Hope for Couples Who Are a Little Behind

Big-clockNot everyone who hears the Start Your Family message is encouraged by it. We hear from people who've said we're overlooking a biblical call to be childless for the kingdom (more on that in another post), that we're insensitive to infertile couples and that we offer little hope to those couples who already have waited. That last concern came most recently in an email from Stacy. She wrote,

I just wanted to write and say that I read your blog and feel very discouraged. My husband and I are 33 and 35 and we just now feel as though we want to start a family. God has softened both of our hearts towards children just over the past few months after praying for a heart change. Everything you write in your blog is very true and I would encourage the same mindset to couples in their early twenties but what if, as a couple, we have missed that boat?

We are trying to catch it now but reading the information on your blog was disheartening, not to mention polarizing. Even though I’m sure it wasn’t your intention, it made me feel as though we missed God’s call as a Christian couple to start a family when we first got married (27 and 30). And by your standards we were too slow in tying the knot as well. I really think you are doing a good thing but can the couples who are a little behind not at least get a little blurb on your blog?

This blurb is for Stacy. And all the other couples who (like us) got married a little later.

I'm actually really glad to be able to address your concerns and agree that some posts on this subject would be very helpful. I think it's easy to misread our message, especially if you haven't read the whole book (or know our story). We, too, married at the average age of 27 (just a month before turning 27, to be exact) and didn't start to think about babies till we were 28. We have a lot of encouragement in the book for couples like you who have waited.

We wrote to young couples as well, hoping to spare them the heartache many couples face when they wait, but that wasn't the entire purpose of the book. It's our heart to inspire couples to open their hearts to the possibility of children, to extol God as the wonder-working, all powerful savior who opens wombs and blesses us with children. You have every reason to hope that babies will come and I pray that is the case! I'm just sorry you read our message to be a discouragement.

That's the gist of what I emailed back to Stacy. She's awesome. She wrote back to say,

Thank you so much for writing back. I really didn't expect to get a response! I really do not mean to come across as super critical and will admit that I didn't read every single thing on your blog. I just feel remorse that our desire for children is just now happening, you know? I wish I could go back and put in my 27 year old heart what's in there now. I feel so behind and like if I'm not able to conceive, its because I missed what God's intentions were for us at the get-go. I know that God is sovereign and that if He wants us to have healthy children (even 3 or 4!) that we will but in searching for encouragement in the Christian community, I mostly get dismayed.

If, like Stacy and her husband, you got married later or you just decided you weren't ready to have kids back when you first got married, there's still hope. Lots of it. That's a big part of why we're doing what we do.

Men Should Consider Biological Clock as Well

In Start Your Family, I (Steve) talk about the strong urge Candice felt to have a baby and how I got her to "hit snooze on her biological clock." It's those potent emotions about having children, as well as a broad range of headlines about fertility and the timing of babies, that make us so aware of a woman's biological clock. Increasingly, however, news reports are explaining that men also have a biological clock to keep in mind.

"It wasn't all that long ago that any suggestion that a man had a 'biological clock' like a woman, and should father children sooner rather than later, would have been given short scientific shrift," says a new article by U.S. News and World Report. "Not anymore. Today, a growing body of evidence suggests that as men get older, fertility can and does decline, while the chances of fathering a child with serious birth defects and medical problems increase."

The article sources Dr. Harry Fisch, author of the book The Male Biological Clock with the finding that after age 30, testosterone levels decline about 1 percent per year. Fisch doesn't come out and recommend an ideal age for men to start a family, but where men have a choice in the matter, Fisch suggests "the sooner, the better."

The Spiritual Part of Babymaking

In telling about his harrowing journey to Ethiopia to adopt four children, Motte Brown talks about the challenges (that's putting it mildly) that he, and his wife Beth, encountered along the way. The details brought tears to my eyes as I imagined what it must have been like to endure everything from lost luggage, to formula and diaper shortages, to the near death of one of their nine-month-old twins. But as bad as all those visible hardships were, what really struck me about the 3-part-post was the trauma of the invisible:

With the benefit of hindsight, I now know I was too cavalier about the "Are you ready?" question. I expected it to be painful. But not so much that we would question the very decision we made to adopt. That is where we were. And that is exactly where I believe Satan planned for us to be. John Piper has a sermon on the power God allows Satan in this world.

