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I think status, at the societal level, is a chicken and egg problem. I'll use a sort of related historical example.
Through the 1960s and maybe 1970s, if a family had a son decide to become a priest, there was a good chance it would be met with esteem in the community. An honorable decision informed by faith seen as something to be respected if not quite emulated (after all, we want grandkids). Flash forward to today, and outside of religious sub-communities, it's probably looked at as an extreme personal journey decision. "Oh, wow, the Johnson boy went to the seminary." Community pillar? Not really. Invited to speak at the High School? Definitely not. Probably awkwardly danced around at supermarket aisle run-ins.
Why the change? This one's pretty obvious. Religiosity in America has declined precipitously since the 1960s/1970s. The society level value (and, therefore, status) has evaporated. It's not longer a "worthwhile'' decision.
Maternity is different because it's never (well, I hope) going to decline by 30-40% in one or two generations. Even in PMC circles today that make a lot of noise about not having children for environmental reasons, a public pregnancy announcement is always met with excitement (side note: if the pregnancy isn't announced publicly, there's a decent chance it isn't going to come to term for one reason or another. That's a different post). It's never going to be "oh, wow, really?" weird to be a mother.
That being the case, I'd gesture at trying to status boost a lot of maternity adjacent things - kids, first of all. But also "homemaking" pursuits, I suppose. I think the fundamental tension, however, is between women-in-relation-to-children and women-in-their-own-right. Is it possible to applaud a woman for her personal and professional accomplishments? Sure! But is this done at the expense of praise for family and maternal pursuits? The kneejerk reaction may be "No, of course not! We can praise a woman for being an accomplished scientist and a Mom!" ... but if you walk through the incentives in a hyper-individualistic society, it gets complicated and uncomfortable. As a quick example - I bet people know the best player on their favor sports team immediately, but can they name the official captains? (There's a bit of a hack in that, in a lot of cases, these individuals are one in the same, but the point still stands).
If you want to raise the status of a role that is fundamentally non-individualistic, you have to raise the status of communal accomplishment as a category in a society. I have no idea how to begin doing that in the west today.
Not to be a mother, no, but in many circles, it already is to be a mother of more than two or at most three children. Several friends of mine have expressed frustration at the extremely negative reaction they received—even from family members!—when they announced they were expecting child four or five. Most of these friends also have stories of being scolded by strangers at Costco for being so stupid or selfish to have so many kids. I’m not so fortunate as to have so many kids myself, but I’ve repeatedly witnessed a bizarre resentment from even generally pro-natal folks when discussing these families.
When society looks so completely askance at anyone who has more than two kids, is it any wonder that we can’t keep the birth rate above replacement?
Thanks for this, it's a useful demonstration of revealed preference and attitudes in folks who will vocalize their support for "families" while demonstrating their true feelings later on.
These strangers are monstrous and evil.
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Yeah, what you described with the priest is clearly a vicious cycle. As the status of the priesthood goes down, fewer high status people become priests, making the priesthood even lower value, etc...
I think we've got the same thing with mothers, but in reverse. The best and brightest women tend to delay motherhood. So, if someone gets married and has kids at age 24, we wonder if there's something weird with her.
There is some hope. Among the very rich, having many children is a powerful status symbol, signalling as it does the wealth necessary to hire nannies and not need to work. But that's pretty hard to fake and far out of reach of the normies.
Sadly, a healthy amount of scorn for "cat ladies" and "wine aunts" may do what positive reinforcement cannot.
Yes but no but yes.
The Vance "cat ladies" comment was harshly received even by some of the most MAGA women in my social circle. My read is that it was seen as a general attack on women as opposed to the specific subcategory of women Vance meant to target. And this weaponized ambiguity will persist until women themselves decide to status boost / value re-orient. Again, I don't see how this happens without the equivalent of a modern day Women's Temperance League popping up. You can imagine what the popular response would be to that.
--- (EDIT) ---
Your comment also made me consider an interesting non-obvious culprit - teen pregnancy. Through the 80s and 90s, there was a major push to reduce teen pregnancy. This was a good idea as the correlation between teen motherhood and poor outcomes for the kids was pretty ironclad. I worry that that's extended in age range to the mid 20s.
As an intellectual exercise, how many women who do a typical four year college after high school are pregnant within 12 months of graduating? If you take out the selective sampling from explicitly Christian colleges, i'd wager that number rounds to zero.
Contrast this with one of my own grandmothers who dropped out of a state school after marrying my grandpa so that they could jumpstart the family. This was not at all seen as a mistake, but as a fortunate shortcut to her ultimate goal.
Pregnant = always good isn't quite the message you want to send for a lot of reasons, but planned pregnant at any age = always good might be.
I think a male near-equivalent of what Vance said about childless cat ladies would be if Walz literally said "the Republican party is run by a bunch of incels". Many Republican supporters would be fuming, maybe even more than about the whole "basket of deplorables" thing. People tend to get touchy when their reproductive success is criticized, or near-criticized.
They sure do. And men who publicly get touchy are simply labeled as "DOUBLE incel!"
