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The Benefits of Being a Young Mom Liz Wolfe

Published

9 months ago

October 27, 2023

The author and her son at home. (All photos by Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The Free Press)

In February last year, while hiking in California’s Yucca Valley, I realized I was probably pregnant.

I was 25 years old and had hoped to have more time to travel and write and get lost in the desert among the agaves, far away from my home in New York City, before having a baby. But the plus sign on my pregnancy test indicated that those plans would be cut short—and I’d need to craft new ones fast.

My husband and I had been married for three years, and we would have preferred to save more money before starting a family. But there was no question we were going ahead. I am staunchly pro-life, and though our child was unplanned, he was definitely wanted.

In normal-person terms, 26 isn’t a very young age for a first-time mom. But Brooklyn, where I live, is proudly not the land of normal people. After my son was born in October, I went searching for a new social circle in an attempt to make friends with other new moms like me.

I found a group in tony Park Slope, 10 subway stops from my neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant. The mothers have been kind, but almost all are a decade older. They’re also more professionally successful than me by a mile.

But while their organizational abilities and propensity to research and plan have served them well in their careers, my few months of motherhood have taught me that babies seem unimpressed with these skills. Raising a new life is a realm where intuition reigns, chaos ensues, and no success is ensured by having completed hours of research.

Being a young mom has also insulated me from some of these older moms’ anxieties. In fact, having less money might also mean fewer problems—or at least fewer choices to ruminate over—as well as a greater resignation to circumstances. My son sleeps in a closet, which up until a few weeks before his birth housed my husband’s surfboard (he’s not a professional surfer, he’s in tech).

When I was pregnant, I did not go overboard buying stuff I couldn’t afford, despite the targeted ads that attempted to convince me that parental sleeplessness could be alleviated by a weighted sleep sack for baby ($89), or that my little guy’s motor skills could be honed with a $69 shape-sorter.

Well-off Brooklynites believe certain things ought to be in place before they start “trying.” A room for the child; a sturdy grip on a top rung of the career ladder; a neighborhood with good schools; superlative emotional maturity. I admittedly had none of those things locked down. But most generations that came before didn’t either.

My grandmother raised her first at 18, in a trailer, which she remembers fondly since it offered more space than she’d ever had before, having grown up in a large, poor, Catholic family in German-immigrant Kansas.

My mom, who had me at 22, worked as a nanny for other people’s children when I was a baby, bringing me to work with her in St. Louis, where we were living so my dad could finish school. She had a few rules for kid-raising: no need to go to the doctor for most things (better to wait and see if a malady resolves on its own); a cardboard box from the garage makes for the most thrilling play; and babies can—and should—be brought practically anywhere. In 1997, she took me to Lilith Fair. And who can blame a 23-year-old for wanting to go to a feminist music festival?

I’ve concluded that the baby-rearing confidence of these earlier generations was partly ingrained, partly passed down, and partly the result of lean times leading to inventiveness. But their cheerful, relaxed attitudes are not shared by most moms I encounter today.

At 26, I represent the national average of first-time motherhood. In San Francisco, first-time mothers are on average about 32. In Zapata County, Texas, along the Rio Grande, the average is a low of just under 21. Generally, the more women have access to education and careers, the fewer children they have and the later they get started. As The New York Times reports, “Women with college degrees have children an average of seven years later than those without.”

For a population to remain stable, the replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman. The U.S. is now at less than 1.8. This puts us on par with many other developed nations that have seen plummeting fertility rates over the decades. Many cultural critics point to the population implosion of Japan, where deaths have outpaced births for the last decade, and where an increasingly elderly population expects to depend on the taxes generated by grandchildren who were never born.

In the U.S., women putting off child-rearing to later in life means that in some cases they won’t have the number of kids they desire, or that it will be harder for them to conceive the children they do want. (The U.S. has also seen a welcome decline in teen pregnancy rates, which are at an all-time low.)

