Andreae Sennyah: I’m Andreae Sennyah.
Ray Pennings: And I’m Ray Pennings. And this is Proverbs & Policy—the wisdom of two thousand years of Christian social thought for public life today.
Andreae Sennyah: Welcome, listeners, to another episode of Proverbs & Policy. We’re really excited in this episode to be welcoming our guest, Christine Emba, who is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on gender and sexuality, feminism and masculinity. She is also a contributing writer at the New York Times and a senior fellow at the Georgetown University Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life. Blessedly, Christine is also a contributing editor of Comment magazine, which I am sure is the reason she is most famous to all of you. Christine, thanks for joining us. It’s so great to have you.
Christine Emba: No, thanks for inviting me. I’m excited to be here.
Ray Pennings: Well, thank you, Andreae. Christine, it’s great to have you. Every conversation I’ve had with you over the years has been provocative. Your book—anybody who has the courage to write a book on Rethinking Sex: A Provocation. Sometimes the temptation of those books is to lower the conversation, but you’ve had a way of elevating it to get us to think from that topic to some great questions about how society is ordered and what the meaning of life is. And I’m looking forward to having a similar elevated conversation and introduce our audience to some of your great ideas.
Christine Emba: Thank you.
Andreae Sennyah: Well, Christine, the reason we had you on today is because of the writing and reporting that you’ve done on the issues of fertility, partnership, particularly in the US, and some of the cultural undercurrents that underpin some of the trends that we’re seeing, particularly among young people. And so I wanted to set up the conversation a little bit by talking about something that has been in the news quite a bit, which is the total fertility rate, both in Canada and the US. The total fertility rate in Canada was at 1.25 and in the US it was 1.6. These were historic lows for both of our countries and has generated a lot of media reporting, a lot of debate about what’s happening in terms of people’s cultural preferences, but also the reasons why people are not having kids. And so a lot of your reporting has focused on this and kind of the mainstream explanation that people have for why people aren’t having kids. I’m curious if maybe you can talk us through what you see as some of the most common arguments, and then perhaps we can get into whether or not you agree with them. But what are some of the most common arguments that you see being made about our historically low fertility rates, particularly in the US?
Christine Emba: Well, I mean, it’s important to note that the total fertility rate has been falling for a while, but has actually fallen very rapidly over the past two decades. In the United States, if you take out the fertility rates of recent immigrants, Americans are below replacement rate, which means that they have a total fertility rate of lower than 2.1, meaning that there will not be enough future humans to replace everyone who is alive today.
But this falling fertility rate is not just a US phenomenon or even a North American phenomenon. It’s actually happening across the globe. And that’s why demographers and policymakers are getting kind of scared. It’s also why the problem seems so elusive. What could be causing fertility rates’ decline everywhere?
There are a few things that, at least in the United States, people like to point to. One is simply financial costs. Inequality is rising in the United States. Inflation has been a plague. And because the United States is a particularly—and, in my mind, unfortunately—you know, independent-feeling nation, we don’t have a lot of supports in place for parenthood. America’s the only developed country with no paid maternal or paternal leave. We do not really subsidize child care. And many people, you know, think about paying for daycare for a child as a cost that could be equivalent to a mortgage in some cities.
But then there are also psychological factors. If you talk to young people today about why they are on the fence or have decided not to have kids, finances come up, but so does a feeling of opportunity cost—that kids will take up a lot of your life, that they will become the focus, that you will have to set other projects or other desires aside in a way that you may not prefer.
And then finally, and to me this is kind of the most interesting point, there’s an undercurrent of anxiety—a sense that the climate feels like it’s collapsing, our politics are alarming, AI is maybe coming. It feels like a scary world to bring a child into. And young people who want to be good and ethical parents wonder if it’s fair to have a child whose life they fear might be worse than that of their parents.
Ray Pennings: It’s interesting, if I can jump in. If I take those three reasons, they strike me from the most mundane—policy, maternal leave, and all the rest, which, let’s face it, given the topics of having kids and all that, all seems kind of boring and technical and transactional, and yet are pretty important. You do note the fact that America is—you’re alone in terms of not necessarily having those policies. We have them in Canada. We have very generous provisions compared to some other countries, and yet not particularly helping. Is there a policy solution to all of this, or is that just sort of the icing on the cake, and the other issues you mentioned are more fundamental than policy?
Christine Emba: Yeah, you know, I mean, policymakers wish that there is a policy solution to this problem, but so far there hasn’t been one. And that’s the kind of interesting thing about—and the sort of puzzling thing about—seeing these fertility rates falling across the world regardless of kind of the policies that different countries have in place. So, you know, Americans, for instance, can complain about the cost of child care, say, or daycare, but in countries like France or Denmark that have, you know, state-subsidized child care, fertility rates are still falling. We think about paid paternal and maternal leave and not having that policy. But again, across the Nordic states, in Canada, countries have those policies and their fertility rates continue to fall.
