Glenn Reynolds, of Instapundit fame, takes a look at why people don’t have kids anymore. Glenn’s conclusion: society has made it more difficult, rather than less difficult, to be a parent.
A lot of his points are spot-on and recognized by those of us, especially in the LDS world, trying to be parents in a parent-unfriendly world. Which of course brings us to the point: what can we do to make our world more kind to parents?
I’m not sure how many of Glenn’s points are addressable. For example, when I was raised in the 1960s and 1970s, I went wandering around the neighborhood by myself from the age of about eight. There is no way I would do that with my kids today (and, interestingly, my kids — ages 10 and seven — have no desire to wander around Miami by themselves). What can we do to change this? I’m not sure there are any solutions, except perhaps to move to more kid-friendly suburbs (the children of my friends who live in Orem, Utah do wander around the neighborhood on their own, so there are still places where you can do this).
But in a place like Miami, your Saturdays and after-school time are spent carting your kids to birthday parties, to play dates, to soccer practice and on and on. Multiply all of the extracurricular activities by five or six or more kids, and you have complete chaos on your hands.
But there are causes for parent-unfriendliness that can perhaps be addressed. One of Glenn’s primary complaints is the “cost” of having a kid, which runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Would the cost be significantly less if we were less materialistic, if our children didn’t have to own the latest Nintendo, the latest clothes and the latest Ipod? The answer is definitely yes. So, it appears to me that one thing we can do is create an environment of valuing things other than material goods and teaching those values to your kids. What do you think, denizens of the Bloggernacle: is it possible?