Why We Ignore Women with Strollers

Motherhood, status, and our hatred of large families.

Bottom line, up front here: mothers are not treated well in public.

Ever since I got my positive pregnancy test, I have become hyper-aware of other mothers. I work in a non-ADA friendly environment, so I often see struggling moms, with askew sunglasses and tight athleisure, straining to hoist their strollers and children up the steps to my building. No one looks their way and no one helps, save the odd woman who has been there, done that.

I find this disturbing. The sheer amount of able-bodied men who breezily walk past in their suits is baffling. I would understand their behavior more if they were in a hurry, but these men are usually not. They are simply oblivious or cowardly, and socialized to be so. What do we do about this? How do we acknowledge that mothers may need our help, without infantilizing them or seeing them as mere incubators? How do we not view people as an island?

We need to learn to appreciate dependence and vulnerability. Unfortunately, the coward in us desperately wants to avoid the vulnerability on display in the eyes of the homeless man, the disabled veteran, the elderly couple, and the pregnant or young mother. We do not want to be reminded of our dependence on others or of our frailty. Instead, we gulp down the lie of perpetual youth, individuality, self-sufficiency, and self-reliance.

This is masculinity and masculinized feminism run amok. Therefore, we should not be surprised that men do not want to help us with our strollers when we have consistently insisted that we are strong, independent women who “need men like fish need a bicycle.” This leads me to another symptom of so-called liberated femininity: the hatred of large families and the corresponding contempt for fertility and pregnancy, an inherently vulnerable state.

The Large Family Controversy

Across history, pagan religions held fertility goddesses in pride of place. Bat in Egypt, Ceres in Rome, Freyja in Norse mythology, Demeter in Greece. Despite these goddesses’ human-like failings, there is wisdom in respecting the life-giving properties of women and nature. Catholic Christianity more perfectly reverences motherhood, with its honor of Our Lady of the Leche, which depicts the Virgin Mary nursing the infant Jesus at her breast.

Her breast is OUT, people!

Unfortunately, since the advent of the pill — which affects the temporary sterilization of women — we are more able to divorce the female body from its inherent childbearing properties and sex from its natural consequence (i.e. children). The “magic pill” makes women think that any breakthrough child is a side effect, a mistake. With abortion, however, women with families now have a foolproof method that results in no more than three children – a number that does not strain the resources of the planet, your neighbors, and most importantly, yourself.

The pill, debunked theories of overpopulation, and many, many bitter adults have led us to view children as burdens, not blessings. An outgrowth of these warped ideas is a searing hatred of large families. In my personal life, I see moms of 4+ kids complaining on Facebook forums that no one – not even their own family members – are excited for their newest baby. Instead, their loved ones ask them questions such as, “Are you finally done?” or “How can you take care of that many kids?”

On the public-facing internet, the not-so-subtle shaming rituals get more sinister. Family influencers who have six, seven, or eight kids get told to “stop breeding” or that they must have a “breeding fetish.” The trolls are utterly convinced that the parents of these children cannot possibly support their kids’ emotional and physical needs. A few mom influencers have attempted to explain their choice to have a large family, but many of their explanations fall on deaf ears.

This myopia is frustratingly novel. Take a look at the size of your grandfather and great-grandfather’s family and try to tell me that their kids could not possibly be supported, despite having fewer luxuries! Even in the early days of birth control, family sizes were larger than they are today. No one thought that you were strange, much less a bad person, for viewing children as a blessing and wanting more of them.

What normal looked like 100 years ago.

Part of this revulsion – especially from young adults on Reddit and Instagram – may be jealousy. Selfish adults who had a lot of siblings growing up may feel like they were gypped of their parents’ affections when they compare their experience to that of their only-child peers. They may have resented the hand-me-downs, the knuckle sandwiches from their older brothers, the name-calling from their older sisters.

A more subliminal justification for this popular attitude is our country’s profound anti-natalist streak. Not too long ago, our culture was mistakenly concerned about global overpopulation, especially the rapid growth of “undesirable” populations like blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, and Catholics. The pill was hawked as a solution to stop the “poors” from conceiving and in 1957, the first contraceptive pill was born.

Possibly as a result of this eugenicist movement, society determined that a “sensible” number of children was two. This fear mongering, the pill, and women’s entry into the workforce started a subsequent tank in the birth rate in the U.S. that we have never recovered from. This is no coincidence. Pregnancy and motherhood make women more vulnerable – to changing financial winds at work, to their male colleagues, and to their romantic partners. These markers of vulnerability are viewed as disadvantageous at best, dangerous at worst.

If you want to be blackpilled on this topic, I suggest a cursory tour of a few subreddits: r/KidsAreFuckingStupid, r/ChildrenFallingOver, and r/Childfree. The undercurrent of rage against so-called “crotch goblins” is certifiably insane. The posts in r/Childfree vacillate between DINKs (dual-income, no kids) bragging about their comfortable lifestyles and trashing their own parents. They complain about their family members' pleas for help with their kids and that the world seems to bend over backwards to take care of families. They want more public spaces where children are not allowed.

