John Stonestreet – Page 7

What’s Wrong with Wanting Grandchildren?

Jan 2, 2025John StonestreetFamilyFamily

With more millennials choosing no kids, would-be grandparents mourn the end of their family line.

People often joke that if they’d known becoming a grandparent was so much fun, they would have done it before having kids. Having grandchildren is widely considered one of life’s great joys, one which, historically, most adults experienced. Today, however, a growing number of people will never have this experience.

Grandparents in America are becoming rarer. In 2014, 60% of people over 50 had at least one grandchild. By 2021, that had fallen to just over half. The historic decline in birth rates means that many who devoted their early lives to raising families will spend their later years watching those families end. The main reason for this is that many millennials, the generation now entering middle age, have chosen not to have kids.

Writing at The New York Times recently, Catherine Pearson gave voice to “the unspoken grief of never becoming a grandparent.” People she interviewed confessed “a deep sense of longing and loss when their children opt out of parenthood, even if they understand at an intellectual level that their children do not ‘owe’ them a family legacy.”

Parents of children who don’t want children find themselves in a difficult spot, especially those who have bought into the expressive individualist idea that children are a choice, and the only reason to have them is to enhance personal happiness. If their children don’t want children, these parents are supposed to be okay with that decision. Apparently, many aren’t.

For example, one would-be grandmother assured Pearson, “This decision was right for my kids,” before adding sadly, “I’m not going to have grandchildren. So that part of my life is just over.” Others who face silent golden years when they expected the patter of little feet are still hoping to convince their adult children to reconsider. One mother said she gently reminds her intentionally childfree daughter that she might not always feel this way—that the woman her daughter will be in ten years “will not recognize the person she is today.”

According to Pearson, she received a largely hostile social media reaction to her article, mostly from millennials. Their “how dare you feel entitled to grandchildren?” reaction puts a “silencing effect” on the whole conversation. In generations past, hopeful grandmas and grandpas would encourage families, but they now simply keep quiet as their children remain unmarried into their thirties, often citing climate change, racism, and school shootings as their reasons to be childless. One 69-year-old mom said her daughter has “made it perfectly clear … that this subject is not to be discussed.”

It’s difficult to imagine a more practical “ideas have consequences” moment than this. The inability of so many to articulate why not having grandkids is a tragedy and to be honest about their grief reveals much about our values. We’ve lost even the language to say what people for most of history took for granted. It is good and normal to want to see your descendants, and it hurts when that hope is dashed.

This moment also illustrates how ideas and their consequences are intergenerational. The view that children are unnecessary burdens or optional accessories did not start with millennials, but it has reached its logical conclusion in that generation. The rapid disappearance and replacement of once-common family relationships, including siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents has made the world lonelier for young and old alike.

Christians should “mourn with those who mourn,” which is what Pearson’s article attempted. The pain of never becoming a grandparent should be acknowledged and legitimized, and parents should not be bullied into unconditionally affirming every choice their grown children make. Kids aren’t products, so no one is “owed” grandkids, and not everyone will or should get married, but some choices are better for society than others. The record number of people in our world choosing to remain barren points to a deep societal sickness.

Christians should also witness to a countercultural way of life, including a positive perspective on children. At least, we can make sure they know they’re not burdens or accessories, that they bring joy, and that we hope—Lord willing—the same joy may one day find them.

None of this by itself will turn our demographic future around. But until it’s once again okay to look forward to seeing our children’s children, there won’t be much of a demographic future in the first place.

A Little Courage Goes A Long Way: Guest Column

Dec 31, 2024John StonestreetCurrent EventsCommunism, Truth

Often, even the smallest acts of courage can change the world. Kamila Bendova and her late husband Václav, both Christians and mathematicians, raised their family in Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia while engaged in the anti-totalitarian efforts of the Charter 77 resistance group. Kamila shared their story of courage during the Colson Center National Conference in May.

The Bendova’s courage began with a small act of resistance. In an old video clip from the BBC, which Kamila showed during the conference, she and her husband are debating whether to acquiesce to the government’s demand that citizens display little flags celebrating the communist takeover:

You see, they wanted us to show the world that the Czech Republic was a democracy on the outside. But on the inside, it didn’t work like that. Yes, we had elections, but there was only one party you could vote for.

Powerfully, the video concluded with the two agreeing, simply and decisively, but also courageously, “No little flags. No little flags.”

Eventually, their resistance would cost them greatly. In 1979, Václav was arrested for his involvement with Charter 77 and imprisoned for four years. Despite this hardship, Kamila continued to open her home to dissidents, many of whom would stop by to seek advice and encouragement before being investigated by the secret police. She relayed secret communications and hid resistance documents in her apartment. All the while, she and her family prayed, studied, and stayed together. The Bendova’s taught their children to love truth and reject lies, especially by reading to them every night. The story that most shaped the moral imagination of the children was Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which was illegal at the time.