The fact that Satan has such power in the world should give a kind of seriousness to our lives which unbelievers don't have. It ought not to make us paranoid or fearful, but sober and earnest in our prayers and persistently conscious of needing God's power. When the enemy is supernatural, so must the weapons be.

The enemy was undoubtedly not happy about a loving Christian family saving the lives of four children, both physically, and by God's grace, spiritually. They saved them through adoption. But aren't Christian couples who conceive and bear children and then, according to Ephesians 6, bring them up in the training of the Lord doing the same thing? When believers conceive new life and plan to become parents for God's glory, they are no less in need of spiritual protection than the Browns were in Ethiopia.

Whether you're thinking about starting your family, already pregnant with your first baby, or like us, in the midst of raising your kids already born, it's important to follow Paul's urging, later in that same chapter in Ephesians, to:

Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. (Ephesians 6:10-18)

 

Green Babies

Is having babies incompatible with being a good steward of the planet? Writing on the Web site Eco Child's Play, Jamie Ervin says no. In her post "Why Environmentalism Should not be a Factor in Family Planning," she disagrees with those who have what she calls a “save the earth, don’t breed” mentality. "IMO," she writes, "this mentality places a greater emphasis on animal rights and earth over HUMAN LIFE and Family."

Well said.

Instead of advocating baby reductions, Jamie encourages people who care about the planet to have green babies.

I believe that we should be the people raising MORE CHILDREN. By the very nature of parenting, I am raising children who are conscious of the impact of everything they do on the earth. They CARE about conservation and reducing consumption.

I didn't wander through the site enough to see what gets covered under the tagline of "green parenting for non-toxic, healthy homes," but I found much to appreciate. Even though the commenters on the blog disagreed, Jamie is insightful to see care for the earth as compatible with having a family, and babies as a source for renewal instead of a threat.

Random Celebrity Comments about Having Babies

"Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby." Carl Sandburg

"It's like everything's fresh and new. Life becomes like looking through a child's eyes. As parents, you have an opportunity to see things fresh again." TobyMac
"Everything changed for me when she was born. Everything. You understand why wars are fought, you understand why men want to own land, you understand why women are so smart, because they have to be... It really did turn my life upside down." Bono (on the birth of his first child)
"There are some exceptional individuals who are able to reach for the sublime by making music, painting pictures--or playing baseball, but for ordinary mortals like myself, it's often a child who helps us 'touch the face of God.'" Sylvia Ann Hewlett
"It is no small thing when they who are so fresh from God, love us." Charles Dickens
"Babies are always more trouble than you thought--and more wonderful." Charles Osgood
"[Parenting] is a journey fraught with potential pain and disappointment, but also unspeakable joy and satisfaction." Dr. James Dobson

Kids Don't Fit (Easily)

I used to think I could "fit" kids into my life. You know, my perfectly ordered, and orderly, life. I even wrote articles about it. Now, four kids later, I've had to do a few reality checks. I'm the one doing most of the fitting these days (not into my old jeans, mind you. It took nine months to outgrow them, surely I'm due more than two months to get back to where I started).

Thankfully, words online can be rethought and revisited. Last week Boundless published my new and revised vision for how we can make room in our lives for babies.

The Big Gap

The promise of "planned parenthood" gives the impression that a man and woman have a great amount of control over family building. While there is quite a lot couples can do to control not having children, the implied promise that a planned approach can help couples have the number of children that's right for them has proven disappointing. A variety of contraceptive approaches now help couples not have more children than they planned on, but the perception of complete control is increasingly leaving more couples having children at a rate below what they intended. Only 2 percent of the respondents to a World Values Survey said they didn't want to have any children, but current demographics show 20 percent of couples ending up without children. Additionally, 3 percent of survey respondents said they only wanted one child while 16 percent of couples end up limited to having one child.

We've know numerous couples who've faced the disappointment of this gap and wish they had been more intentional about their approach. While planning how not to have a houseful of kids, they ended up falling short of the kids they hoped they could have.

