If They're Not Cryin', We're Dyin'
Children should be seen and heard
A few months ago I was at a conference. It was one where a lot of people brought their families with them for a vacation as well. It was not a religious conference, by the way.
I thought it was very interesting that several of the women who were attending had their babies with them in the ballroom. Some of them had their bassinets sitting right next to their seat.
As they are known to do, some of the babies would cry from time to time. But that did not seem to bother anybody.
At one point someone even said from the dais, “If they’re not cryin’, we’re dyin’.” I thought that was a great sentiment.
To be honest, while having babies at a professional conference might sound odd, I thought it had a very healthy and even cool vibe.
Over the past few of years, I’d attended a few church or religious type conferences as well, and it’s not been uncommon there for women to have their babies with them in the event.
I don’t have have a comprehensive knowledge of how things worked in the past, but my impression is that it was pretty unusual for there to be babies in conference type settings if they event did not have onsite child care.
We aren’t going back to a midcentury type world where women with young children were at home and not engaged in civic life apart from child-centered activities. If we want to raise birth rates, then we have to make it as easy as possible for women with young children to be able to remain engaged in life.
Practices like making it clear that babies are welcome at what might seem to be business or formal type events, and creating cultures in our communities where having kids around in adult settings is normal and expected, is one way to do that.
Because with our below replacement rate fertility, it literally is true that if they aren’t crying, our society is dying out.
Cover image credit: Yogi/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
I’m with Aaron on this one. It is useful to remember that the fifties model was actually a short lived one. I’m old, so I remember what a farmer’s wife did in the course of a day, feed 20 hands bringing in a harvest with three full hot meals including pies. Few households could afford to be without additional revenue before the ‘50’s. Women worked at seasonal jobs in agriculture, and often had cleaning jobs, as the Downton Abbey maids went to the factories. One of my grandmothers took in washing, boiling the water over a fire, scrubbing with home made lye soap on a board. Not a fun or easy job. The other cleaned the Capitol (movie) Theater wielding mops which were heavy before soaked with water.
Speaking of conferences , I attended one where a number of researchers were presenting papers on autoimmune diseases. I have a rare and serious one. The work that was being done by women in research and writing the papers that would bring relief to people like me was heartening. In the world that is emerging, a poorer, underpopulated world, we’re going to need all hands on deck. For the women who want to stay at home, we need to offer support and respect. For the women who have a desire and ability to contribute, we need to offer support and acceptance of the presence of children, rather than insisting that the children be hidden away. It isn’t possible for children to be in all workplaces all the time, but there are more places now than in the early industrial age. If you want to read about the cold, hard evidence as to why a-two parent family is the most desirable environment for a growing child, read Katy Faust’s, Them Before Us, a book which collects the data from impeccable sources. She also reveals the hideous damage to children that is done by birth technologies where the child is taken from the mother’s womb and turned over to strangers, with no mother who has shared her heartbeat and voice with the infant. The damage only becomes greater as the child grows and develops the desire to know the identity of person who gave him or her birth. Katy Faust has adopted children into her family, and does not deny of diminish their pain. But she makes it clear that stepping in when the alternative is a series if foster homes, is vastly different from paying money to create a painful situation for a child so that the adult can feel more comfortable. The idea of an artificial womb is such a travesty that the choice of that direction is the ultimate cruelty. Katy Faust has spoken to congressional committees on the topic of creating laws that hold the welfare of the child over convenience and ego needs of adults. We are at a perilous point in history. I said I was old. When I grew up, it was normal for youngsters to “hate” playing with the opposite sex. It was a sign of emerging adulthood when boys and girls began to see some attraction to the opposite sex. The next step, of looking forward to forming a lifelong marriage, was characteristic of a mature, normal human. The seething hostility between the sexes going on now is appalling. It is not universal. I know many delightful young people, devoted to each other, raising sane, happy children. But anyone, male of female, who thinks that a world in which men and women live apart is anything but a disaster is fooling him or herself. It is time to lay down the weapons and work together to build a humane world. I might add that I am fortunate to live in marriage of more than half a century. I feel such sorrow for young people that don’t even know enough to aspire to a relationship that has brought us such joy, and that is such an advantage as we navigate the challenges of age. Aaron, I appreciate the way you keep the focus on finding a way for people to achieve marriage and a family, rather than sending them off in search of a perpetual adolescence ending in an empty old age, as so many “influencers” male and female, are doing. It is voices like yours, and now Louise Perry’s (The Case Against the Sexual Revolution) that are now being heard by young women and men, that offer a path out.
I agree with Joe N.'s comments below. He wrote, "We are living in this weird dystopianism where many men and thinkers will acknowledge that women's liberation has been a societal disaster... And women are enjoying unheard of privileges in society nowadays."
Patriarchy is Biblical, and therefore it is the ideal system. Anything less than that is a compromise that will lead to varying levels of problems, and today because of our wholesale capitulation to feminism, we have enormous problems. Aaron says we are not going back to the old days of women staying at home with children, and while societal trends surely validate that statement, we need to carefully evaluate the advisability of encouraging any new privilege which may further undermine patriarchy.
Regarding the issue of women with crying babies attending public events, the question then is whether or not the net effect of that practice helps or undermines patriarchy. On the one hand women feeling that they they have a right to attend all public events with babies (and possibly militantly letting their babies shriek without taking them outside) somewhat enforces feminism. On the other hand, there are so many forces aligned against women having children and properly caring for them that to deny women access to certain public events (with or without children), even if they should not in principle attend, could be perceived so negatively by them that such a policy would militate rather strongly against their having children. Such a reaction more strongly advances feminism than allowing them to attend the events in question. For this reason, I very narrowly support Aaron's position that we should accept the wailing babies, though I do hope that the women bringing them would have the decency to temporarily remove them if the crying is excessive.