The "child-free movement" says that the only way to be free and happy is to avoid having kids at all costs. Many people in my generation have taken this idea to heart, and as a result the birth rate has dropped to cataclysmic lows. But the "child-free" mentality is wrong, and leads only to emptiness and sadness, and I'll explain why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| So some good news for you guys to start the show. | |
| First of all, I am in a building. | |
| This is not a drill. | |
| You know I'm serious and I mean business when I've got a roof and walls around me. | |
| So that's exciting. | |
| Even more exciting, we've taken my Facebook Live videos to podcast. | |
| And you can get them on the podcast app of your choice, including the new edition on Amazon Alexa and the Google Home device. | |
| If you like the show and you use a voice assistant, this will be a great new feature for you. | |
| But you have to activate the shows first. | |
| So it's a very simple process. | |
| With Alexa, you just enable the skill. | |
| Like adding an app. | |
| Alexa, enable the Matt Walsh Show skill. | |
| Now, I don't have any skills, so you're not enabling my skills. | |
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| Alexa, enable the Matt Walsh Show skill. | |
| Then you can tell her to play or open. | |
| Alexa, play the Matt Walsh Show. | |
| Google doesn't need to be added by a user, but you have to speak very clearly for her to understand. | |
| And I tell my wife this all the time about me. | |
| If you want me to understand anything, you have to speak slowly and clearly because it takes me a long time to understand things. | |
| So you just say a command like, okay, Google, talk to the Matt Wall Show, or okay, Google, speak to the Matt Wall Show. | |
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| Last week, the Washington Post ran a very glowing article about the child-free movement. | |
| And then a couple days ago, the ladies on The View had one of their normally intellectually stimulating conversations about this movement. | |
| And of course, when the term is used, I just need to, I feel like every time, we talked about something similar to this a few weeks ago. | |
| And I opened with the same disclaimer I'm going to open with now, but it was to no avail then, and I'm sure it'll be to no avail now. | |
| But I just want to clarify. | |
| When we talk about the child-free movement or people who consider themselves child-free, people who are advocating for the child-free lifestyle, now those are exclusively people who have chosen, they have made it their goal to avoid having kids at all costs, at all costs, up to and including murder. | |
| So these are people who have chosen, they've chosen not to have kids. | |
| Because they feel that children would be a terrible burden on their comfortable lifestyles. | |
| So that's what we're talking about here. | |
| We're not talking about people who can't have kids. | |
| That's not at all, in any sense, what we're discussing now. | |
| Okay. Now this kind of attitude, the child-free attitude of the last thing in the world that I ever want is to have a kid, that used to be stigmatized. | |
| And now, you know, when they talk about it in the media, when they're talking about it on The View, they act like it still is stigmatized to not have kids. | |
| But it's not really anymore. | |
| It used to be stigmatized, especially if people who were just openly selfish and self-centered and said, I don't want kids because I want to be able to take vacations and buy a lot of nice stuff. | |
| That used to be stigmatized, for good reason. | |
| Now, though, the stigma runs very much in the other direction. | |
| Like, yeah, you can have a kid. | |
| I'm not saying it's stigmatized to have a kid. | |
| And it's not necessarily stigmatized to have two kids. | |
| Once you get to three, you're pushing it. | |
| But if you commit the sin of having five, six, or more kids, then you're going to face a society that will just heap scorn upon you. | |
| It's true that women without kids may sometimes be asked about it. | |
| When are you going to have kids? | |
| Maybe that's annoying. | |
| But they will not face, I'm just telling you, I come from a large family, they will not face anywhere near the same level of open disgust that people have for big families. | |
| So it's different than people being bemused or just inquisitive or whatever about the fact that you don't have kids. | |
| It's different than that. This is disgust. | |
| There are a lot of people out there who are just disgusted by big families. | |
| And if you don't believe me, just try sometime, like something from my childhood. | |
| I had five siblings, so the six kids in the family. | |