When asked “Why Tolkien?” Kamila responded:

Because we knew Mordor was real. We felt that their story … was our story too. Tolkien’s dragons are more realistic than a lot of things we have in this world.

Like the hobbits and their friends, Kamila’s family also faced an oppressive regime. And like Tolkien’s heroes, the Bendova’s faithfulness and small acts of courage were not in vain.

Author Rod Dreher has told the Bendova story in two of his books. At the conference, he noted that courage is costly but comes with great gain:

What has [a person] gained by being willing to make this stand? For one thing, he’s gained his self-respect. He knows that he won’t live by lies even if he has to pay a price for it. Beyond that, though, he has made a statement to the wider community that it is possible not to live by lies. It is possible to defy this unjust authority if you are willing to suffer.

Over time, enough people may be inspired by seeing the small but meaningful acts of courage that they will bring down the entire system, which is built on lies. That’s why it’s important to take the flag down or to take the sign down in your shop, or not to sign a petition that you don’t believe in.

It may be that Kamila’s example of courage, even in the smallest aspects of raising children and exposing lies, can inspire Christians today who face what Dreher calls “soft totalitarianism.” America may not have secret police or gulags, but we do have woke universities and social media influencers, and powerful DEI departments and state civil rights commissions. They threaten to cancel and to penalize and to fire. We’ve seen how small acts of courage from bakers and professors and pundits and X accounts can push back on the darkness we face.

Likely, the new administration will bring a reprieve from the most aggressive corners of the left. Even so, this was made possible by small acts of courage in various corners of our culture and, in the days ahead, the courage in our houses will be more important than what comes from the White House. Kamila and the Bendova family are reminders that little acts of courage go a long way.

Ready to Change the World? Eat Dinner With Your Family: Guest Column

Dec 16, 2024John StonestreetChristianityChristianity, Family Time

If the Christian’s civic duty is only to vote, then it is now safe to return to life as normal, at least until the next election cycle starts in a few months. However, much more is involved in the fight for the soul of any nation, including this one. Our civic duty extends beyond the ballot box.

The historic shifts in the platforms of both parties during this past election are not just due to changes in popular opinion. Rather, they point to how dramatically our collective cultural imagination has shifted, a shift that reflects our institutions. Public schools, universities, media outlets, digital platforms, publishing houses, Hollywood, corporate America, and even churches have become more progressive. Critical theory and gender ideology not only dominate the required reading lists of many schools but are also embedded in the community guidelines of countless digital platforms, the HR policies of many businesses and healthcare systems, not to mention the personnel of various government agencies.

But this collective cultural drift so evident in our politics has not simply resulted from bad ideas or personnel. The conservative Jewish political scholar Yoram Hazony once argued, “It is not disbelief that plagues us but dishonor.” Specifically, he meant the dishonor of the most essential institutions and the traditions kept by them. The breakdown of the family, the compromise and collapse of our religious consensus, and the loss of civil society has contributed greatly to an uncritical acceptance of bad ideas and destructive patterns of behavior.

As Hazony reported, even those who claim to be committed to and excited about conservatism have little intention of actually engaging in those practices worth conserving. Keeping the sabbath, reading Scripture, attending religious services, and hosting regular family dinners are more than just nostalgic traditions. And yet, as Hazony explained, these essential habits of a healthy and flourishing society are losing out weekend after weekend to heading to “the mountains or the beach, or staying home ‘to finish something for work.’”

Civic duty and political change cannot be reduced to how one votes. It’s how one lives, especially with those to whom we are (or should be) the closest, that matters more. For example, studies have long shown that regular family dinners bring enormous benefit, especially to children. According to the Director of the Family Dinner Project Dr. Anne Fishel, regularly gathering around the dinner table results in better nutrition, less obesity, and better mental health:

Regular family dinners are associated with lower rates of depression, and anxiety, and substance abuse, and eating disorders, and tobacco use, and early teenage pregnancy, and higher rates of resilience and higher self-esteem.

Even more, regular family dinners are also a predictor of long-term success. For school-aged kids, frequent family mealtime is “an even more powerful predictor of high achievement scores than time spent in school, doing homework, playing sports, or doing art.”

Yet, for all these benefits, only 54% of American families sit down to a daily mealtime, and for many who do, family dinnertime is constantly besieged by digital distraction. Even before the advent of smartphones and tablets, Neil Postman warned that “(a) family that does not or cannot control the information environment of its children is barely a family at all.”

It may sound too simple to be true, but it’s not. One way that Christians can make a lasting, significant difference in politics is by protecting and cultivating the dinner table. The future of our nation may indeed depend on whether Christians make family mealtimes, as one non-Christian sociologist has described, a “sacred space.”

It matters greatly who is in the White House, but it matters so much more who we are in our houses, in our houses of worship, and around our dinner tables.