The Secret Life Of Parents

What The Childless Don't See, And Can't Know

Campbell Scott comforting his child in ‘The Secret Lives Of Dentists’ (2002)

Look at this:

Doug Landry is a Millennial progressive political consultant. I know nothing about him, but I’d bet he doesn’t have kids. For those who do have kids, whatever their politics, this is an extremely relatable anecdote. Crack on J.D. for his statements about childhood if you like, but cracking on him for this one just reveals your own arrogant lack of understanding about parenthood.

It brought to my mind a moment from 2003, when my then-wife and I got a babysitter and went with another couple to see the film The Secret Lives Of Dentists. It’s a domestic drama about two dentists, a married couple, whose marriage is put to the test when the wife has an affair. Campbell Scott, who plays the cuckolded husband, is sorely tempted to throw his cheating wife (Hope Davis) out. He would be entirely justified to do so. But they have little kids, and Scott’s deeply felt responsibility to those children keep him anchored, fighting the temptation.

There’s a scene late in the film in which everyone in the family except for Scott comes down with a rotten virus. Puking, fever, the works. It falls to Scott, the husband and father, to keep everyone together and cared for, despite the chaos. If memory serves, we see Scott getting vomited on by one of his daughters, even as he is being run ragged trying to keep up with everyone’s needs, including his sick wife’s.

This scene wasn’t framed as high comedy, nor for tragedy. The emotional tone of this movie was pretty even. But my wife and I convulsed with laughter, as did half the theater. Our childless friends sitting next to us sat there in uncomprehending silence. I realized later that you could tell who in the audience were parents by whether or not they laughed at that scene. Why? Because we had all been there.

If you have had kids, so have you. There are so many times when illness overwhelms your household, that you think, “I can’t go on” — but of course you go on, because that’s what parents do. A year or after this movie, a vicious stomach bug hit our house. My wife was pregnant, and isolated in the bedroom to keep from catching it. That left me, who was about 12 hours ahead of our five year old Matt, to care for him. There was copious puking from both of us, but I was the Dad, and I needed to care for Matt, as well as protect Mom and the unborn baby from this virus, so there was no opportunity to rest of pity myself.

At one point I put Matt, feverish and vomity, on the couch in my home office, so I could sleep on the floor below him and be close enough to hear my wife if she called to me in the night. Little Matt rolled over and upchucked off the side of the couch — all over my head. It was that kind of night.

We all laughed at that story later, as a parenthood war story. I assure you it wasn’t funny at the time. But you know, that kind of thing is the crucible of parenthood. Living with these absurdities — like when the former President of the United States calls you to ask you to be his running mate, and your little boy just wants to engage you in Pokemon talk. In the Dentists film, Scott’s character realizes that being a husband and father means being willing to bear pain and suffering with grace, and that if his wife will abandon the affair, it might be worth giving their marriage another chance, because of the love he has for the family itself — a love that showed itself in his self-sacrificial service to them all during their sickness.

As you know, I am divorced, my wife having filed in 2022. The last decade of our marriage was incredibly painful for us both. I can’t speak for her, but in my case, I endured it for the same reason Campbell Scott stayed with his marriage: out of love for the kids, and the deep desire to protect them from harm. (We never fought in front of the kids, out of concern for them.) I would be very surprised if that same thing didn’t drive my wife, who had shown herself to love the kids sacrificially so many times in their childhood, to stay in an unhappy marriage for a lot longer than most would. This is what parenthood can do to you.

I sense that much of the vomiting sour bile on J.D. Vance over his past remarks about children and family comes from professional-class people who don’t want to feel judged in any way for their choice to remain childless. (Side note: I don’t think for a second that J.D. was criticizing those who wanted kids but couldn’t have them; nobody who has had children can feel anything but compassion for the involuntarily childless.) I have seen in the political discourse around J.D. and children a sense of resentment over the idea that having children gives one greater wisdom.

I’m sorry, but it does. Not in every case — it is possible to be a bad mother or bad father, and to learn nothing from the experience of parenthood (J.D.’s own troubled childhood testifies to this — but generally, yes, of course it does. This doesn’t make the childless morally less worthy, or the childbearing morally greater. But for most people, having kids gives you more wisdom about life — wisdom to which the young and childless ought to defer.

I mean, look: a garage mechanic who once served under arms in war is not necessarily going to be smarter about whether or not America should attack X country right now. A man who did not serve, and who went through advanced academic training knows things that the veteran does not about warfare and strategy. On the other hand, the veteran has hands-on experience that taught him things about war that can only be understood that way. The knowledge gained from that experience is at least as valuable, and probably more valuable, than theoretical knowledge. (The movie to watch about the limits of rationality in warfare is Errol Morris’s terrific documentary, The Fog Of War: Eleven Lessons From The Life Of Robert S. McNamara. )

This is the kind of thing I’m talking about with parenting. The laughter of the Dentists audience was the sound of wisdom gained from having gone through that humiliating experience. It’s the sound of people who discovered in themselves the capacity to love in ways they never understood. It’s the sound of people taught by parenthood that the secret to a happy life is to learn how to bear that kind of suffering with grace, and to keep your eyes on the higher good that you serve.