And then there have been countries that have actually tried to make really sort of specific policy interventions of the kind that, you know, policymakers like to talk about exploring—you know, giving cash payments or bonuses to families that have children, trying to incentivize fertility. South Korea has been actually—South Korea and Hungary have been on the frontier of this, like actually kind of providing baby bonuses to families. And has it worked? It has not worked. It really hasn’t worked at all. In fact, South Korea has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world still, despite targeted policy interventions to try and change that. So that makes me think that while policy matters, it’s not going to be the total solution. And we need to think about the problem in a more holistic way.
Andreae Sennyah: Could you delve a little bit deeper into that? Because I know in some of your writing, you have raised these common economic and even political drivers for why people are choosing not to have kids. But I think you’ve argued that that’s not the whole story—that there’s something deeper going on in terms of people’s sense of meaning, purpose in life, and a more fundamental question about whether being itself is a good thing. I’m curious if you could delve more into that and some of your thinking, or what you’ve heard from young people on this issue.
Christine Emba: Yeah, that was my, you know, third point of the three reasons why people might be choosing not to have kids. And I actually really do think that that is the key issue of our time and also the hardest to address. If you think about it, honestly, these questions about, you know, do I have paid leave? Is it expensive? Are there climate issues? People have been having kids for millennia in very bad circumstances, in famine, in war. This is not the first scary time, but our response to it does seem a bit different.
One of the most interesting books that I’ve read recently is actually by the author Catherine Pakaluk. It’s called Hannah’s Children, and it is a sort of ethnographic survey of women in the United States who have five kids or more, which is what she—it’s kind of arbitrary, but she decides to choose that as, you know, sort of having unusually large families in this day and age. And in interviewing these women and asking them sort of how and why they’re capable of this, they don’t talk about having a lot of money or having a lot of resources necessarily. They all talk about faith—not necessarily even Christian faith, but faith in something larger than themselves, and a belief that children are a good in and of themselves, that it’s worthwhile to pursue, and that providence on some level will help them and give them the ability to take care of and raise their families. They have a belief that it is important to have kids and that they can trust somehow that it will go well.
Ray Pennings: If I can jump in there—you mentioned faith. To what extent is it belonging to a community? As opposed to—you know, as I’m listening to you, I’m sort of thinking of, you know, the end-of-liberalism arguments and the very individualistic sort of concerns, as opposed to having a large—I come from an immigrant family. Depending on who asked the question, my wife and I have one child, but if I need to answer in a larger sort of sense, my siblings and I average over five each. So, yeah, I mean, I’m used to an environment in which there is large families, but that is as much a sense of community sharing responsibility, a community of faith in which there is support. Life is thought of differently in that context, and I suspect decisions about having kids are too. Is there an element of individual versus community in how we understand the world?
Christine Emba: I think so. So that actually is kind of a—I wouldn’t call it a secondary point, but another theory around why people, especially in the middle class and upper middle class, seem to be having fewer children. Or it’s a theory that some researchers have. Sociologists and demographers, people who sort of study these social functions, note that a lot of these behaviours are kind of contagious. If you’re a young person and suddenly all of your friends start pairing off and getting married, it becomes more likely that you will do that yourself. If your friends start having kids, it becomes more likely that you will have kids. Friends or family start having kids. And if you grow up in an environment, in a community, where having kids and having a family and sharing responsibilities is the norm, you’ve seen examples of how it works. And it makes you feel like you can do it yourself, like it is possible.
One of the things that I’ve noticed in the United States, and that researchers have commented on too, is that families have shrunk over the past several decades from an average of four or more kids to less than two at this point, if we’re looking at the total fertility rate. And talking to young people too, and noting other things about our community formation—how people increasingly move away from home to live in cities, don’t live embedded in religious communities or their family communities—I talk to a lot of people who don’t have any real experience with kids, who have never held a baby or can’t remember the last time they did, who find it much more natural to play with someone’s dog than to talk to a toddler.
And if you are not embedded in a community or have a background in which child-rearing feels normal, it’s really daunting. It is a daunting prospect. It looks scary and novel. And it’s not like having a pet, because you are responsible for a child for eighteen years and also recognize that this is a person whom you will be taking care of, and you don’t want to get it wrong. And I think actually that element of unfamiliarity is something that people don’t really think about when they’re making that decision, but makes people, like, a little bit more scared to have kids. They don’t know or have a sense of how that really fits into their lives anymore.
Andreae Sennyah: Totally. I think too, Christine, your point about the unfamiliarity of children, or being around kids—not just in your personal life, but also in public and social environments. I often think about the fact that I frequently go to restaurants and never see any kids there, right? Not just one kid, let alone two or three or four. And so I think there’s something about the socialization—kind of like the passive socialization to being okay with having kids around, okay with even the sounds that kids make or the things that kids do—that makes the idea of having kids more daunting and more foreign-feeling to a lot of people who are of the younger generation.