But my concern is less the fertility rate, and more the cultural script that accompanies having children, which leaves professionally successful moms high and dry. Despite living in a time and place of such extraordinary abundance—of products, of experts, of information—their anxiety seems to be soaring.

I can’t help but wonder if this fear has an effect on when people want to have children and how many they desire.

Take this comment posted by one mom to my Park Slope-based group chat at six in the morning.

“Question about solids,” she asked. “How many times a day/week are you giving them?”

A litany of highly specific regimens followed—three meals a day by seven months; at least two consistent feedings every day if they’re six months or older; purees first; purees never; a chart about how many solids should be introduced to a breastfed baby by age. Three moms expressed how anxious they were about whether their babies were eating the correct amounts on the correct timeline.

Of course, the devoted and thoughtful mothers in my group are just surveying their digital “village” to make sure they’re doing okay. But every time I peek at the chats and forums, I wonder: Why are moms so anxious? Whatever happened to the time-honored tradition of winging it?

I’ve been trapped in conversations with moms obsessing over the best nursing pillow or electric breast pump. I’ve heard all about the virtues of the Uppababy Vista V2 ($1,000) vs. the Uppababy Ridge ($600) vs. the Nuna MIXX ($800)—strollers that look engineered by scientists, designed for lunar exploration.

I can see how the impulse to optimize everything is borne out of the belief that these executives-turned-mothers can perfect their son or daughter’s childhood. But so often the underlying theme is fear.

Consider the Owlet, a baby sleep monitor that retails for $300. The app, which uses “predictive sleep technology” to tell you when the next nap is needed, is hooked up to the “dream sock” that monitors the baby’s heart rate, alerting parents if there are signs of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)—a terrible yet rare event that can occur while a baby is sleeping. Though the company got in trouble with the FDA for marketing the Owlet as an anti-SIDS technology despite not having secured proper classification, it was a great sales pitch: pay us $300 and we’ll give you a device that can alert you in the middle of the night if the baby stops breathing.

While hanging out with these older mothers, I have come to understand the origin of some of the fear and anxiety. Many have gone through expensive fertility treatments and suffered repeat miscarriages. When it takes three years and $40,000 of IVF to get pregnant, and when the hardships are so numerous that you’re pretty sure you’ll have to be one and done, regardless of your dreams, I can see why they feel extra pressure to do it all “right.”

My situation in some ways feels liberating. I’ve quickly learned the nuts and bolts of baby tending. I have the energy to work like a dog, waking up early to write or prepare for TV hits, to make up for the fact that much of my week is occupied by baby needs. The tight spacing of the generations in my family fosters closeness. I feel like I watched my parents grow up and hope my own son will enjoy the same experience—and one day even find his closet bedroom comedic.

(Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The Free Press)

Many women of my generation think they should start having children only once they’ve become a fully-fledged person. But it’s never clear when that completion sets in. And it’s frequently sabotaged by our inability to ever feel like we have enough—enough money, enough free time, enough patience.

And ultimately, the pursuit of reaching these goals is futile because—even if you finally become a fully-formed adult—having a baby will unmoor you with a new love that is so overwhelming and self-sacrificial and all-consuming it fundamentally changes who you are.

Children aren’t trophies you get for having completed your “becoming.”

Having my son when I did has given me the unexpected gift of the inability to overthink, to overbuy, to overplan. In doing so, I hope to follow the example of the generations who came before me, who raised resilient kids during tough times, with less gear and more grit.

Liz Wolfe is a writer at Reason. This is her first piece for The Free Press. Follow her on Twitter (now X) @LizWolfeReason.

Read Martin Gurri’s incisive essay on population decline here.

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Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

9 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Substacks

TGIF: The Week Unburdened by the Week That Has Been Suzy Weiss

Published

16 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather outside of Union Station to protest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States. (Probal Rashid via Getty Images)

Oh, no, it’s the sister again, for another slow news week. Let’s get to it.

