I took a rough poll of my friends: how long had it been since they held a baby? It confirmed what I had guessed to be true: a majority of my friends hadn’t held a baby in years, if not a decade or more.
If you’re in that camp, let me remind you what it’s like. When a baby first settles into your arms, you may realize you’ve been holding your breath. Their soft, fragile frame barely fills your arms. They are all gentle coos and sweet little breaths. Sticky, sweaty, round arms and legs, and the tiniest feet and hands that you’ve ever seen press against you. If you’re lucky enough to hold a baby while they’re awake, you may be struck by their wide reactive eyes and their mysterious facial reactions to your presence. Minute for minute, while you cradle a newborn child, the most brain growth they’ll ever experience in their life is happening as they stare back up at you.
Babies are incomprehensibly sweet and fragile, but they’re also squirmy, stinky, and psychologically challenging. They’re their own little people. They cause suffering on the way into the world and once they’re in it. And because babies are real, they show us a kind of beauty that is incredible precisely because it demands something from us. True reward requires risk and challenge. And in some small way, a baby holder must be prepared to watch a little child suffer, and learn from mistakes. And if we’re being honest, a life spent avoiding pain, or inconvenience, or challenge isn’t a life at all.
If my friends are in any way representative, one way we can think about the Holding A Baby measurement is as a loose proxy for societal atomization. In particular, the people around me generally aren’t close to intergenerational communities, and don’t have responsibilities or attachment to the people that surround them in their day-to-day lives. We want desperately to have the casual comfort of being truly known in their everyday life, and yet we travel from event to event — rarely forming close enough bonds to really share in suffering or deep joy with others. We tell ourselves that having too much responsibility to other people who are needy is unpleasant and to be avoided. And other people must not know that we ourselves have constant needs.
Modernity highly values control and immediate gratification removed from discomfort. Any food you can dream of delivered on demand, goods shipped to your doorstep from around the world — the moment you want something, you can get it. The longer process of these goods being designed, refined, produced, packaged, shipped is all entirely removed from our consciousness. The moment you’re uncomfortable, you can change it for a small price.
Babies refuse to conform to these easy visions of the good. They teach us long lessons of compassion and patience, and ultimately delayed gratification.
In the same way that consumption goods are produced without our understanding, increasingly children are as well. As we go through life isolated from many exposures to child-rearing, it makes us less human.
More specifically, we are overwhelmingly told to see life as an exercise in risk mitigation. Maintain optionality, avoid pain, optimize happiness. It’s often simpler to choose social situations that avoid friction up front, and “ghost” people when the inevitable relational difficulties do come. Across America, we increasingly sort ourselves into social situations with peers who are similar demographically. Conversation with another friend of the same age at a work event may come easier than chatting up the 80-year-old standing in line with you for groceries. Babies, parenthood, or committing to existing continually around either of the two don’t fit neatly any sort of box.
Parents then feel pressure to hide their kids away. It’s well-documented that children today roam within a significantly smaller radius than their parents, despite significantly lower crime rates. Children are increasingly not allowed in “adult spaces,” which often has an unfortunate recursive effect of making it a more unpleasant experience for everyone when children are allowed in these spaces – the child isn’t prepared to behave well and the public isn’t prepared to receive a child’s volatility with the right amount of attention. Whether it’s apartments that have “no unsupervised children under 18” rules, restaurants that have no-child policies, or garden or open sidewalk areas where a child would not be allowed to play without intensive supervision, it’s no wonder children have trouble once they are allowed into places where everyone would like the preservation of a pleasant environment. The child has been prevented from making a single mistake until the very last possible moment. He has not had an opportunity to fail.
The French get something right when they bring children into many adult spaces and simultaneously normalize a high standard for children being brought into those spaces. Everyone is collectively brought into understanding what children are like, and how to invite them into collective ideals of good behavior. Rather than society treating children and childhood as a risk to be mitigated, we should all submit ourselves to knowing children — holding a baby now and then, saying hello to a 5 year old standing in line — and gently stepping into inviting children into society along with us. As Stephanie Murray has written about, this also requires something increasingly abnormal of parents - to learn how to navigate uncertain scenarios with strangers in public. Perhaps it means asking the sweet girl washing her hands next to you if she minds holding your baby while you wash your hands, perhaps it means trusting a shop owner to give your toddler gentle feedback about how to behave in their store. Generally it means ceding some parenting grounds to non-parents with low expectations, and delivering gentle feedback on their step-in ‘parenting’ when absolutely necessary. No one is better off peddling anxious prohibitions on behalf of parents. Everyone is better off for learning how to gently welcome and steward the next generation into our world. Involving ourselves in the lives of people who are different than us is the only way to fight atomization.
We live in a world of globally declining birth rates. In the US, birth rates are at their lowest since the 1930s (when we began tracking this data) and are below the rate that would enable us to maintain our population level. When we talk about the fertility rates, conversations are dominated by policy recommendations, scientific innovations, and abstracted incentive discussions around total fertility rate. And it’s a vicious cycle. I think we occasionally miss the most simple details of what’s contributing to fewer babies, more fear around parenting, and a horrifically atomized society. It’s simply hard to want something or feel that its beautiful challenges are viable when you never see it and have little community to do it with.
None of these social trends are monocausal: the cost of childcare has increased, it’s hard to raise kids far away from your parents and intergenerational community more broadly, there are fewer walkable cities than ever, etc. Parenthood, birth, and pregnancy are mostly told of in stories of the negative extreme. Birth is treated like a medical event, a risk, a threat — rather than something wondrous, natural, and empowering. Children are to be kept in a glass case and all of society is to support the ultimate goal of lifelong risk mitigation for them and on behalf of the parents.
The Holding a Baby metric is helpful because it doesn’t point a finger at the individual either. It’s clear that many, many individuals are deeply yearning for exposure to a different kind of beauty, but the odds can feel stacked against us.
We often discuss this all from the perspective of memetics — people need to be memed into having babies or pushed toward altruism. But women do not need to be sold another fantasy encounter. Depictions of perfect, idyllic babies & parenthood are not compelling either – we all instinctively know that little humans are messy, challenging, and occasionally instigators of suffering. Tricking women and families into having more kids would never be a lasting solution. The conversation about fertility rates is often really about something else - whether we as a society can realize that the things that bring the most joy require the most sacrifice.
People instinctively want to encounter beautiful things that involve suffering, because those things are real. Even writing about babies in this way feels somewhat silly. The most compelling version of any truth is one that is lived out before your eyes, as C.S. Lewis writes: “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal… To love is to be vulnerable.”
Love involves some risk, a risk that must be measured and managed. It is just this wrestling with risk and vulnerability and that makes love full. There is no avoiding this cycle. Lewis underlines the costly nature of parenthood:
“We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”
If Lewis finds this beauty extremely difficult to describe, how difficult then is the practical application? Real beauty, and the pleasure and joy of experiencing it, is not without some discomfort and trade-offs. Real, experiential, immersive beauty is messy and not without suffering, a far cry from the version of beauty we have been sold.
Only a genuine encounter with beauty and suffering offers a solution to the modern dilemma that distances so many adults from young children. The greatest beauty will only come from a struggle partnered with resolution; and a lived story, a lived truth that is an example to others.
It is essential that we suffer and rejoice with one another. In an era defined by atomization and the lack of communal emotion, suffering & rejoicing together is a radical proposition. Holding a baby might be the most radical thing you’ve done in your lifetime.
Yes pls more pls
“The Holding a Baby metric” nice