Parenting is hard...

...you should try it.

We had some friends over for dinner the other night. We all have young kids at home, and so naturally chatted about (what else?!) parenting.

Of course the trevails and trials of parenthood come up. We’ve all had the kid who will eat nothing but vanilla yogurt for several days or hates socks. But, “Life would be meaningless without our kids,” my husband said. I’ll note that this is one of the hottest things any man can say, but especially the man with whom you have chosen to parent these rascals.

We nodded along. We all agree: our kids give us perspective, wonder, joy, deep wells of love and purpose.

But is that a good enough reason to have them? Even more troubling - are we just selfishly demanding that these tiny beings complete us?

I’ve been reading a lot about the fertility crisis, in the West generally and in America in particular. One thing that stands out to me is the way that we are now questioning something that used to be commonplace assumption. Broadly speaking, we used to believe that everyone needed kids, wanted kids, would have kids if they could. Now, again making a generalization, we assume that you don’t. And, as a kicker, even if you have children, you find them to be difficult, inconvenient barriers to an easier, wealthier, less-stressed life.

Is that our goal: ease, wealth, or peace?

If it is, nobody, and I mean nobody - who has ever made a young man pick up his room, pull weeds or scoop dog poo - the kinds of things which turn a little boy into a young man - thinks that parenting is easy or peaceful. No one who’s ever trotted sweatily behind a bike as chubby legs wobble on two wheels is confused about the cost of parenting. No one who has ever coached a tween on hygiene and body hair thinks, “Wow; what fun!”

Parenting is a sacrifice, and saying that it’s not does our generation a disservice. We buy school shoes and sports fees, haircuts and Goldfish, and any wanna-be parent watching from the sidelines will wonder if this is such a good idea. Kids are expensive, they interrupt our conversations, our plans, our retirement accounts. I think this hard, expensive, life-upending adventure is worth it, however, despite the memes about exhausted, broke parents and the legions of my peers who have opted out entirely.

Why? Are some people just built to be parents?

This will be construed as a hot take, but I think we parent for the common good as well as our own.

Parenting is not something you want to do. By God’s grace it becomes a joy and an honor. But we do it because we will die out if we don’t, because the loss of our culture, our faith, our very species hangs in the balance, because we believe that if someone gave us life, we should do the same.

The other day we went to the theater to see Toy Story 5. Jesse woke up from his nap singing “You’ve Got a Friend in Me”, as prepped as a Norwegian soccer fan for the excitement to come. He wore his Woody shirt and hat and brought stuffed Buzz and Woody along, earning jealous stares from other young movie-goers. When Buzz and Woody appeared on screen, one small ecstatic fist raised in the air in triumph - the moment was here, his heroes were on the big screen in a new adventure - and he stayed glued to the film the entire time, munching popcorn and switching between Adam’s and my laps in total immersive joy.

It was one of those rare moments when I could feel time rushing by, like the sand under my toes as the wave retreats back to the sea. I knew, deep in my gut, that this would not come around again, it was a fleeting, precious moment of wonder. His full-throated obsession is good for me, the childlike imagination we watched play out on-screen was here in my lap, making my thighs fall asleep and my hips hurt. My kids are a flesh-and-blood reminder that children aren’t props or vehicles for our own inner child, they are people, like Blaze and Bonnie, like Andy and Sid, characters in their own dramas and heartbreaks, ecstasies and adventures.

While I was tearing up over the enthusiasm of my children for Toy Story (Addy and Isaiah were devouring popcorn and giggling one row over with their cousins), I noticed that adults greatly outnumbered children in the room. Not aunts and uncles and grandparents shepherding kids and therefore making the grown-up-count higher than the kid-count, but genuinely childless people, coming on a weekday afternoon to enjoy a cartoon.

Now hear me: this alone is not a judgment. Toy Story is great, for all ages. And I understand the desire for nostalgia. I’m a Millennial on the cusp of Gen X, in possession of my very own print journalism degree no less, exactly the kind of person who craves the simpler times of Woody and Buzz.

But my generation’s obsession with our own childhoods while being unwilling to get into the messy business of raising kids ourselves is troubling to me. So many of us are engaging in cheap memory-hacking, the rush of storytelling without the sacrifice of having to explain that story to a small, not-yet-developed brain.

For example, in the latest Superman movie, Clark Kent’s whole storyline revolves around an obsession with his parents, first with the Kryptonian Jor-El and then with his earthly adoptive family, Jonathan and Martha Kent. I’m sorry to tell you that it did not work for me. The emotional pay-off was supposed to be that a grown being, capable of lifting skyscrapers and saving the world, watched home movies to sooth himself post-heroics. I found it weird and deeply unsatisfying. Worse still, it’s emblematic of a growing need of my generation to constantly be the child, the precious misfit, the one in need of cheerful memories and head-patting.

But think of the heroes of our youth: Han Solo and Jim Hawkins and Jean Valjean; Aragorn and Matt Murdock and Steve Rogers. There are plenty of women to name, too, none of which would have curled up in a ball to stare at childhood photos of themselves after a hard day. Can you imagine Jo March or Leia Organa or Elizabeth Bennett needing such a comfort? What would we think of Arwen or Claire Fraser or Meg Murry scurrying home after battle to watch themselves at a younger age, in search of warm-milk reassurance? Our heroes did not model the endless backward gaze that our generation has perfected. So why are we still pursuing it?

I think we’ve told ourselves that connecting with our inner child is valuable, that examining our lives, our stories, our origins gives us emotional resonance and power. And it does. Play is important, and so is memory.

But it can become a sedative, and keep us from the real business of being the heroes of our own stories, the safe laps for the next generation to find themselves on.

It’s nice to be the kid, but it’s even better to give the childhood you dream of to the young ones, rather than fighting with time to go backwards, into the shell of a memory. We want to milk our past for meaning while avoiding the deep wells of poignancy and power right in front of us, here and now.

It’s time to grow up. The next generation needs us.