You mentioned this too, Christine, that, you know, the more that you see these, like, models of your friends or your family pairing up and having kids, the more likely you are to do it as well. And I know one dimension of the work that you’ve done has been looking into the formation of partnerships, which is a kind of inescapable question when it comes to this topic of fertility. And I just read this morning a really interesting article that you came out with in the New York Times about the dating habits of Gen Z. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that. I know in the article you cite a survey from the Institute for Family Studies. And I’m curious, maybe if you could, like, delve into some of the arguments you make there. There’s lots that I could go into, but maybe start with the Institute for Family Studies and what their findings were about Gen Z and their dating habits.
Christine Emba: Yes. So I wrote an article in the Times this spring titled “The Reason Gen Z Isn’t Dating.” And the research that I cited was from a survey of young adults from the Institute for Family Studies and Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute, which also studies sort of family and social issues. And yeah, the dating habits of Gen Z—they don’t have any, because they’re not dating.
This survey that they cited found that only 30 percent of its respondents—they made a nationally representative survey and then cut it down to a representative set of people who say that they are single specifically and were of, you know, sort of young adult age. Only 30 percent of those respondents said that they were actively dating, as in had gone on a date in the past month, despite actually half of them saying that they were interested in finding a relationship. And they used what I found to be an indelible phrase. The survey top-line report stated that we’re in a depressed dating economy, which, looking around me, seems true.
Andreae Sennyah: That’s really interesting. Ray, I was wondering maybe if you could jump in on this, because Ray frequently points to me as the resident young person to explain cultural trends. But I’m curious from your perspective, and from a generational perspective, Ray: what is your response to what Christine has just shared with us about Gen Z’s dating habits? How would your generation have thought of dating or contextualized some of these trends that we’re seeing?
Ray Pennings: I certainly notice the difference between my son’s generation and my own generation, even in terms of expectations and everything else. I haven’t studied it like you have. I think there are a couple of things that I observe. One, I’m wondering if the increasing availability of dating apps is a predominant way of meeting people. I’m even looking within a church community where there are lots of youth events in which—you know, my generation, we went to youth events, and there were lots of jokes in terms of why you were really going, what your real motive was. They weren’t always as spiritual as they were made out to be, and yet turned out to be a place where an awful lot of us ended up meeting our partner—and whether that is church events, high school events. There was a thing of: you went to events where you were likely to make connections with some potential partners, and you proceeded from there.
What struck me—what strikes me—is that immediately defined the pool somewhat in terms of where it is, and there was a set of shared expectations. You know, you talked earlier about being with kids. I grew up in the midst of, you know, fifty-eight first cousins living within, you know, not that far. You always were with cousins of various ages and everything else, and the people that you ended up meeting also were there. So a lot of that was just a given.
When you hop on a dating app—I’ve never been on one, full confession here, so I’m dealing totally with the stereotypes of swipe right and swipe left—but the whole world, to some extent—you know, algorithms don’t do the sorting as well as you did the natural sorting when you went. So I think, first of all, just the narrowing of the pool—it seems to me way more intimidating going on an app in which the whole world is possibly there and there’s no way of narrowing down. So I think that’s part of it.
I think the other thing—and I’ve read it in something you have written along the way, I don’t remember whether it’s a book or an article—but you have talked about how young people actually talk about dating and theorize and all the rest a whole lot more, but they don’t actually do it. And I’m wondering—you know, I’m not sure where that comes from. You know, in my generation, we didn’t talk about dating. We talked about potential dates and compared notes and did all of that. And I suspect the girls did the same among themselves, and the guys. Now it seems a different sort of conversation that is much weightier philosophically, theologically. People are carrying much weightier expectations in than I think my peers did, when there was somewhat of an almost natural expectation as just sort of life’s pathway at a certain age. When you went to university—finished high school, went to university—the expectation was there that you would begin looking. At the same time, that was part of just—that was just part of growing up.
Christine Emba: Yeah, no, I think you—I think you bring up some really important points there, and I think you’re really on to something in the things that you bring up. I mean, so to go back to that survey really quickly, another thing that was interesting about the findings was, you know, people said that they wanted to be in a relationship, but they weren’t actually dating. So a kind of mismatch between desire and action. And probing further into, okay, why are you not dating if you want to be in a relationship? The most cited factor or reason for why somebody wouldn’t be dating was what the survey termed a lack of dating efficacy. So people said that they didn’t feel comfortable, basically. They weren’t sure that they were good enough at dating. They felt like they—
Ray Pennings: That’s nothing new. None of us really felt all that comfortable, to be perfectly honest.