Hasn't this been the messaging ("they're weird") of Harris-Walz since the convention? Funny how cleanly it maps to "When they do it, it's outrageous and wrong, when we do it, we're merely spittin' facts."
Well personally, I think it's the same thing no matter which side does it.
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Seeing Musk get called an "incel" was certainly one of the "weirdest" things I've seen, considering we're talking about a guy who has had
1112 children with 3 women.Words versus symbols, right?
More-babies-than-rockets Musk can be called an incel because he's weird, nerd techy (instead of cool San Francisco VC techy), dresses sort of schlubby sometimes, and dances weird (Wow, that clip is truly painful).
Just as there's nothing particularly feline centric about "cat ladies." Instead, it's about
symbolingsignalling a harsh, unattractive, bitter woman who is not only repulsive to men but unfriendly with other women.Incel is another evolutionary branch of nice guy or neckbeard. Cat lady is the descendant of marm, spinster, and witch.
The central thing about male inceldom is failure with women. Calling Musk an incel isn't a correct application of a literally-incorrect label, it's just plain ludicrous, and no amount of both-sidesing will change that.
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For me personally I imbibed the “pregnancy will ruin your life” message as a teen and wasn’t receptive to any counter programming for decades.
If your parents aren’t planting the seeds to make you desire a family, then the messaging you pick up elsewhere will dominate, and it’s almost all of the “pregnancy is a disaster” variety.
The post-college PMC corollary to this is _over_planning pregnancy. I've seen a number of friends over the past near decade have their first child, and the lead up to the pregnancy is this bizarre strategy consulting inspired plan. "As soon as (usually husband) makes VP, we'll move to (nice suburb) and (wife) will start to manage her work commitments so she can mostly operate from home. In Q2, we'll begin trying to conceive in earnest." It's hard not to see a eugenics-lite mindset. A pregnancy / child is another "project" on the PMC-life-success-progress meter.
Fortunately, a lot of this thinking evaporates once the child actually shows up and the parents find out how much they love being parents. If child number 2 comes along, the entire tenor changes. "(wife) is pregnant again. Hoping for a (girl/boy) this time." It's anec-data, but I've had a number of interesting conversations, especially with PMC fathers, that can be summarized as "If I knew how much more fulfilling fatherhood was than anything else, I would've started having kids way earlier." Anti-natal messaging really is one of the worst social biohazards of recent memory.
On the other side of the coin, those couples who just don't want to have kids for whatever reason have equally as intricate defense strategies ready to go for dinner parties. "Oh, well, with (husband or wife's) current case load, the time commitment is untenable, and (wife or husband) is also really taking on more responsibility at (something like FAANG or McKinsey). It's just a bad time right now, but we'll reassess next year maybe." It's the casual double speak of an overly refined PMC. I wouldn't mind if the response was as simple as "Yeah, we don't want kids." The "rational" defensive script comes across a somehow more insidious and spiteful. It's like a cover story for a double agent.
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It's not a great way to win an election, and it's also cruel. But it cuts deep because it's true.
We do a disservice to our young people when we hide the facts of life from them. Many of us will die alone and unloved because of decisions of expediency made when we were young. Parents should teach their children about how to build a full life for themselves, starting with having children of their own.
When I was 10-13, I was not at all interested in the opposite sex, but was positively disposed to the idea of having children. That changed quietly at some point between 13 and 16, as preserved in that novel I wrote at the time where I suddenly questioned halfway through if the blatant self-insert character functionally parenting a couple of space-orphans was really compatible with my sense of identity. It could have been that abstinence-only presentation they put all the 8th-graders through, but I somehow doubt. I'd been surrounded by overpopulation memes forever; I'm really not sure what changed. Maybe the realization that I didn't have a community or social life or any fondness for the increasingly alienating environment around me? Some hormone balance suddenly shifting? Increased self-doubt? The realization that I was not sufficiently attracted to real people for reproduction to be remotely reallistic anyway?
I could go on. Lots of weird teenage crap that could tie into the rapid vibe-shift on the subject. At some point, all of that stuff went from a believable fantasy to something to fear, dread, or dislike. I like to think I was more reflective than average at the time, but clearly not enough to catch the transformation as it was happening.
I'd argue it wasn't so much propaganda as getting older and having a more realistic view of what raising kids actually look like. There's a reason why for instance, a series about a bunch of kids raising themselves in a boxcar was a YA series aimed at basically older elementary school, because as you get any older, even an average intelligence 13 year old starts thinking of some issues and plot holes.
Also, depending on the family the responsibilities you may have at 15 with a baby in the household, whether it's a younger sibling or a visiting cousin are probably different and closer to reality than you would've had at 9.
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"Parents should teach their children about how to build a full life for themselves, starting with having children of their own."
You assume the parents think their children have had a positive effect on their lives, or more importantly, telling your kids at 18 to pop out some babies will overwrite the previous 18 years of complaining they've heard about the cost of raising them or getting in the way of their own lives, and so on.
I don't think that's an assumption.
Absolutely, end the schizophrenic messaging around children.
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Upvoted four million times.
People often opt for short term emotional self-soothing even if that has led to worse and worse long term outcomes for them. The universe isn't cruel, it's ambivalent.
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