→ Biden dropped out: Six years ago emotionally, but technically this past Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. He did it via X and promptly threw his support (and cash) behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Then he got Covid and hunkered down in Delaware—or depending on what hooch you’ve been drinking, died and was reanimated so he could appear before the cameras on Wednesday to address the nation. Joe’s family, including Hunter, sat along the wall of the Oval Office as he spoke. The president talked about the cancer moonshot, ending the war in Gaza, putting the party over himself, and Kamala’s tenacity, as Kamala’s pistol dug ever-so-slightly harder into his back. Right after, Jill, the First Lady of passive aggression, who apparently wanted to outdo her heart emoji, tweeted a handwritten note “to those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed.” I respect a First Lady who stands by her man and her energetic stepson. A First Lady who sees the high road way up there and says to herself, “If they want us out of here so bad, they can clean out the fridge and strip the beds themselves!”

→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.

That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.

And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.

Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”

→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk Boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-11. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe. . . well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story.” The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.

Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the Boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

20 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Momentum continues to build behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and the national narrative as a whole has shifted.

Democrats appear to be generating significant enthusiasm among younger Americans. Yesterday, for the first time in their history, the March for Our Lives organization endorsed a presidential candidate: Kamala Harris. Students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized March for Our Lives after the shooting there in 2018. Executive director Natalie Fall said that the organization “will work to mobilize young people across the country to support Vice President Harris and other down-ballot candidates, with a particular focus on the states and races where we can make up the margin of victory—in Arizona, New York, Michigan, and Florida.”

Andrea Hailey of Vote.org announced that in the 48 hours after President Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote. That meant a daily increase in new registrations of almost 700%.

People are turning out for Harris in impressive numbers. In the hours after she launched her campaign, Win With Black Women rallied 44,000 Black women on Zoom and raised $1.6 million. On Monday, around 20,000 Black men rallied to raise $1.2 million. Tonight, challenged to “answer the call,” 164,000 white women joined an event that “broke Zoom” and raised more than $2 million and tens of thousands of new volunteers.

Another significant endorsement for Harris came yesterday from Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who wrote on social media: “I’m committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse [Kamala Harris] then count me in!” Duncan’s public announcement offers permission for other Georgia Republicans to make a similar shift. In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond similarly paved the way for southern Democrats to vote for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Harris’s appearances are generating such enthusiasm from audiences that when she delivered the keynote address this morning at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, Texas, the applause delayed her ability to begin. After a speech defending education and calling out the cuts to it in Project 2025, Harris ended by demonstrating that after decades of Democrats being accused of being anti-American, Trump’s denigration of the country has enabled the party to claim the position of being America’s defenders.

“When we vote, we make our voices heard,” Harris said. “So today, I ask you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win! God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”

Today the Commerce Department reported that economic growth in the second quarter was higher than expected, coming in at 2.8%, thanks to higher spending driven by higher wages. The country’s changing momentum is showing in media stories hyping the booming economy Biden’s team tried for years to get traction on. “Full Employment is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” was the title of a story by Zachary Carter that appeared yesterday in Slate; CNN responded to today’s good economic news with an article by Bryan Mena titled: “The US economy is pulling off something historic.”

With Harris appearing to have sewn up the nomination, the question has turned to her vice presidential pick. That question is fueling the sense of excitement as potential choices are in front of cameras and on social media advocating Democratic positions and defending the United States from Trump’s denigration. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro listed the economic gains of the past years, and said: “Trump, you’ve got to stop sh*t talking America. We’ve got to start standing tall and being patriotic and showing how much we love this amazing nation.”

The vice presidential hopefuls appear to be having some fun with showcasing their personalities, as Minnesota governor Tim Walz did in his video from the Minnesota State Fair where he and his daughter went on an extreme ride. So are social media users who have dug up old videos of, for example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explaining how he would pilot a small starfighter that had lost its auxiliary shields, or Arizona senator Mark Kelly’s identical twin brother Scott pranking a fellow astronaut on the Space Station with a gorilla suit Mark smuggled on board.