Christine Emba: They felt like they were not necessarily strong enough to handle rejection, that they didn’t really know how to identify potential partners or the right person for them. They didn’t really know or feel comfortable asking someone out. They didn’t feel certain that they could, you know, read someone else’s emotions or behave appropriately in a relationship. They didn’t know what to do. And so they were opting out.
And I think this ties into actually a bigger problem in our broader society that I think also ties back to what we were talking about with kids—this socialization aspect. One of the things that I wrote about in my book, Rethinking Sex, was a sort of a disappearance of norms, basically. We have moved, you know, from—in the post–sexual revolution world, we kind of had this belief that, like, oh, more freedom is better, more privacy is better. Like, it’s great that nobody is looking over my shoulder when I go out on a date or telling me what to do; I can make up, you know, my own rules. But it turns out, especially in, you know, these emotionally fraught circumstances, knowing what the rules are and what you’re supposed to do is actually really helpful. It can be extremely daunting to make it up by yourself as you go along.
And if you think about Gen Z in particular, this is also a generation who came of age and had some of their formative years—when you would be learning how to interact with other people, going on your first dates—they were locked up at home because of COVID. So a lot of them didn’t get that real-world interaction or understanding of what it looks like to be with other people. And that’s showing up in their fear and anxiety about dating.
The other thing, Ray, that I think is really important—I think you’re really on to something about how dating apps have changed the game. And I actually am a strong believer in the idea that dating apps have been very bad for dating culture and have changed a romantic culture for the worse for at least a generation. You’re right. There is something about the sheer array of options that feels daunting to people. They don’t do a great job on sorting for what matters. You can, you know, swipe by height or something, but it’s much harder to figure out, you know, like, is this person funny? Like, do their values match mine? Do they get along with my friends and family?
I’ve also written about how apps contribute to this kind of feeling of disposability. There are so many options available to you. It’s hard to settle down and just pick one. And that also makes it harder to commit to working on a dating relationship. If something is not going well or there’s an argument, you can tell yourself, well, just find someone else and leave the relationship. Then you don’t have a sustained relationship that might lead to a marriage or kids. Many of these fertility rate problems are actually just downstream of this larger problem of finding a partner and being able to be in a relationship, which has always been the first step.
And then I think the last thing about dating in this moment, and your comment around, I guess, how people are talking about dating but not talking about their dates or going on their dates—I think this is kind of an internet problem. There’s so much content—and combined, I think, with people being socialized online during COVID, but also we’re all—all young people are kind of broadly socialized online. There’s a ton of content out there about dating and women and men. And on the internet, because of the way that algorithms work, inflammatory content is rewarded. So you hear a lot about extremes: women are bad in this way and you have to, like, be very careful; men are dangerous and abusive in this way and you need to be really careful; here are some tricks about understanding women; here’s, like, dating advice about how to get things out of men; here is what the perfect, you know, girlfriend will look like. And also, if you want, here’s pornography to watch that will, you know, show you what you should expect from women.
All of this content is not real. That’s the thing. It’s usually much more extreme—in the case of pornography, very extreme. Not reflective of the interactions that you’ll be having in real life, and doesn’t teach you about how to interact with a real person and get to know sort of their ins and outs and compromises. And it makes the opposite sex seem very scary, especially for women. And so I think there is a sort of underlying anxiety that leads people to talk a lot about dating and sort of theorize how to do it well based on all of this information and all the people they see on their apps, but not want to take the step to actually do it.
Ray Pennings: It’s interesting—as you’re saying that, what strikes me—pardon the going back to a generation, but I just think back to my own experience. There was an algorithm at work. I grew up with sort of a whole raft of cousins, a couple of sisters, a mixed-gender youth group of a dozen or so people that were relatively close. We did things together. Ironically, the evaluation of potential dates—even though we hated it when it happened, you actually sort of implicitly got the sanction of who you should pair up with or not pair up with by that peer sort of thing. Now, that wasn’t black and white. It wasn’t always explicit. But there was a sense of understanding—you know, you really should consider this person. I know that, you know, on the face of it, it’s not here. But, you know, recommendations come, all of that. It’s a much better algorithm and much more human than the sort of “all men or all women have these characteristics,” which, as you say, is not true at all.
Christine Emba: And literally much more human. I think about dating apps—and I think people are coming to realize this—is that dating apps succeed by having people not get in relationships, by having them not succeed. They want them to stay on the app. Your happiness is not actually their priority. Whereas in the algorithm that you talk about, Ray, like your friends and family and church—like, ultimately they want you to find a person who fits you and then go off and get married. So they’re actually working for your benefit. And that’s a very different thing.
Ray Pennings: To what extent then are the broader trends of social isolation, family breakdown—the fact that we have less siblings, less friends, less—you know, I suspect that peer group—you know, I had one or two close friends, but I had a dozen to twenty sort of larger group, depending on where it’s at. I’m wondering whether or not the average circle of the person in their early twenties today is a fraction of that number. And is that a factor?