Financial Crash Simplifies Approach to Babies

We're still finding out what exactly happened to the American economy last fall (2008) and what the ramifications are for our day-to-day lives. Writing in the Wall Street Journal this weekend, Peggy Noonan (former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan) made an interesting observation about a change in attitudes toward babies:

...everything changed in 2008. A new economic era, begun by a terrible and still barely fathomable crash, is here, and many of us sense deep down that things will never be the same, that the past quarter-century's fabulous abundance—it was the richest time in the history of man—is over. Novelists of our time will, one hopes, attempt to catch what just passed and is passing, try to capture what it was and keep it for history, as F. Scott Fitzgerald caught the Roaring Twenties, as Thackeray did England's 19th century in "Vanity Fair," as Tom Wolfe did the beginning of the age of abundance, in "Bonfire of the Vanities."

I offer in a spirit of encouragement a free image, or observation. At a certain point in the '00s, I began to notice, on the east side of Manhattan, that the 3-week-old infants, out for the first time in their sleek black Mercedes-like strollers, were amazingly, almost alarmingly, perfect. Perfect round heads, huge perfect eyes, none of the dents, bruises and imperfections that are normal and that tend to accompany birth. I would ask friends: Why are babies perfect now, how did that happen? The answers were the usual: a healthy, well-fed populace, etc. Then a friend said: "These are the children of the scheduled C-sections of the affluent. They are scooped out, perfect." They were little superbabies whose handsome, investment banking, asset-bundling, financial-instrument-creating parents commanded even Nature.

But the death of Lehman Brothers was "the day Wall Street died," as the Journal put it this week, and the day the great abundance did, essentially, too. That is a very big thing to happen in a single year. The proper attitude with which to approach the new reality? Consider it "a nudge from God," a priest said this week. Consider him to be telling us what's important and what's not, what you need and what you don't, what—who—can be relied on, and can't.

Partial Nesting

Our idea of a nest took shape a few months after we got married when we read an article in Time magazine called the “Young and the Nested.” It described millions of couples our age who were settling down—leaving their slacker Generation X attitudes behind in order to decorate homes, have dinner parties, and do similar big people stuff. “Weary of kicking up their heels, they have turned to settling in with the same zeal they once gave barhopping,” the author wrote. “Nesting means you get to trade a crazy public space for a place where you can define who you are,” a couple from St. Louis, Mo., told the writer.

Ann Clurman, a partner at Yankelovich’s MONITOR generational study, offered some perspective on what motivated Gen Xers to nest: “They are the first generation to be scheduled from their earliest play dates; to view school, even grade school, as a ruthless competition; to enter the work force unsure of where they’re going but clear enough that the destination is the top. And now they’re rebelling in their own way--not in the streets but back to hearth and home.”

We saw ourselves in the cultural trend that article captured. Not that we ever had a wild streak to settle down from, but that our desire for hearth and home was part of a larger movement. We had context for our longing to channel the restless energy of our single years into an effort to make a home for ourselves in the world. The term “nesters’ stuck with us as something more descriptive than any generational label.

While the “Young and the Nested” article had much to say about the quest for hearth and home among young couples, a primary focus of the story was the growth and youthful re-orientation of the nesting industry. It described how 20-somethings were embracing hardware and kitchenware stores that had previously targeted older customers. Places like Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Williams Sonoma, and Crate and Barrel gave our generation visions of a nest that looked a lot more like the ones our grandparents and great-grandparents knew than the odd nesting stuff we knew from the 70s and 80s. Buying into that vision of a more traditional craftsman period, we spent a lot of time in upscale showrooms buying candles and sconces, mirrors and kitchenware, lamps and rugs, desks and occasional tables.

Around that time, we found a description of real nest building that reminded us a lot of our approach back then. Consider how the male and female common tailorbirds split up their work: “Nest building for the Common Tailorbird is a job undertaken by the female. The male can be seen escorting the female on her material collection rounds.” The description continued in something of a Martha Stewart tone:

The ‘cover’ of the nest is formed by the female who meticulously pierces an equal number of holes on each leaf edge with her finely pointed bill as a needle. Spider silk or fine grass serves as thread. Stitching back and forth through the holes, the bird joins each leaf seam together. Fine strands of grass are used to weave the cup nest inside the folded leaf. Once that is completed, feathers and other materials are used to line the inside of the nest to keep the nestlings warm.