The irony and entitlement on display is simply astounding. Firstly, the once-touted village for parents has now all but evaporated. Boomer parents are either ambivalent to their millennial kids’ needs, must work to make up for retirement shortfalls, or are choosing to work despite their wealth. Gen X parents — who may be divorced and have even less saved up for retirement than their parents — are not likely to be much better situated when grandkids come around.

Children are in fact welcome in fewer and fewer places. In my city, dogs are often more welcome than children in venues and restaurants. They are met with smiles and pets, while babies are ignored at best.¹

It’s not hard to see why women are not enticed to have children, even with the prospect of a $5000 dollar stimulus check. Like Johann Kurtz says, motherhood — and stay-at-home motherhood in particular — is embarrassing. It is not seen as high-status. When the first question at every dinner party is “What do you do?” mothers implicitly pick up that motherhood is not a viable nor flashy career path.

I admit – I am a bit frightened about my upcoming loss of status. My current job is very glamorous. It makes me sound accomplished, and it is one of those careers where I often brush paths with powerful people. This career path could take me to high places, to galas where people twirl their wine glasses and muse about solving the world’s problems.

The unfortunate reality is that high-status careers like mine do not bend the knee to motherhood. They compete with it. Once you become a mother, you cease to be a degree-holder with a passion for the works of Thomas Aquinas. You become a woman covered in spit-up who is no longer able to commute to the office. Gone are the spontaneous happy hours with your coworkers and your 6 a.m. Orangetheory classes.

In other words, your life ceases to be about you once you become a mom. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this in the eyes of God — sacrifice is necessary for the greatest goods in this life and the next one. For most women, this sacrifice is joyful and nurturing their child brings them greater happiness than any quarterly report they ever did at their desk job. But in the eyes of the world? Motherhood is just… messy. And we really want to avoid that mess.

Subsidies will not fix this. Expanding maternity leave is a good start but will not fix the capitalistic incentive structure that selects against big families. Grandparents are unlikely to get more involved. Faced with these odds, most prospective parents will only choose to have children if it looks feasible and fiscally responsible. This is where we have to combat the fear-based narrative that has arisen among many young men and women today.

Chappell Roan, a pop starlet, recently went viral for asserting that all of her friends with kids appear to be in hell. Family vloggers are exposing laze-about fathers who just can’t seem to help their wives around the house. Troubling birth vlogs are popular and reinforce narratives that women aren’t built to birth. Climate alarmism gives many impressionable women the false notion that the world will end in our children’s generation. Our backgrounds with narcissistic parents or divorce only fuel our pessimism about our own abilities.

These messages contribute to fear and retraction into our comfort coves. We begin to assume that as a parent, our emotional and fiscal resources will be strictly limited and nonrenewable. We simply know — even before trying to conceive — that we cannot love and provide for more than one, maybe two kids. The prevailing wisdom of our age, taken from the front flap of Family Unfriendly, goes like this:

“Our culture tells parents there's one best way to raise kids: enroll them in a dozen activities, protect them from trauma, and get them into the most expensive college you can. If you can't do that, don't bother.”

I won’t deny that raising children is a difficult task, especially with the decline of that often-illusory village of relatives and the wild demands we place on parents’ shoulders. But our culture seems to enjoy making it more difficult than it has to be. Your kids can take community college classes, share a room, wear hand-me-downs, and not go to Disney World. They do not need smartphones, the latest viral pair of Ugg boots, or to be a track star at Princeton.

Despite the expectations society places around childhood, there are communities that buck the declining fertility trend. Naturally, they are religious and rural. This makes sense; fertility is mimetic and baby fever is real. For better or worse, religious communities that prioritize and reward marriage can expect more marriages, and thus more babies. Most importantly, religious Americans believe that children are a blessing, an opinion that their atheist brethren do not share.

In short, we need more stable marriages. I think a subtle way to boost marriage rates is to encourage chastity and small weddings. The pressure to have an Instagram-perfect wedding has gotten seriously out of control, likely influenced by extravagant Middle Eastern and Asian cultures. I would know; we spent thousands to basically host a family reunion, birthday party, and wedding all in one. This was a blessing, but unnecessary. Perhaps I will cover wedding culture in another article; let me know if you would be interested in that. And as always…

At the end of my musings, let me leave you with a few common sense, non-earth shattering thoughts.

1. We hate vulnerability, and thus we hate fertility and children.

2. Misleading scientific theories and harmful technologies (including social media) have actively discouraged having children.

3. Subsidies and government incentives will not change minds and hearts.

4. Communities that view children as ensouled individuals, and not commodities, are insulated from birth rate declines.

5. We must teach our children, spouses, and friends to HELP WOMEN WITH STROLLERS, FOR CRIPES’ SAKE.

1. As an aside, I was looking online at sheets for my baby’s crib. The sheer number of people buying crib sheets for their “fur baby’s” bed was astounding (#makedogspetsagain).