Christine Emba: Yeah, no, it absolutely is. Research shows that people say that they have fewer close friends and that they also live near fewer close friends or relatives or relations. And I think that that is a huge factor, actually. You know, to go back to earlier in our conversation, where you asked about, you know, is there a policy solution for some of these fertility problems? I think that all of these problems are really interrelated. We haven’t even touched on kind of what is talked in the United States of as a loneliness crisis and social isolation. I think that all of these things are tied together. People feel lonely. They don’t make friends. People aren’t dating, so they don’t enter relationships. People don’t enter relationships and they’re lonely, which makes the world seem scarier. So of course they don’t want to have children. All of this is interrelated, and these are, like, major social questions that aren’t going to be solved by one policy silver bullet. And I think that’s why, you know, politicians and countries that have tried to have a silver bullet have not found it succeed.
Andreae Sennyah: Christine, you’ve given us lots to chew on in this conversation. But something that I’m really thinking about is this interaction between sort of good and fundamental human desires and how they are being distorted in the current context, particularly for young people. The work that we’ve done at Cardus has shown kind of maybe similar things to what you’re saying, insofar as people seem to desire to have more children than they actually do, and that there is this gap between kind of undershooting what your true desire for the size of your family is, for example.
At Cardus—as you know, as an editor at Comment—we really try to focus also on the hopeful aspect of the challenges that we see. And so I’m wondering if you could help us conclude this conversation by giving us something that is still giving you hope, despite some of these trends that you’re seeing in the US and similar things that we’re seeing in Canada. What is a cause for hope when it comes to these questions about fertility and partnership in both of our countries?
Christine Emba: I’m glad you asked that, because honestly, writing and researching about these topics can be kind of a downer for me. And so looking for hope is really important. I think that Cardus—I mean, one of the things Cardus, you know, makes itself known for is a sort of care for the common good. And one of the things that makes me feel hopeful about this moment is that I think young people especially are becoming awake to this idea that something is off, and becoming more concerned about the common good and their own good.
I feel hopeful when I read about younger generations who are, you know, adopting sort of a neo-Luddite-ism and giving up their smartphones on purpose, who are, like, actively trying to separate from social media. So I live in Washington, DC, and I went to a really funny event recently. A young guy in the city started putting up posters and created, like, an—online, admittedly—invitation to an event in the park, in this big park in DC. And the event was just called “Eat an Apple with Me.” And he was like, “I’ll be there eating an apple at noon in this park.”
Andreae Sennyah: How many people showed up, Christine?
Christine Emba: So over three thousand people ended up RSVPing. And he was like, “I was going to provide apples, but now it’s got to be BYO apple, because I don’t have enough.” And, like, hundreds of people, including me, showed up at this park—like, in real life, not online—to just, like, eat an apple because it was funny, and, like, make jokes about it. And, you know, I just saw people, like, talking to each other and making connections and existing in the real world. And it seems clear that there is a desire for that, and people are trying to pursue it. And I think that’s the only thing that’s going to save us. And I’m glad to see that it is beginning to happen.
Andreae Sennyah: That’s a great story to end us off, Christine. I want to thank you so much for your time, for joining us on this episode of Proverbs & Policy. There’s lots for Ray and I to chew on and discuss in part two of this episode.
Ray Pennings: Including an apple.
Andreae Sennyah: Yeah, maybe we’ll bring apples, Ray. That could be good.
Christine Emba: That sounds like a delicious idea.
Andreae Sennyah: Terrible joke to end the episode. Okay, well, thanks so much, Christine.
Ray Pennings: Thank you, Christine.
Andreae Sennyah: All right, Ray, well, welcome to this segment where we discuss what we heard from today’s episode from our guest, Christine Emba, who was talking to us about fertility, the causes of declining fertility, particularly in the US, and what that means for us in public life. I’m curious about your initial reactions to what we heard from Christine.
Ray Pennings: I thought it was fascinating in the sense that what you would think is a very personal topic—fertility, dating, relationships, all about individual choices—how it really came down to bigger issues of community, belonging, and relationships with others. And it had implications far beyond the personal. Yet, on the other hand, policy doesn’t fix it. It’s not something we fix as a society or through government. So it really focused our attention on the other institutions of society and the relationships we form in them.
Andreae Sennyah: Yeah, I’m really glad that Christine brought up so many different things for us to discuss in this portion of the episode. The first thing, I think, that is important for us in our work at Cardus, and that I hope will be helpful to listeners, right, is the question of how to talk about declining fertility. I think this has been a bit of an issue that people are hesitant to discuss, mostly because they don’t want to say the wrong thing. And so wondering maybe if we could talk a little bit about that.
