A New Influence
(First published in my print column: The Nature of Things)
As we watch the horror of yet another outbreak of violence in the world taking thousands of lives and displacing millions of families in the onslaught of another war, one is challenged to believe that ours is a species with even a modicum of intelligence.
Is it that, or is it perhaps that we’ve just had an imbalance of influence for far too long—millennia-long?
Bear with me a moment…
In a recent interview Canadian psychology professor, author and “culture warrior,” Jordan Petersen, made the claim that for the first time in recorded history women 30 years of age and younger have produced fewer children than ever before. These statistics are taken not just from the U.S., but all advanced countries where women have access to education and financial independence. But as much as it might appear that modern-day educated women are opting for careers instead of raising children, a deeper dive into cultural sway reveals a different picture.
Petersen added that while gaining education and cultivating a career are more accessible to women today in most developed countries, women are still more likely to put their profession on hiatus, scale back duties, or forego pursuing advancement in the workplace in order to prioritize and accommodate the requirements of child-rearing—much more so than their male counterparts. In other words, regardless of social, cultural, or economic influence—or even personal empowerment opportunity—biology still trumps all when it comes to women heeding their own inherent desires toward having children and a family. (This, offered in generalizing terms—of course there are many women who are quite content with having made the choice not to have children. But they do not represent the majority.)
We pour endless hours into our children—mothers and fathers, both. But biologically speaking, it is the women who undoubtedly sacrifice the most. As young mothers undergoing the physical and emotional life-bomb pregnancy presents, to months of changing diapers and feeding, years of protecting and nurturing; a mother is young when she begins this journey and when the children finally leave the house as adults, her own youth has gone as well. Parenting is taking a big part of your own life and giving it to your children. Society does not notice or reward the love you pour into your children, or appreciate the sacrifices you have made. Seldom is it seen for the great deed that it truly is.
People never include on their resume birthing or raising children. Compared to founding organizations, winning offices, creating new technology, or conceiving great ideas, society does not view raising children as an accomplishment.
Ours is a world reduced to valuing only that to which a number can be attached, yet this perception of life as a series of calculations leaves out everything that we cannot quantify. How does one quantify beauty? Can you quantify joy? Who can quantify love? No wonder our world has become in so many ways ugly, joyless, and unloving. That is what happens when decisions are guided by maximizing or minimizing a quantity, whether it is military arsenal, national territory, cases of an illness or bushels per acre. In all instances, the quantity equates to money.
In maximizing money, we devalue everything that money cannot buy. And of course the paradox is, it is only the things that money cannot buy that are truly meaningful in the scope of human life.
Parents who pour labor and love into children, and mothers who sacrifice career opportunities to raise children are doing some of the most important work there is to do—to give one’s life and youth to another being, so that they may become human, is a profound gift.
If we as a society really embraced that truth, we would reorganize all of our systems. We would organize society in the spirit of, “How can we best support and prepare these people of the future?” In the microcosm of the family unit, mothers live and breathe this notion for their children every day. And in so doing, there can be no consideration of war.
Maybe it’s time some of that kind of thinking was applied to the bigger picture of our world as a whole.
Maybe it’s time we put some of those working women—those modern-day mothers—in positions of power to influence a more loving and meaningful future.