I’ve told the story in this space about how, in the fall of 1999, two weeks before our first child was born, my sister Ruthie phoned us in New York from Louisiana. She told me that my wife and I were probably feeling apprehensive about how our lives were about to change. I can’t sugar-coat it, she said, as the mother of two; you are both about to lose a lot of freedom. You know that.

But what you don’t know, and what you can’t know until you are having the experience, is what kind of joy you are about to receive. You won’t be able to go out on a whim to your favorite restaurant, Ruthie said, and you will miss it. On the other hand, nothing can replace the feeling of sitting at home eating take-out pizza and watching a movie with the baby sleeping in your arms.

Well, she was right. She was one hundred percent right. What’s more, having a baby changed the way I thought about politics and a lot of things, and it did so for a predictable reason: when you have kids, you have a stake in the future in a way you could not have had as a childless person. I moved away from liberalism toward conservatism dramatically after 1989, when I graduated from college and moved off campus. Suddenly having to pay taxes, and having to deal with the reality of crime, made me start thinking hard about what the world would be like if most people held the liberal views I did. I saw — and I felt — that my liberal ideals were incommensurate with lived reality. So I changed.

In a similar way, some of my untested conservative views began to change after my son was born. Without realizing what was happening to me at first, I suddenly became aware of how thin some of my libertarian views were when I thought about the kind of world that libertarianism would create for my son to grow up in.

Parenthood forces you to deal with the messiness of humanity. J.D. Vance’s little boy had no way of knowing who his dad was talking to, and why it was important. Kids want what they want, when they want it. J.D. had to learn to navigate that, but also how to train a child to defer gratification. If previous generations were too neglectful of kids, I have seen Millennial parents over the years indulge their children too much — as if the child’s expressed need must automatically take priority over whatever the parent is doing at the moment. We see all around us the deleterious effect of that approach. Parenthood teaches you not only to be patient and merciful to others, but also when love requires that you train a child away from thinking he is the center of the universe. Doug Landry’s apparent belief that Vance should have told Trump he would have to call him back, because right now he needed to have a conversation about Pokemon with his seven-year-old, is the kind of thinking that leads educated middle-class idiots to agree to put their child on puberty blockers because he says he’s a girl, and you can’t tell him no or he’ll hate you.

Parenthood also teaches you that you aren’t the center of the universe. You can’t make decisions based only on what’s good for you. You have little people depending on you. Maybe you can’t afford to take that vacation this year, because you have school fees coming up, or something like that. Maybe you’d rather chill out and watch a movie tonight with your wife, but the kids need you to play a game with them. So you play the game with them. This is a valuable lesson to learn about life.

Parenthood also teaches you the limits of rational control. The typical educated middle-class American wants to believe that everything is theoretically controllable. It’s not. Raising children trains you on how to control what can be controlled, how to let go what can’t be, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Parenthood also teaches you just how damn hard life is. That couple who went with us to the Dentists movie found themselves pregnant a year later. Their baby died just before birth. Seeing that little white coffin at the front of the church at the funeral tore me in two. Everybody there at that funeral surely felt deep grief and sympathy for the mom and dad, but I would bet that everybody there who had had children knew at an even deeper level how profound their suffering was. Years later, one of my kids had a serious health scare. It all worked out fine in the end, but for a time our child’s mother and me didn’t know whether the little one was going to die a horrible death. And we were utterly powerless in the face of it. Seeing the innocence of our child, who had no idea what was happening to him, and understanding that we, as his parents, had to bear this terrible knowledge, and the knowledge that we might be burying him in a little coffin one day soon — well, it changes you.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. Being a parent doesn’t immunize you against stupidity, but it really is an apprenticeship for life beyond the confines of the home. Future historians, I suspect, will look back on our culture and civilization and see a people who had an insane disregard for the future. This is not a point I’m making against liberals. It’s almost as true of conservatives. We are not a civilization that makes proper provision for our descendants. If we did, we would live very differently. The fact that most people still have kids, and continue to live the way we all do, is proof that parenthood is not a vaccination against folly.

In time, after much suffering, we will once again learn the fundamental truth that all civilizations must know: that order is built on the family, and the family is built on children who are raised to be responsible adults, who in turn will bear children that will carry on. I’m old enough to remember the stories I heard in childhood of sacrifices made by parents — often immigrant parents — who struggled with poverty and limts, but who gave up so much so their children would have a better shot in life.

My own late father was born in the Great Depression, and didn’t really know his father well. For most of my dad’s childhood, his father was out on the road working any job he could find to support his wife, their two boys, and his mother, who lived at home with them. Would my grandfather have preferred to be at home with his wife and kids? No doubt. But the agonies of that time and place didn’t allow it. He did what any decent man would have done: gone out into the world foraging for what his family needed to survive. This meant in the end the sacrifice of a close relationship with his boys. My grandfather was a rough working class man who never talked about his feelings, but I find it hard to believe that he didn’t feel the pain of the absence of a close relationship with his sons. Yet he did what a father and husband had to do then: he provided. On the home front, my dad’s mom raised two country boys who stepped up to do their part for the family in the absence of father. My dad said that many was the night when their supper was nothing but stale cornbread in buttermilk. Many was the day when the only way they had any meat to eat was because he and his older brother went into the woods and shot and skinned squirrels.

