I recently had the distinct honor of hosting a baby at my house. I can’t think of another guest who would have made such an indelible impression. My 26-year-old nephew and his wife have a 4-month-old and came to visit for a few glorious days. Oh, how I have been missing babies!
My five kids all begged for turns holding this bouncing little boy, usually prying him from my arms. There was a lighthearted joy and mirth in our home that really only a baby can bring, a feeling increasingly rare in a culture unsure whether children are blessings at all.
I was so grateful that my kids had that time with their little cousin, now that their siblings are older. Perhaps they had forgotten how wonderful babies are; I’m glad this little boy could remind them. They heard him cry. They saw that his mother was tired from waking in the night, they smelled as their cousin changed his son’s dirty diapers, but none of that seemed to matter much compared to the quality of the little guy himself.
The joy and laughter, and the renewal a beautiful baby brings into a home and into our hearts, is not replicable by anything else. And as those babies grow, the blessings continue.
The particular kind of unconditional love and quick forgiveness we feel for a curious toddler who has just tipped over our favorite vase is found in no other relationship. The daily, monotonous duties we perform, with no hope of repayment, for growing children, would cause resentment if done for anyone else.
A life full of children is a life lived more abundantly, where virtues are tested more vigorously and weakness is exposed more openly — and where love becomes a daily healing balm. Children don’t just add value to life; they can make life feel valuable. Dostoevsky said, “Children soothe and heal the wounded heart.”
Life in many seasons and circumstances can be abundant and joyful, especially in the presence of faith and hope. And wounds can be healed in many kinds of relationships.
Yet, as our world turns more and more away from seeing children as a blessing, fewer souls are healed and life can feel less valuable. Each new child renews the world, and if there were no new children, life itself would end.
How do we shift a societal trend so stark that many signs show there will be a population decline across much of the developed world within 60 years? Even religious communities’ birth rates are plummeting.
It won’t be easy. In previous generations, when the birthrate was higher, your little siblings, young cousins and kids running around the neighborhood built up your view of life and expectations of your future. You learned how to play with kids, and you took joy in their crazy antics.
Now, for many, encountering and having a relationship with babies and little kids is rare. The idea of them is more abstract for young people who have missed having memorable and positive experiences with them. People rarely long for what has become abstract to them.
What we often see and hear referred to online are not babies in the fullness of their humanity, but objects getting in the way — central figures in portrayals of exhaustion, inconvenience and sacrifice detached from the love that makes duties and sacrifices light.
Rather than being built around relationships, our culture has become consumerist and technological. In a society like this, relying on our natural instincts to produce the next generation of babies isn’t working.
If it isn’t sacrilegious to compare a child to a product, the best way to get people to try something new is often through exposure. I finally caved and bought the new Thin Mint Frosty after seeing it, hearing it raved about and getting just a small taste of it. Real-life babies are like that — they sell themselves.
Not the “babies” tired mothers complain about on Instagram, or the ones described as obstacles to success by so many celebrities. What we often see and hear referred to online are not babies in the fullness of their humanity, but objects getting in the way — central figures in portrayals of exhaustion, inconvenience and sacrifice detached from the love that makes duties and sacrifices light.
I remember that feeling of exhaustion and inconvenience well, waking for my newborn’s third feeding at 5 a.m. Somehow, the feeling dissipated as soon as I picked up my adorable infant.
It’s the real, living babies who convince us we want one of our own. They are the ones we get to hold and laugh with, who enliven our soul, who activate something deep in us — a maternal and paternal instinct which we share with the hundreds of generations who preceded us.
Real babies put life into perspective. They help us reorient our priorities, and they give us reason for hope.
As babies become more rare, their presence in our lives becomes more powerful and potentially transformative. As the youngest child in my family, I was rather apathetic toward babykind until I had one of my own, and then the love affair quickly began.
If you have children who aren’t familiar with the joy of babies, invite those babies into your homes however you can. Babysit, invite people with babies over for dinner or better yet, if you can, just have another one of your own.
Let us show our children that not only do we value them, but we glory in all children. And let them discover for themselves the blessed worth of babies.
Who knows? Maybe then they will start planning out a life where they have a few of their own. But for now, my kids just keep asking when the baby will visit again.