This NY Times piece on the recent Natal Conference in Austin, by Emma Goldberg, is highly ironic and actually quite clever. Goldberg avoids doing the thing that makes so much reporting by liberals unreadable, that is, dismissing whole movements because some of their members are obnoxious racists. She found all sorts of people at the conference, including white nationalists but also tech types and women with lots of children just looking to connect with people like themselves. One woman said she had attended because “I knew having five kids wouldn’t make me the weirdest person in the room.”
Here's one good bit; when economist Bryan Caplan was challenged on how few women were among the speakers, he said,
“We were going to have more women. But they all got pregnant.” (He meant this literally; the conference organizers said four female speakers had dropped out, citing either pregnancy or caring for a sick child.)
The key observation is that while the mostly male attendees all think it is important to get women to have more babies, none of them have a clue how to do that. And so far as I can tell, the only answer anyone has found is “patriarchal religious cultism,” which I doubt will be successful on a large scale anywhere.
What struck me most was the sense many attendees had that having lots of kids makes you weird:
“If you want to have babies, go girl boss that,” said Hannah Centers, 41, a mother from Tennessee who home-schools her three children and said she felt judged by her neighbors when she told them she was pregnant with her third.
I have more children than any of my close friends, but if they think my family is weird, they are careful not to say anything in front of me. In fact I cannot remember ever feeling judged or shamed about my family. Some people clearly think it is crazy, but in the spirit of thinking people are crazy for being into ice climbing. So I'm not sure if people really are judging these mothers, or if maybe they are just insecure and seeing judgment where there is only bemusement.
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So I'm not sure if people really are judging these mothers, or if maybe they are just insecure and seeing judgment where there is only bemusement.
Occam's Razor - people really are judging them, but for being (or flirting with the idea of being) weird patriarchal religious cultists. They just assume they're being judged for having a bunch of kids, when that's really just a symptom of the actual issue.
I have three kids, and my personal viewpoint is that I have *never* experienced the kind of negativity this woman is describing.
I could speculate as to why this is; my guess is it has something to do with the fact that my kids rarely had meltdowns in restaurants and were taught to be polite to wait-staff.
(note that this is not the same as claiming that they *never* had meltdowns in public)
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