| And anytime we went out to eat anywhere, We're walking through the restaurant. | |
| Just to sit down at our table, people looked at us like... | |
| I mean, a few times I was really worried that someone was going to pick up a steak knife and just start stabbing all of us. | |
| Because the looks of hostility and anger that people have just seeing a big family, until you've experienced it, you don't really understand it. | |
| And it is surely a sign of a shallow and really suicidal civilization when large, healthy, nuclear families... | |
| And as the American birth rate continues its decline and younger people categorically decline to have kids, or they put off having kids until they are biologically incapable of having kids without medical intervention, as that's happening, it's become clear that the child-free mentality is not fringe. | |
| It's not some Little thing off to the side we don't have to pay attention to. | |
| It is becoming rapidly the most acceptable and kind of mainstream approach to life. | |
| And for that reason, I think it's worth saying... | |
| I think maybe it's worth making a few comments about it. | |
| So that's what I'm going to do. On the child-free so-called movement. | |
| First of all, the term child-free... | |
| Is monstrous, actually. | |
| It purposely puts children in the same category as diseases and parasites. | |
| A woman will say that she's child-free with the same kind of triumphant tone that she might say she's cancer-free. | |
| And that's intentional. | |
| Now, we've taken this term child-free because we consider it to be an improvement over the old term, which was childless. | |
| And we don't like that term anymore because childless insinuates that a person is missing something if she has no children. | |
| But the thing is, a married couple... | |
| That chooses to reject the life-giving potential in their union is missing something. | |
| We use the term childless for a reason. | |
| Because they are missing, by choice, one of the fundamental things that gives marriage its purpose and its meaning. | |
| Just think about it this way. | |
| You could never... | |
| We don't speak about any other group of humans on the planet the way that we speak about children. | |
| Children are the only ones who we feel perfectly entitled to expressly dislike and even say we don't like them. | |
| It's not uncommon to hear people say, well, I don't like kids, or even I hate kids. | |
| There was an article written a couple years ago I forget in what publication. | |
| I want to say Salon. | |
| If it's not Salon, I don't mean to... | |
| You can understand why I assume that it is. | |
| I think it was Salon ran an article and the title was something like, I hate your kids and I'm not sorry. | |
| Something like that. And it was a woman confessing that she just hates kids. | |
| It's somewhat uncommon to hear people say it like that in public, but that's not an uncommon thing to hear just in society. | |
| Someone who just hates kids, hates being around them. | |
| So it's suddenly acceptable to have a prejudice that Against an entire group of people. | |
| Why is that okay? | |
| I know people think, well, it's okay to not like kids. | |
| It's actually not okay. | |
| You know why it's not okay? | |
| Because it wouldn't be okay to feel that way about any other group, would it? | |
| Whatever your demographic group is, what if somebody said, what if you're a middle-aged woman and somebody said, I don't like middle-aged women. | |
| I just don't like them. Don't want to be around them. | |
| Don't like them. That's all. | |
| How would that make you feel? | |
| Was that an okay thing to think? | |
| Now, if you think it, you think it, but you shouldn't think it. | |
| There's something wrong with you if you think it. | |
| Again, these are the kind of statements that in the past people would be ashamed to say. | |
| They would never say that. And they'd be shamed for saying it, and deservedly so. | |
| We're not supposed to hate people for who they are. | |
| Whatever happened to that? | |
| Or express our desires to be free from them. | |
| I mean, what if you said you were moving to a certain neighborhood because you want to be free from X group of people? | |
| Now, if you were to put kids into that X group, then everyone's fine with it. | |
| But if you were to put any other category of person into that group, that would generally be frowned upon. | |
| For good reason. It should be. | |
| So that's the way we feel about most people. | |
| We say, you can't just hate whole groups of people. | |
| But we've made children an exception to that rule. | |
| And that doesn't make any sense. If anything, children should be the only non-exceptions to that rule. | |
