Gratitude and Parenthood
Parenthood is something to be highly thankful for. Society should encourage more of it.
I try to write a piece for Thanksgiving every year, mostly touching on how we should be thankful for the incredible nation we all live in. That point still stands: America in 2024 is the best place and time to ever live in human history. We have amazing liberties, profound prosperity, and wondrous technology that allows us a material standard of living far greater than previously experienced by mankind. But this year, I’m going in a slightly different, more personal – but also more universal – direction. This year, I’m thankful for one thing in particular, the most important thing in my life: being a father. My wonderful daughter, Penelope, was born last July and my life has not been the same since. Parenting is the biggest challenge and the greatest reward I’ve ever experienced. It has presented novel happenings every single day, brought me immense joy, and fundamentally altered the way I view the world. It has made me a better, more thoughtful person. And it has put life into a brand-new perspective.
Joining the eternal community of parents, a lineage that has sustained the human race throughout our entire time here on Earth, is the Ur-experience of mankind. A parent in 2024 is connected experientially to a parent in 1564, or 984, or 44 – or even further back through the earliest periods of recorded, and unrecorded, history. The responsibility to feed, clothe, house, and raise children has not changed, although the means of doing so has. Children have always learned to walk, talk, and eat. They have always fallen down, gotten up, and fallen down once again. And parents have always been there to see these changes over time, watching their offspring grow from infant to toddler to child to adolescent to adult. Being linked in this unstoppable chain of being is remarkable and inspiring. It is a connection to the very basis of our shared humanity, both past and future.
And that connection is a deeply conservative thing. Respecting the past and the timeless traditions of humanity are the bulwarks of conservatism, properly understood. The concept of society as a compact between the living, the dead, and the unborn is a conservative mainstay. Human flourishing is the goal of all conservative thinking, and bearing children that comprise the next generation of humanity is the root of said flourishing. Parenthood links individuals to a broader community infrastructure, including schools, playgrounds, churches, and extracurricular activities, where they meet and engage with fellow parents, building connections across a variety of classes, races, religions, political affiliations, and careers. This is how society builds the “little platoons” described by the foundational conservative thinker Edmund Burke as essential to the associational life required for civilizational success. Those ties to community inculcate conservatism, as they incentivize long-term continuation of the institutions of society – a basic tenet of conservative ideology. All of these together make parenting an inherently conservative undertaking.
Parenthood is itself a wonderful thing that is good and necessary for society overall, but each parent has a key role to play. Motherhood gets a lot of the press – and justifiably so! – but as a man, I’ve only experienced fatherhood. And it deserves far more of a societal focus than it gets, as the mentorship and modeling of masculinity that fathers provide are irreplaceable. Men are, by far, the most violent members of society; we commit the most crimes, engage in the most interpersonal conflict, and do the most destruction. Those physical instincts can be channeled towards useful ends: preventing crime, defending the nation and the homestead, and risking one’s life to save those of the more vulnerable. Masculine leadership is how those violent tendencies are directed towards positive ends, instead of those that destabilize society and harm the innocent. Fatherhood is a grounding experience for the father and an inspirational one for the son. Both are needed to create a virtuous cycle of masculinity that has beneficent civilizational impacts in the long-run.
We have all, definitionally, been part of the community of being as children, but one has to proactively choose to become a parent. That choice is one that is unfortunately becoming less commonplace in the advanced democracies of the West. Choosing parenthood is necessary for the continued existence of mankind, as without replacements for ourselves, the population will inexorably decline. And with population decline comes civilizational collapse in the long-term. Fewer people mean fewer innovators, fewer leaders, fewer explorers, and fewer geniuses. Population decline is like a snowball rolling downhill; it only gains in speed as it progresses. It requires care and choice to reverse it. And that must be an active choice.
People in my generation – Millennials – and younger are having kids later, if at all. This is due to a wide variety of reasons, but the most important to me is the failure to adequately center parenting as a necessity for the maintenance of society, as well as the denigration of American society itself as worthy of continuation. We must care about our nation to choose to prolong its existence; for far too long, American identity has been recast – falsely – as pernicious and historically evil. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. America is a uniquely moral nation, despite our faults. We should absolutely push to keep this incredible experiment going, and that means having children and raising them to learn the truth about our wonderful and glorious nation.
And we should show parenting for what it is: a profound responsibility that also presents the greatest opportunity for joy and fulfillment we can possibly experience as humans. Embracing that responsibility, one which has been borne by our ancestors going back through antiquity, is the mark of maturity. Millennials should welcome this challenge and join the ranks of our forebears in carrying the flame of mankind forward into a brighter future. It would be beneficial and grounding for our generation, one that has far more anxiety and social illness than it should. And we could all be thankful for that.