I believe that harsh experience taught my father to be a good provider for my mom, my sister, and me. My dad and I had lots that divided us, but never did I doubt that he loved us sacrificially. He worked himself down physically and psychologically because he constantly searched for ways to make a little more money, so his kids wouldn’t know the fear of the material insecurity he endured as a boy. It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood, and having to think about providing security for my own children, that I sat back and confronted how thin the line between poverty and security was for my sister and me in our childhood. We had never known it as kids. One of the gifts my parents gave us (our mom was also raised in rural poverty) was the illusion that all was well, and all would be well, materially speaking. I saw later that never speaking of our perilous finances in front of the kids was a sacrifice, perhaps only a small one, that made a big difference. Now that I think about it, that experience in my childhood probably had a lot to do with why I was determined never to let my own children know how close their parents’ marriage was to bankruptcy through most of their childhood. This is just what parents do, don’t you think?

Ross Douthat wrote yesterday in his newsletter (I’ve unlocked it for you) in acknowledgement that being a “pro-natalist,” as he is, is “weird” to most people. The birth dearth really is an existential crisis, both economically and civilizationally — but as Ross avers, it’s one that very few people want to face, for the reasons he explains. Yet as it is sometimes said, “facts don’t care about your feelings” — and the fact is, we can’t go on like this forever. Excerpt:

I’m honestly not sure where we go from here, because this acceleration increases the radicalism of the pro-natalist ask. When I started out writing about these issues 15 years ago, it was possible to frame pro-natalism in relatively modest terms, as a matter of shifting emphases and policy tweaks. But the deeper we get into a birth dearth, the more dramatic the alteration required to come back up: not just modest child tax credits but a complete overhaul of the welfare state, not just a slightly more pro-marriage culture but a transformation in how the sexes relate to one another and pair off, not just a dose of can-do American optimism but a recovery of existential hope, not just a politics that takes family life more seriously but one that resists gerontocracy directly by — well, for instance, by giving parents extra votes.

So the serious pro-natalist in 2024 is not just a bit weird but also increasingly a bit utopian-seeming and revolutionary. Which seems likely to create a dynamic where more normal people finally wake up to the problem, only to decide that the solutions look impossible and fall back into fatalism or denial or despair. And also a dynamic where pro-natalism itself becomes a factional cause, a rallying cry for groups that are already fecund against forces that seem arrayed against them — in other words, a culture-war issue, after all.

To be clear, it’s possible to argue for even radical changes in a nuanced and consensus-oriented style. (Here is an academic paper that does just that on behalf of the extra parental votes idea, for instance.) And since nobody stands to lose more in the future than groups that don’t reproduce themselves — giving even the deepest skeptic of birthrate panic a reason to take these issues seriously — I continue to hope for a world where pro-natalism isn’t just a factional issue but a shared premise of a reviving civilization.

But I’m skeptical that the issue can escape the pull of polarization, the vortex of the Kulturkampf. And I suspect that the “weirdness” that Democrats are eagerly attacking at the moment will come to seem much more familiar in the stranger world to come.

Here in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been taking the collapse of Hungarian fertility seriously, and trying to address it through policy fixes. Hungary is a great place to have a big family, in terms of tax breaks and other things. And yet, there has been no real turnaround. This tells me that there are factors other than material ones involved in the birth dearth. I believe it’s ultimately a matter of God and metaphysics; after all, in the past, people everywhere had children, even when they were much poorer. Nevertheless, in Hungary Orban’s spending a fortune in public dollars to encourage families to have kids is popular — or at least not unpopular — because at some level, Hungarians understand that their survival as a people depends on turning this crisis around.

If we were a wiser world, a world that had more concern for its children and its future than what Obama called “the fierce urgency of now,” we would be able to have these discussions. We would not frame having children as just one consumer choice among others. It is the choice, for heaven’s sake! A people that ceases having children will cease to exist. It is not the case that everyone who can have children should have children, but a culture in which childbearing isn’t seen as the norm, and indeed a good and noble thing that all members of society should support, is a culture that is already dead and doesn’t know it.

Last word: my mom and dad used to reflect nostalgically on their early years of marriage and parenthood, talking about their material struggles, and concluding that those were some of the happiest times of their lives. My kids are all grown now, and we are all dealing with the incredible pain and fracturing caused by divorce. I now live with my older son in Europe, a place I had long dreamed of living in, and my career is more successful than it ever has been. Yet never have I been happier than the days when that same boy who is about to start grad school turned his little feverish body over on that couch and upchucked onto my head. This is not sentimental nostalgia. This is truth. You parents who read this know what I’m talking about.

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