Ginny Roth: It’s time to stop panicking about parenthood

“You’re buckling the car seat wrong—and it’s a matter of life or death.”

“Want to survive the first week home with baby? This bassinet is non-negotiable.”

“Top 7 ways to properly play with your newborn. Hint: You’re doing it wrong.”

Wait, what?

I shake myself out of my 4 am Instagram-reel-induced stupor and recover my rational brain. There is no proper way to play with a newborn. A baby young enough to be called a newborn can’t even really play at all. You feed them and change their diapers and that’s sort of it.

Not that caring for a newborn is easy. The best way to feed a baby is a source of countless mommy wars and provides endless fodder for fear and shame-inducing Instagram reel content and what economist and author Emily Oster calls “panic headlines”. As a first-time mom, despite my personal obsession with skepticism and critical thinking (some might say to a fault), our overbearing parenting culture even got to me. I was constantly second-guessing myself, doubting my choices, and making absurd middle-of-the-night Amazon purchases, convinced I was messing up if I didn’t have the thing, or do the thing, our culture told me I needed.

I gave birth to our second child about seven weeks ago, and the second time around, I’ve wizened up. I’ve also had a lot of time to think about Lyman Stone’s important new research on Canadian birth rates. Fertility and natalism are having a bit of a moment in North American intellectual circles these days. Cultural conservatives have been talking about declining birth rates for years but turning points in Chinese and Japanese population data mean even mainstream thinkers are starting to care about what might happen if fertility rates in Canada and the U.S. continue to decline.

What makes Stone’s research design unique is that he doesn’t start by leaping to convenient assumptions about why we’re having fewer babies—not enough childcare or workplace benefits—like so much fertility analysis does. He starts by asking women about their childbearing choices. Most interestingly, he asks them what factors make them more or less likely to have kids, drilling down to the likely cause of the important gap between how many children women say they want to have and how many children women end up having. And there is a gap. A meaningful one.

It turns out, not only are Canadian women having fewer kids than they’d like to have, but the reasons why are not what you might think, nor are they easily solved for. There are a few popular theories about why Western birth rates are dropping. One, that it’s become too expensive. If young people can’t even afford to buy a house, how are they supposed to raise a family? Two, that it’s about secularization. As Westerners lose their faith, they lose the spiritual drive to have big families, and, three, that our work-obsessed culture is replacing child-rearing with career advancement as the thing that gives people meaning in their lives.

All three theories resonate with those of us in our twenties and thirties who think about why we and our peers aren’t having more kids. And as Stone’s research bears out, they each seem to play a bit of a role, but in and of themselves, they feel incomplete. And for the optimists among us, particularly those seeking to buck the falling birth rate trend in our own lives, it feels important to better understand the source of this troublesome gap. Because if we can truly understand it, maybe we can fix it. And Stone’s insights uncover root causes that while daunting to address, seem truer to life than any other analysis to date.

Stone concludes that there are two major interrelated cultural trends that drive the fertility gap in Canada: intensive parenting and capstone childbearing. Intensive parenting speaks to the content my Instagram algorithm is currently serving me. The very idea that there’s a correct way to play with a newborn speaks to the absurdity of parenting culture in Canada. Capstone childbearing refers to the idea that having kids is something you do after you’ve achieved other milestones, like establishing yourself in your career, travelling the world, or both.

These trends are connected to financial factors in so far as it’s easier for wealthy women to take on the high costs of intensive parenting (you are, after all, a failure as a parent if you don’t buy the $1000 UPPAbaby stroller) or to seek out expensive fertility treatments later in life once they’ve achieved other milestones. But Stone’s research reveals that public policy designed to close the financial gap won’t be enough to close the fertility gap. Indeed, Canada already has incredibly generous parental leave benefits and (in theory), ten-dollar-a-day childcare. Despite all that, the fertility gap persists. The problem is cultural. And if politics is downstream of culture, public policy definitely is.

Stone’s explanation is cause for both optimism and pessimism. For a natalist like me, it’s exciting to think we could be getting closer to understanding what really drives childbearing behaviour. On the other hand, culture is notoriously hard to shift. The tidal wave of toxic, conflicting parenting advice and the pervasive (but biologically false) notion that a woman’s thirties are her new twenties feels almost impossible to reverse. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Fortunately, amongst the toxicity and fear-mongering some thought leaders are trying to usher in a culture shift. An American pediatrician constantly reminding parents that the nightly activities they have their kids signed up for are in fact, optional. An economist who’s made a career of convincing women that pregnancy and parenting must not be joyless, anxiety-inducing endeavours. A mom of six with a big Twitter following reminding parents that they don’t need to invent new activities for their kids every fifteen minutes, they can just have them help with the laundry.

These leaders neither glorify nor vilify what it means to be a parent. Sure, it’s hard. But it’s not just hard. The complexity of what it means to be a parent—the simultaneous ease and difficulty, joy and dismay, comfort and inconvenience—is precisely the point. Parenting isn’t convenient. But it also isn’t awful. And more importantly, it is intensely rewarding, as too many women learn too late in life when they think to themselves “If only I’d started earlier”. We owe it to these women to push back against a culture that tells them they can’t. We owe it to these women to build a culture that says, parenting must not be so intensive. You can travel with your kids, not just before you have them. Childbearing can precede the climax of your career, punctuating your life with meaning. Having children isn’t something you should tackle after you’ve tackled life. Having children is life.