The big glaring difference between the common tailorbird and us is that our nest building wasn’t quite so focused on “nestlings.” We were pursuing hearth and home, but the vision we were chasing was more centered around the stuff of the nest than on its original purpose. A bird watcher would find it strange to see two birds create an exquisite nest and then never lay eggs in it. But that’s what we were doing. We were making a beautiful nest, but we weren’t having any nestlings.

How Can We Fit Kids Into Our Lives?

Ideals are great … until they meet the blender of real life. Having a vision for why and when to start a family can give you new momentum, but you’ll need all the extra motivation you can find once you start thinking through the logistics, the how. This is the place where the things that might be stirring in your heart meet the practical questions from your head: “How can we afford this?” “How will this affect our work?” “How are we going to manage all the care a baby will need?” “How do we prepare a home for a baby?”

“Parents have always had the primary responsibility for taking care of their children’s needs,” writes Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. ”What is new is that those needs are greater today. In a dynamic society and global economy, the task of nurturing, guiding and preparing children for flourishing adult lives requires higher investments of parental money, time and attention than ever before.”

fridge picsComing up with all that money, time, and attention is more challenging in a day when couples typically need two incomes to cover their current budget (especially those carrying hefty student loan debt). Beyond the practical financial questions, the psychological questions add more anxiety. Couples who had poor modeling from their parents wonder how they’ll be able to avoid the same mistakes. Those who have seen the extra stress children bring to a marriage might wonder how their relationship can weather having a baby. Additionally, any couple that has gotten used to the nicer things afforded by two full-throttle careers, will likely have nagging worries about changes to their lifestyle and identity.

Then there are the random questions that pop up in the middle of dinner or in the middle of the night: “What about the family reunion that’s scheduled near the time we’d be having a baby? What about that trip to Europe we have planned—the baby would only be a couple of months old?” “Can you even put a car seat in the back of a Mini Cooper?”

In the face of all these logistical questions couples can lose their vision for starting a family—or at least end up wanting to hit snooze on the process.

When couples reach this place in their thoughts about starting a family, it’s tempting to hold off until they can come up with a better plan—until they can figure out what to do with all the questions that have surfaced. But maybe a better plan is overrated.

Just as it’s okay to start your family without having detailed answers to every question “Why,” it’s also okay to not know how everything’s going to work out, to not be able to see but so far down the road ahead.

Most children have been born into the world without a strategy—without a detailed budget or contingency plan. (You have to wonder what life would be like for kids whose parents would actually write a strategic plan before having them; Eustace Scrubb in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader comes to mind.)

By saying you don’t need a detailed plan, however, we’re not advocating that you just plow into all the logistical details of launching a family fueled by a blissful hope that everything will come together. We’re not saying you should back your way into parenthood. It’s a significant responsibility to bring life into the world and then care for, provide, protect, and guide that life.

What we are saying is you don’t need a detailed plan, but a few timeless principles can make all the difference.  …

[This is an excerpt from the “How?” section of Start Your Family: Inspiration for Having Babies.

When's the Right Time to Start Our Family?

Most couples have some kind of timeline in mind for when it feels right to have a baby. Maybe it’s vague, maybe you haven’t talked it through as a couple to land on a precise target, but you likely have a sense of what you think needs to happen first and what conditions you think would be optimal for a good start. “We’re going to pay off some debt and explore Colorado a little more and then get started,” we used to tell people. “We’re thinking we’ll try in a couple of years depending on how work is going,” or “We’re going to squeeze in another degree before we have kids,” we’ve heard others say.

Conventional wisdom says timing is everything—it’s essential to find the optimal time to launch your family. “Now that the baby is only a theoretical possibility rather than a biological inevitability, the pre-requisites for baby-readiness in the mind of the modern couple grow every year,” wrote Read and Rachel Schuchardt. Fifty years ago, nearly three-quarters of couples had children within three years of getting married. Now, only about a third do so.