So I know that in some of these discussions, there is a little bit of baggage around terms like pronatalism, for example, and what the connotations are with that term, right? I think a lot of people are concerned to speak about fertility or declining fertility because they don’t want to come across as ethnocentric. They don’t necessarily want to take an anti-immigration position, for example, in the way that we discuss this issue. And so I think those are fair concerns. I also think—you mentioned this—that it’s a deeply personal topic, right? The decision of whether you have a child, how many children you have, and with whom are all deeply personal. And I think we want to be sensitive around those discussions, you know, especially maybe for people who desire children but aren’t able to have them. And so I think it’s good for us and, you know, for our listeners to be cognizant of those places that they may not want to go when having this conversation.
But at Cardus, we’ve taken a different approach. Our colleagues Peter Jon Mitchell and Andrea Mrozek, who work in our family program, have taken the approach of asking Canadians what their fertility desires actually are. And so I’ll do a shameless plug for our own research: a report titled Home Alone that we published earlier this year, that surveyed Canadian men and women in 2025—so pretty recent data—that was asking men and women what their actual fertility desires were. And I think that gives us a lot more space to talk about this, because, as you know, Ray, we found that people are essentially undershooting, quote-unquote, their intended fertility aspirations. They’re not having as many kids as they say that they want. And I think that gives us much safer territory to discuss this topic, because we are asking Canadians what they really want. Any thoughts or reflections on that, for how you’ve navigated this debate so far and maybe how this approach that we’ve taken at Cardus could be useful to our listeners?
Ray Pennings: Yeah, I think it’s important to highlight the fact we live in a very pluralistic society in which, you know, questions of—you know, there are gender, there are questions about marriage and the state of marriage and what marriage means. And there are contested views in society as a whole. So the minute you use any of these terms, you’re almost inviting the previous polarizations into the debate. And sadly, in much of public life, people tend to dismiss those who aren’t in their camp.
So by entering into the conversation, framing it not in terms of aspiration, personal choice, and desire, we actually, on the one hand, affirm what people are wanting, and we’re highlighting the fact that actually to desire children is a deeply human thing. It is a natural thing. I think much of the conversation has come in which, okay, it’s yours. You can have the kids if you want. You don’t have to. We separate out expectation. And we focus on the other aspects—whether that’s women in the workforce, whether or not who belongs at home as a caregiver, degrees of attachment between parents, the roles between fathers and mothers in terms of support and engagement, and all of those. But we haven’t—so we reduce it to a series of individual sort of behaviours, but we don’t step back to understand there is something in most of us—not everyone.
There are some who, as we talked about with Christine—there are some real—whether it’s financial, whether it’s psychological, whether it’s fear, whether it’s unfamiliarity, not knowing how to deal with kids—it’s a scary thing. I grew up, as I mentioned, in the midst of all sorts of kids. Same time, when you go home with your wife with your first child, and all of a sudden the very basic things that you’ve done umpteen times with your siblings and your cousins—and taking care of it is totally natural—and you walk in and it’s only the two of you and the baby, you’re not sure. You’re not overly confident. At least we weren’t. And I’m not generally known as a guy who lacks confidence.
Andreae Sennyah: That’s certainly true.
Ray Pennings: Isn’t that right?
Andreae Sennyah: That’s funny.
Ray Pennings: Yeah. So it is by getting at the—just being able to address and overcome some of those things at a very personal level, I think we open up conversations in terms of those contested notions without hitting the—without starting with the conflict.
Andreae Sennyah: Yeah, I think you raise a good point. It is a huge deal to keep a human being alive, and one who’s totally innocent and dependent on you. So I think that’s an important thing that we can’t minimize in this debate.
Ray Pennings: And the record will show I have more than three decades of success at it.
Andreae Sennyah: Excellent. Well, hey, I’m glad to hear that.
Ray Pennings: I do.
Andreae Sennyah: Maybe I’ll reverse the order of the title of our podcast, Ray, by talking a little bit about the policy before we get into the proverbs. And I think it’s because the role of policy in this question is actually—it’s not insignificant, but it’s quite limited. And so we discussed this with Christine a little bit—that, you know, financial considerations are a factor for people when they decide whether or not they’re going to have children, or how many. And she was raising some of the limits in the United States of the less generous—compared to Canada, the less generous parental leave and maternity leave policies that they have. But we found in our own survey that financial concerns did rank pretty highly for people, including concerns about child care costs and, you know, worries about the economy in general. So I do think policymakers have a role to play here in ensuring that the conditions for having and growing families are suitable, that people are able to afford having the kinds of families and the size of family that they want. What’s your reaction to some of the financial considerations? Does everyone worry about this? Is this a generational problem?
Ray Pennings: No, I think—so there’s an important distinction that needs to get made in terms of the nature of government action. It’s one thing to say government should put forward policies that encourage you to have kids. And as we discussed with Christine, some of the countries that have been at the forefront of doing that—really, the results have not been overwhelming. Government can’t, because there’s a whole bunch of other considerations.
