The dismal economics and wild joy of parenting

Have you ever seen a 2-year-old learn the commutative property of addition?

If you don’t spend a lot of time around babies, it’s hard to imagine raising them. (Photo by Fairfax Media via Getty Images via Getty Images)

Babies are a lot of work.

Two months ago, my family welcomed home our fourth, and he has thus far been wildly easier than the first three. He sleeps on his back, in his crib, for hours at a time — an ability I previously believed was a myth perpetuated by some sort of safe sleep industrial complex. He is sweet-tempered and takes his siblings’ manhandling with good grace, only crying when he has a legitimate complaint and stopping as soon as that complaint is addressed.

If he were our first baby, I would be unbearably judgmental of all those other people talking about how having a new baby is a several-months-long marathon of sleep deprivation.

Still, babies are a lot of work.

He is held almost all hours of the day. He generates an astonishing amount of laundry. For weeks, we were doing overnight shifts, with someone awake at all times to solve baby problems or be a baby sleeping service. He spends the whole evening nursing, and he goes through a lot of diapers.

If you were to ask someone who isn’t a parent what they know about parenting, they would almost certainly tell you they know that it’s hard. But while child care is hard, it is simply not true that it’s harder today than it ever has been.

However, it is harder today to know what parenting would be like than it ever has been.

A growing share of American families have only one child, so those children can’t see their nieces and nephews grow and get a sense from that of what parenting is like. Our cities have fewer children than even a decade ago, so young adults don’t see children in their day-to-day lives or get a concrete vision of what it would be like to raise them.

A lot of the most thoughtful adults I know are, for this reason, hesitant to have children. It’s a huge commitment to make, and it hardly seems wise to make it without having a real sense of what it will be like. And the fewer people who make the leap, the harder that sense is to get.

As my parental leave comes to an end, I want to make the case, as a parent and a liberal, that parenting is an incredibly worthwhile endeavor, one that is hard but joyful and full of meaning — and also one that we as a society could be making so much better.

The dismal economics of child care