It seems that more and more couples believe that if they get going too soon they’ll get themselves and their babies off to a bad start. Admittedly, there are few things in life more daunting than launching a new life into the world. Anyone who soberly reflects on the magnitude of the venture and of the things that could go wrong can be motivated to think more cautiously about their timing. But for today’s couples, the factors guiding timing have grown more complex.

Teddy backyardCouples have always worried about being able to provide for a new family—economic changes, job situations, and debt issues have always been considerations. Today couples are more likely to go into marriage with much greater consumer and educational debt than their parents did, leading many to put off having children. In fact, the percentage of college graduates citing education debt as their reason for delaying children nearly doubled between 1991 and 2002. Additionally, many now have the mentality that getting established—a common prerequisite for having children—means attaining the standard of living that their parents spent decades accumulating.

The promise of a longer life also complicates a couple’s timeline. People who only expected to live for sixty to seventy years knew their life span would affect the amount of time they would be able to spend with their offspring. In the midst of what Robert Butler calls a “longevity revolution,” however, it’s a lot easier to think about starting a family at a much later age.

Adding greater complexity to a couple’s timeline is the growing perception that reproductive technology can make it possible for a woman to become a mom just about whenever she wants. Where the limits of fertility once seemed unyielding, they now seem highly flexible.

In the face of ballooning debt, ever promising breakthroughs in artificial reproductive technologies, and faith that we can live longer than our forebears, couples have more reasons than ever to delay starting their families, alongside few if any cautions about how long they wait. In such conditions, a more stretched out timeline seems prudent and ideal for both them and their future baby. But is it?

Our concern is that even couples with the best intentions tend to underestimate the power of inertia, while overestimating the flexibility they actually have in their timing.  …

[This is an excerpt from the “When” section of Start Your Family: Inspiration for Having Babies.]

Why Have Kids?

It’s okay to start your family without a specific reason why—to not have a grand vision or a driving purpose for launching a new life. It’s all right to let the love and joy you share with your spouse drive you forward into family even when people tell you to stop and think gravely before having kids. Teddy campEver since time began, men and women have brought new life into the world and the great majority of them did so without clear answers to the question, “Why?” At a simple level, it’s because humans share a lot of reproductive similarities with creatures of all kinds. We were designed with a sex drive that leads to coupling and a fertilization process that can trigger the miracle of life.

If you were to ask your grandparents or great-grandparents why they had children, they would probably give you a baffled look and say, “That’s what married couples did.” In one of their several books on generations, authors William Strauss and Neil Howe observe that the family was such a powerful institution at the midpoint of the 1900s—what they call “the American High”—that it was taken for granted. “Once World War II ended,” they write, “family formation and parenthood weren’t a choice, but a social expectation. To the mind-set of that era, everything was on autopilot.”

In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz echoes such observations on his way to showing how things have changed. “In the past, the ‘default’ options were so powerful and dominant that few perceived themselves to be making choices. Whom we married was a matter of choice, but we knew that we would do it as soon as we could and have children, because that was something all people did.” In the past half century, however, choice has grown into one of our greatest commodities.

“Today,” Schwartz writes, “all romantic possibilities are on the table ; all choices are real.” It’s a trend Howe and Strauss spotlight, writing, “Once the Consciousness Revolution ended, family formation and parenthood weren’t a social expectation, but a choice, even a profound personal statement.”

And so we, of the Xer generations and following, stop to ask, “Why?” We don’t just do things out of tradition or expectation. We don’t just have kids because that’s what’s expected or because it’s what our parents did. We’ve moved beyond that. We have kids as a statement, as a lifestyle choice. But the choice to have children now sits on a shelf in a growing supermarket of options leaving couples asking why that choice would be better than any other.

For many couples, the choice to have a baby faces more than just competing options—it’s under serious scrutiny. “In our society today, parenthood is on trial,” says Po Bronson in his book Why Do I Love These People? He describes skeptical parents like a jury “considering the facts, making their calculations, collecting more evidence.”

…

Where can you find compelling answers to the nagging question, “Why have children?”

[This is an excerpt from the “Why?” section of the book Start Your Family]