gestation, childbirth, and childrearing—and for their levels of productivity above and beyond mere motherhood. This is not something that any narcissist with a functioning uterus can pull off.
Cultures need more than just strong relationships that glorify motherhood. Successful traditional cultures often have inbuilt mechanisms to shame individuals for proceeding down life paths that are unlikely to be fruitful—this is where the concept of an “old maid,” the unmarried 30-year-old woman, comes from, as well as the concept of the crazy cat lady (a woman who adopt pets as a means of artificially satisfying her instinct to care for children). Cultures that shame these outcomes lower their probability of occurring and thus enjoy a higher birth rate, which is why people from traditional backgrounds around the world often share disgust for such life paths.
As our House’s cultivar frames it: Humans start as individuals and evolve into something more as they escape the cycle of individual indulgence.
- People begin life trapped in the confines of a solitary identity
- Then form lifelong partnerships, evolving into a combined identity representing something greater than themselves
- Later they have kids, becoming a force that reaches into the future
- And finally, they die, casting off the remnants of their now-totally-unnecessary solitary selves and living on through their descendants and the lasting contributions they’ve made to their family unit
Individuals who stop early in this cycle fail to fully mature and become frozen in a child-like state—their development arrested in their cocoon of individuality.
We understand that pop culture would be horrified by the idea that individuality is something a person would be proud or honored to sacrifice. From our perspective, idolizing individuality, a separation from those around you, those that rely on you, seems deeply perverse.
I, Simone, was adamant about both being perpetually single and not having kids until I met Malcolm. He convinced me to change my mind on this subject not by pressuring me but by logically walking me through the value of relationships and family. Given my default perception that such life commitments were more about disempowerment than anything else, I am glad Malcolm clued me in. Nothing in my life felt more empowering than letting go of personal identity to become part of a team that I genuinely believed in. Nothing in my single life could have freed me more from my personal demons and caprices than having kids, who gave me bigger things to strive for. There’s an emptiness to pre-family life that many attribute to a lack of community, but from my experience, it’s a void that can easily be filled by family and a clear set of values.
As our philosophical ancestor Winwood Reade put it: “He who strives to subdue his evil passions—vile remnants of the old four-footed life—and who cultivates the social affections: he who endeavors to better his condition, and to make his children wiser and happier than himself; whatever may be his motives, he will not have lived in vain.”