In a pivotal scene from “Stranger Things 5″ released last month, 19-year-old Nancy Wheeler and her boyfriend Jonathan Byers are trapped in a government lab, the room melting around them. Nancy has been avoiding Jonathan’s attempts to talk about their future, but finally breaks: She needs space, she says, and she needs to figure out “who she is.”
That’s when Jonathan reveals the engagement ring he has been carrying for months. He tearfully admits he thought proposing would “fix everything,” but now fears it would only make things worse. In what may be their final moments, he tosses the ring into the molten goo promising to soon overtake them.
You don’t have to believe that Jonathan and Nancy are soulmates — or that everyone should marry their high school sweetheart — to agree that, at this point, the story of a strong young woman who must loosen her grip on love and commitment to “find herself” is tired.
For years, popular stories in the media landscape have treated commitment, and in particular family life, as the thing a serious young woman must outgrow in order to become her best self. Girls hear the message early: Don’t build your life around love and family too soon or you’ll drown in drudgery.
Encouraging marriage and family, on the other hand, has been seen as cringe and religiously fundamentalist, at best — and, at worst, as dangerous and misogynistic. The true modern woman proves her strength by staying unencumbered: career first, autonomy above all, and relationships only pursued when they don’t make too many demands.
The messaging is relentless enough that women of faith can sometimes be swept away. And as our daughters get pulled in certain directions by the gravitational force of this pervasive message, I’ve come to believe that it’s urgent to be even more up front and honest with them about what matters most.
Women should, of course, be educated, financially capable, and free to pursue meaningful work. But starting a family of one’s own can also require as much planning, sacrifice and serious preparation as any professional considerations.
A culture that treats paid work as the highest measure of meaning will inevitably downplay distinct life-giving and life-sustaining capacities women embody — biological, emotional and relational. Yet one can affirm women’s equality without pretending the sexes are the same and honor women’s ambitions without treating caregiving as a lesser form of contribution.
When we treat caregiving as secondary, we shouldn’t be surprised when social life frays. In the last 40 years, work that has been traditionally done by women (birthing, feeding, teaching and caring for the children, keeping the home, building communities, caring for the sick and elderly) has become increasingly outsourced or abandoned altogether.
At the same time, our society has become steadily more depressed, addicted, obese, and lonely than ever. High school girls are now more than 10 percentage points less likely than boys to say they want to get married some day. In one recent poll, Gen Z women ranked being married and having children 10th and 11th most important on a list of attributes that make a life successful (after five economic conditions and “emotional stability” but before “fame and influence”).
But the “you can have it all” era has been cracking for years. Anne-Marie Slaughter’s widely read Atlantic essay “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” put words to what many professional women felt: It was always unreasonable to expect women to “manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).”
Sheryl Sandberg’s "Lean In" tried to offer a blueprint for the modern career woman, but many critics noted that the advice often assumed a level of wealth and support most families don’t have. By 2018, Michelle Obama said out loud what many mothers know: “You can have it all? … Not at the same time — that’s a lie.” In 2023, even Vogue was writing the epitaph: “the girlboss is dead.”
This might be good news. Many women I know have grown tired of the power woman vision of success. It simply doesn’t work as well as many women have hoped. “Trad wives” and “quiet quitting” have been trending on social media for years, and imperfect as these movements are, they point to a yearning for a more meaningful life path.
Young parents today now have the opportunity to change the culture of how we empower our daughters. Along with other positive messages we might share, let’s be willing to boldly teach them to aspire to marriage and family.
I’m not simply arguing that women should consider marriage and children the way they might consider a city to live in or a hobby to take up. I’m saying that parents should teach their daughters early and unapologetically that building a family is a very important good: a central way human beings give and receive love, learn responsibility, and create something that outlasts them.
Treating family as one lifestyle choice among many doesn’t just expand options; it tells girls that commitment is negotiable, that caregiving is second-rate, and that postponing love carries no cost.
The sociological data probably needs no repetition, but given these times, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the boost to social connection and stable childhood outcomes that comes from stable marriages — compared to the significant consequences for children that follow divorce.
My faith as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gives me additional language for this. "The Family: A Proclamation to the World“ calls the family “central” to our life’s purpose, and we are taught that unlike our worldly careers or possessions, we can find joy with our families in the eternities.
None of this means marriage in and of itself is a guaranteed path to happiness or success. Some marriages are ill-advised, unhappy or even destructive. And since it is never, ever a woman’s fault when her partner decides to abuse her, having frank conversations about love and marriage can play a preventive role — providing parents opportunities to teach girls what healthy love looks like, how to recognize warning signs, and how to walk away when they must.
It goes without saying that marriage and family shouldn’t be the only aspiration young girls are permitted to have. Many women can balance fulfilling family and professional lives. I have navigated many educational and professional ebbs and flows in my 10 years of marriage and have been blessed with opportunities I would have never dreamed of.
But, to the degree that I have managed it well (and I have not always done so), I owe it mostly to the wisdom of my mother, who for many years stayed home with five young children, before embarking on an impressive career in secondary and university education. She counseled me and my sisters from a young age about choosing prudently our academic and professional path so we would always be able to put our future children first.
I know many beautiful and good women who long for marriage and family but have not found that blessing yet. Calling family the ideal is not the same thing as declaring it a universal guarantee or treating unmarried women as unfinished. We can honor the ideal without minimizing the value of other innumerable contributions that single women make to their communities and to the world.
Madeleine Albright once said, “Women can have it all, just not at the same time.” This is not an insult to women’s ambition, it is a testament to our freedom — freedom to take one season of life at a time and decide where, in that moment, our own gifts are best used.
I hope to have much life left to live, and yet, I already know that in 50 years looking back, the season I spent raising beautiful little souls will have been the greatest honor of my life. My hope is that my children will feel, in our home, that the deepest kind of success is measured in love, one small soul at a time.