My grandmother, formidable woman that she was, bore five children into this world without once apologizing for it. Her husband—my grandfather—was the second-youngest of nine, which meant he had already been raised in a human anthill. And if you trace the line further back, as I once did in a fit of historical necromancy, all the way to the 17th century, you’ll find the same pattern repeated like a stubborn melody: very few families in my father’s bloodline bothered with fewer than five offspring. I myself am one of seven—an echo of that ancestral insistence that abundance of children was not a curse but an asset.
On my father’s side, the forebears were tillers of soil, hewers of stone, breakers of their backs in mines, and movers of goods across river and sea. In such lives, children were not “mouths to feed,” they were additional hands—smaller at first, yes, but quickly capable of real work. The more children you had, the more secure your survival, and by extension, the more respected your place in that rugged social order. Children were both insurance and wealth, status and shield.
On my mother’s side, however, the story bent differently. These were clerks, minor administrators, the pale-faced custodians of the city’s endless paperwork. They dwelled among walls rather than fields, and within those walls more than two children were already considered reckless extravagance. Children were not wealth but expense, not status but embarrassment—like bringing a muddy boot into a drawing room. The truly ambitious wanted careers, not progeny. For them, children were not companions in toil or bulwarks of survival but burdensome parasites gnawing at the ankles of their aspirations.
And now, in our present carnival of inversion, we see where such thinking leads. Once upon a time, men and women drew admiration from the size of their household, the din of many voices at the table. Today, a woman can garner more status by posing for strangers on OnlyFans than by raising the next generation. We have, somehow, learned to revere exhibition over creation, consumption over continuity. And when women are taught to see digital voyeurism as a “career,” children inevitably lose.If we are to crawl out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves, we must be ruthless about changing what we admire. Because admiration is the compass of any society, and right now, ours points directly toward the abyss.