Hungary is right now a real-life experiment in pro-natal policies — subsidies, regulations, protections, messaging, and more — all aimed at boosting the country’s sagging birthrate.
American Conservative writer Gladden Pappin traveled to Budapest to write about this effort, and he produced an interesting and well-written article on it. One of the most interesting things about the article was its omission.
My editor Conn Carroll pointed it out:
This struck a chord with me as well, because I had noticed this trend in pieces about birthrates and baby-making in the United States.
When liberal journalists write pieces explaining the baby bust in the U.S., they usually make very good points about our culture’s complicity in this: We expect mothers to do too much without help, and we place extreme and absurd pressure on parents, making them feel they need to be perfect and get their children into Princeton.
Yet these pieces oddly tend to omit the role of husbands and the babies’ fathers. Monica Hesse’s “I’m About to Have a Baby” column mentioned her husband in passing in paragraph seven. The New York Times had two podcasts about the baby bust back in mid-April, and over the course of 90 total minutes, marriage, husbands, or fathers were not mentioned once.
This isn’t brand new. President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign rolled out a slideshow called “Life of Julia” that showed Julia going through her life on the strength of federal subsidies, with no human contact until her baby was born — and no husband or boyfriend ever appearing.
Look, I understand why women — their preferences, needs, costs, benefits, et cetera — take a front-and-center role in this discussion. Women are the ones who get pregnant, give birth, nurse babies, and, in most societies, do a vast majority of the nurturing of children, at least in the children’s earliest years. Any discussion about birthrates, for reasons biological and cultural, needs to begin with women and focus mostly on women.
But omitting men entirely from the discussion is an odd tic of our press and academics. I may be overreacting, but I read it as part of a broader shift of diminishing the importance of marriage, husbands, and fathers. Americans are less likely to say marriage is where they find meaning. When I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about the need for in-person schooling, education scholars dismissed me with an eye roll as “another dad.”
All social science shows that children are better off when raised by two married parents. That is simply not up for debate. Why doesn’t our commentary on baby-making even mention the junior partner in this whole undertaking?
We should turn around our birthrate decline in this country. We should listen to every objection from the liberal feminists, the sociologists, and the childless millennials. But when we ask why people don’t have children today, we need to start by asking why young people get married less and later. The delay in marriage and retreat from marriage is perhaps the leading cause of falling birthrates.
As demographer Lyman Stone puts it, “most long-run change in fertility can be accounted for by changes in the marital composition of society.”
So we’re not talking meaningfully about childbearing and birthrates and parenthood if we’re not also talking about marriage.