That sense of fun is an enormous relief after years of political weight, and it has spilled over into making fun of the Republican ticket, most notably with a false story that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote about—and I cannot believe I am typing this—having sex with a couch. The story is stupid, but worse are the denials of it, which have spread the story into populations that otherwise would likely not have seen it.

Just two weeks ago, Vance appeared to be the leader of the next generation of extremist MAGA Republicans, but now that calculation seems to have been hasty. Vance is a staunch opponent of abortion—the key issue in 2024—and he has been vocal in his disdain of women who have not given birth, saying in 2021, for example, that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to say that people who don’t have children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.

Republican commentator Meghan McCain noted that Vance’s “comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian.” Actor Jennifer Aniston, who tends to stay out of politics, posted: “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States.” Vance had called out Harris by name in those 2021 comments, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff took to social media to defend Harris from Vance’s attacks on her as “childless,” calling her “a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” Harris’s stepdaughter chimed in: “I love my three parents.”

Vance also ties the Republican ticket firmly to Project 2025. The Trump camp has worked to distance itself from Project 2025—not convincingly, since the two are obviously closely tied, but it turns out that Vance wrote the introduction for a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who was the lead author of Project 2025. The book appears to popularize that plan, right down to its endorsement of a “Second American Revolution,” and according to the book deal report, proceeds from the book will go to the Heritage Foundation “and aligned nonprofits.”

Now Vance’s words praising Project 2025 will be in print, just in time for the election. Yesterday, Trump posted: “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25 [sic]. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!”

Trump is clearly aware of, and concerned about, the changing narrative. This morning, he called in to Fox & Friends, saying, “We don’t need the votes. I have so many votes. I’m in Florida now…and every house has a Trump-Vance sign on it. Every single house…. It’s amazing the spirit…. This election has more spirit than I’ve ever seen ever before.” Tonight the Trump campaign proved their worry by backing out of debates with Harris, saying debates can’t be scheduled until she is the official nominee, although Biden was not the official nominee when they met in June.

The larger narrative shift has affected the media approach to Trump, who is accustomed to shaping perceptions as he wishes. Now, 12 days after the mass shooting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there is increasing media attention to the fact that there has still been no medical report on Trump’s injuries, although he wore a large bandage on his ear at the Republican National Convention and said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday that he “took a bullet for democracy.”

Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that it is not clear whether Trump was “grazed” by a bullet or by shrapnel, words that former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance called “FBI speak for, ‘it’s unlikely it was a bullet.’”

CNN chief medical consultant Dr. Sanjay Gupta noted last week that the people need a real medical evaluation of Trump’s injuries, explaining that “gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma.” But, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has noted, much of the press has kept mum about the story.

Media outlets have reported Wray’s testimony, though, and in a social media post today, Trump called on Wray, whom he appointed to head the FBI, to resign from his post for “LYING TO CONGRESS.” Tonight, he reiterated that “it was…a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard.”

Perhaps eager to get back to their districts, House Republicans canceled their expected votes on appropriations bills scheduled for next week and left town today for their August recess. The House will not reconvene until early September. The government’s fiscal year 2025 begins on October 1.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/opinion/trump-lies-charts-data.html

https://marchforourlives.org/in-a-first-ever-endorsement-march-for-our-lives-endorses-kamala-harris-for-president/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-economic-growth-regains-steam-second-quarter-inflation-slows-2024-07-25/

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/biden-economy-employment-inflation.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/entertainment/jennifer-aniston-jd-vance/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/economy/us-economy-gdp-second-quarter/index.html

https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/jd-vance-wrote-foreword-book-project-2025-architect-kevin-roberts-and-proceeds

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-might-not-shot-1930037

https://people.com/was-trump-struck-by-bullet-or-shrapnel-fbi-director-testifies-8683340

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-wants-fbi-director-resign-immediately-chris-wray-rcna163641