My own sense is that the government needs to make room for individuals, couples—to make room for people to make the decisions that are rightly theirs in terms of having kids. And so that has to do with everything of levels of taxation, tax credits—get out of the road and create opportunities, if you will, for those choices to be made. So I think government has a very positive role to play, very much the role of getting out of the road and creating opportunity for people to make those choices. And in that sense, you know, maternal, paternal policies, child tax credits, all of those things—I’m a fan of those. And I think it also sends the signal out what we as a society think is important. And having all of those benefits is sending the message that having kids is a good thing. Society thinks that’s important. And we’re prepared to create the room for you to make those choices and support you in those choices that you make.
The first thing I highlight is the nature of policy. It’s not always what you do. Sometimes it’s what you don’t do, and getting out of the road. I don’t want huge government programs incentivizing—you know, you’re going to get X dollars if you have three kids, and X plus—
Andreae Sennyah: Yeah, or a free fridge or something.
Ray Pennings: Exactly. Now, but let’s also recognize that there are even, you know, within sizes of them—the difference between having two kids or three kids with car seats in the back means all of a sudden a huge different choice of vehicle. It means—we always joke along the way, it’s when parenting goes from man-to-man to zone defence, in the sense when you have more kids than parents, it changes rather significantly. Observing within broader social communities and all the rest, there are significant differences.
The flip side of that, and I think that’s an important thing to have, is that practice makes perfect. People tend to be way more intimidated with their first child than they are second and third, because they’ve done it before and they managed to keep the kid alive. And lo and behold, the kid actually thrives, and all the blessings and benefits. What I fear of conversations of this is that we tend to reduce kids to cost, to the work that’s there to keep them alive, to the finances required to do them. I can say unequivocally as a father, there is nothing in life really that compares to having your own child and the relationships that you build. And there is something very distinctive. And it’s a huge reward. And I think people deep down know and want that. And we need to create the room for those blessings to dominate the conversation, and not just some of the challenges.
Andreae Sennyah: Yeah, I think this is lots to think about, Ray. But two things that are coming to mind as you responded there are these views from our tradition that we share. The first is that life is a gift, right? And that every human life is a gift. And it sounds a bit touchy-feely to maybe say that—you know, warm fuzzies, and how does that factor into policymaking? But I think it hits on the fact that there’s something transcendent about that, that there’s something bigger than a government policy at play here. Like, your life is a gift, my life is a gift. And yeah, that’s not a technical consideration. I don’t have an economic value to it—to that.
And then I would say the second thing is about the relationships between people that you were touching on—that the family is actually, I think we would share this view, that the family is something prior to most of our other institutions, right? It precedes the state, it precedes the market. It is a natural institution that—and so the state does actually exist to serve and support that natural institution, not the other way around. And so that is also a helpful lens of maybe the right ordering of where, you know, family and fertility policies should rank in the way that we think about public policy.
Ray Pennings: Yeah, if I can just—I think you hit on a very important point there in terms of the ordering. You know, Augustine talks about the ordering of our loves, but tied to that very much is the ordering of our institutions. And, you know, we live—you know, we think of democracy, we think of a liberal society with an emphasis on rights. And much of this conversation takes place in the context of choices and rights, and “you can’t tell me what to do,” and “I get to exercise my own rights.” And then sometimes we’re brought face-to-face with the transcendence of all of this, and that fertility is not an automatic thing. You can make all the choices you want. There are a good number of people who have decided they’re going to have children at whatever age, and they take steps to prevent conception prior to that. And lo and behold, they’ve reached that age, and all of a sudden conception doesn’t prove the automatic thing that they thought it would be, and we have lots of challenges of infertility and proceeding with extraordinary means even to try to facilitate conceptions, even at later ages. So, you know, I think that brings us face-to-face with conception and birth. We understand the science, but there is still a miracle involved in every human being, in every human birth.
I think the other thing to talk about in terms of institutions: not only is the family pre-state, pre-liberal in that—I would argue the church is too. The church does not exist by the blessing of the state. And I think that becomes particularly relevant when we think of the nature of marriage, the history of marriage. The state has become involved in marriage because it often involves children and the care of children and legal liabilities and responsibilities and how children are raised. Historically, of course, the church’s role was very much in terms of marriage. It was understood in a Roman Catholic setting as a sacrament. Protestants still have a very high view of marriage, even though it’s not viewed as a sacrament in the same way. But it was seen as something that belonged very much to the institution of the church. We used to talk about the relationship of the church and the state in the context of: the church’s job was to hatch them, match them, and dispatch them. There was a sense in terms of those transitions of life.
But what I think is important when we think of religion—the academics tell us there are three sort of elements of religion that belong together. You need all three in terms of how our religion functions in society. On the one hand, there’s belief. Secondly, there’s belonging. And thirdly, there’s behaviour. And what was striking to me as I just reflected on our conversation with Christine: we started very much on belief. And what was interesting is the gap between aspiration and actual reality. Most people want more kids than they’re having. There is a belief in terms of the value of having children and the good that can be expressed differently in different settings. But what was driving it was very much something about a belief that embeds the nature of human life and procreation and what that all means.
The question then was behaviour. How do we change behaviour? And we explored various settings of behaviour, and we’ve already talked about policy not working extremely well. And, you know, what was interesting in our conversation with Christine is that, you know, young people today seem to be talking about dating more than doing it along the way. And obviously having relationships is a key part in terms of, you know, the fertility and planning and how that all unfolds. So there is a challenge in terms of the behaviours required to enhance fertility—everything from the dating all the way through the process—are being challenged. And how do you affect it?
I think the interesting thing is the fact of belonging. And we talked about social isolation and loneliness—that we live among the loneliest generation that is there. I came across some data the other day in which Ryan Burge, a sociologist in the US, measured various aspects of religiosity. And he noted the fact that the personal ones—the personal prayer, the personal Bible reading, and all the rest—did not correlate with happiness in the same way as the communal ones: showing up at a place of worship, even charitable giving and participation in religious communities supporting others. And I think it just spoke to the fact that you need all three. You need belief, behaviour, and belonging, and they reinforce each other.
And I think really what it highlights is what we’re talking about in fertility. Whether or not you are religious in the—you know, serving a transcendent God in the name of the traditional religions—or you think of yourself as totally secular and “I’m not religious,” you’re still living out of core beliefs one way or the other. And I think it’s the interplay of how your beliefs connect to the community that you belong to that produce a particular set of behaviours that may very well be at the heart of the fertility question. And I’m wondering whether or not looking at fertility is less looking at policy and more looking at the nature of the community and how we connect with others in the community.
Andreae Sennyah: Yeah, those are great points, Ray. And I think it also touches—some of what Christine said really touched on, or at least brought up for me, this idea of formation of personhood, formation of character, especially in a post-COVID era for the youngest—like, the younger generation. And in the internet age, for lack of a better term—like, now that so much of our relationships happen online, and so many pseudo-networks or parasocial relationships are being formed online as well—I think that there have been, and are—and I think we’re seeing the consequences of—a lack of formation of character, and the inability to escape the fact that at a certain point, human beings do have to come face-to-face, especially when it comes to decisions like the one we’re talking about today. And so I think your points about the church relate to an essential institution in the formation of character—probably as essential as the family as a place of forming character, of understanding how to relate to one another, how to cope with disappointment, which is something that Christine was talking about as well in the dating sphere.
I think the biggest thing that I took away from this interview we had with Christine was just a reminder that the conversation about fertility as a quote-unquote social problem or societal issue is part of a continuum of human action that begins with the formation of relationships, and that the state has a very limited role in being able to address that problem. And I think we can all cringe at the thought of what the public policy matchmaking scheme would look like if facilitated by the Government of Canada, or something equally horrifying.
I think it’s a reminder for us about the role of all the institutions in society—churches being one of them, but certainly others too, right? Like, you know, whether I, you know, am part of some other kind of social club or, you know, play soccer with my friends on the weekend or wherever—like, these natural institutions in which we connect, we form relationships, romantic or otherwise, and give us opportunities to understand what it means to be human, how to interact with other people, like, in a normal way. And then to maybe take some risks in the formation of relationships and everything that could come after that.
Something that did really stick with me, and that I hope sticks with listeners too, is this story that Christine told us about what is causing her to have hope—this idea that a young guy invited lots of people to the park to eat an apple with him at noon. And I think she said something like three thousand people showed up. I would say that, you know, that is a huge cause for hope, because as much as we fear that people are kind of not—you know, it’s kind of like a failure to launch, like they’re not actualizing their full potential as adults—clearly, we—you know, there’s nothing new under the sun. Human desires have remained the same. We desire to know one another, to be in relationships, to form families, to have friends. All of those things are still true, and no amount of Twitter, or whatever it’s called these days, is going to fully supplant the desire—like, the true desires that we have.
Ray Pennings: Yeah. I’m so glad you raised the three thousand in the park with the apple story. It was such low-hanging fruit for dad jokes throughout that I did my best to restrain myself, but I really think that got to the core of the episode. So I’m very thankful you raised it.
Andreae Sennyah: No, it’s really made it a fruitful conversation, Ray. Hasn’t it?
Ray Pennings: Indeed. Indeed it has. Indeed it has.
Andreae Sennyah: Excellent. Well, thanks so much, listeners, for joining us for another one of these episodes of Proverbs & Policy. We look forward to speaking to you again on our next one. Thanks, Ray.
Ray Pennings: Thank you so much, Andreae.