| Because I can think of plenty of valid reasons to dislike most of the adults I have encountered in my life. | |
| And I'm sure people that have encountered me could say the exact same thing. | |
| There's plenty of reasons to not like me. | |
| There's plenty of reasons for me to not like most of the people that I've encountered that are adults. | |
| But kids... You know, kids are innocent. | |
| Kids are energetic. They're fun. | |
| They're unconditionally loving. | |
| Kids have unconditional love. | |
| What's not to like about it? | |
| If you don't like that, there's something wrong. | |
| It's not something you shouldn't not like that. | |
| Basically, kids have all the qualities that we have unnaturally infused into dogs. | |
| That's essentially what's happening. | |
| Kids and dogs have traded places in our culture. | |
| Do you realize that? That now we've taken all the qualities of children and we've given them to dogs. | |
| And we've taken the qualities of dogs and given them to children. | |
| And now we treat children the way people used to treat dogs, which is a lot of people didn't like dogs, don't want to be around them. | |
| They're animals. Get them out of here. | |
| I don't want them inside. I don't want them on a plane with me. | |
| I don't want them in a restaurant. | |
| Like, they're dogs. They're animals. | |
| It's a beast. Please get it away. | |
| You know, I don't want to... And it would be okay to say, I hate dogs. | |
| I just don't want to be around them. | |
| They're gross. I don't like them. | |
| Now you can say that about kids, but you can't say, oh, you said it about dogs. | |
| Dogs are saintly. | |
| They're saints. Dogs are unconditionally loving. | |
| No, they're not. They don't have any love. | |
| They're not capable of it. Love is a willful choice. | |
| Dogs don't make willful choices. | |
| They don't have a conscience. | |
| You need that to have love. | |
| You need to be a human to love. | |
| Kids really have that. | |
| And anyone who's a parent, you've seen this, especially in your younger kids. | |
| That they really just love you deeply. | |
| And it's not just that they don't see the flaws in you. | |
| That's part of it. | |
| I mean, they do kind of see you as a superhero. | |
| My kids think that I can pick up our house. | |
| My kids literally think I can pick up our house above my head and walk down the block with it. | |
| That's what they think. And they might think that because I told them. | |
| I don't know. I don't remember. | |
| So they do kind of see you as a superhero. | |
| But I think they do also see your flaws. | |
| And sometimes they'll point them out kind of innocently. | |
| They're very honest about it. | |
| But they love you in spite of it. | |
| It's the most non-judgmental thing. | |
| If a kid ever comes up to you and just points out something wrong with you, they don't mean any offense by it. | |
| They're just noticing it, but they love you anyway. | |
| It's no big deal, nothing personal. | |
| That's why we should all like kids. | |
| So second thing. So that's the first thing. | |
| It's really not okay to be prejudiced against kids. | |
| And one other point on that, especially when you consider what we do to kids in this society, kids are also the only human... | |
| Talk about prejudice. | |
| If you want the real evidence of that, They're the only humans in our society who you can legally kill, and we've killed 60 million of them. | |
| So before you laugh at the idea that we're prejudiced against kids, we've got a mass grave filled with 60 million dead bodies of children. | |
| So yes, we are prejudiced against children in our culture. | |
| Second thing, there's no freedom in being child-free. | |
| Now, there are things that my wife and I Have trouble doing now because we have kids. | |
| Of course, we can't leave the house without spending 45 minutes looking for somebody's shoes. | |
| And that's a whole other thing. I don't want to get off on that tangent, but that's the shoe thing. | |
| I'm at the point now as a dad where I just want to give up on shoes. | |
| I'm about to tell my kids we're not doing shoes anymore. | |
| There's not gonna be any more shoes in this house. | |
| No more shoes. I'm gonna have a no-shoe policy now because they can't... | |
| I'm telling you, the moment a kid walks in, within 10 seconds of a kid walking, getting inside the house, the shoes will be off and one of them will be lost. | |
| Just gone. Anyway, I say all that lovingly though. | |
| It's... So that's one thing. | |
| You can't just leave the house. | |
| You gotta find the shoes. | |
| You gotta go through the whole thing. But that's just a fact of life. | |
| And my wife and I, we can't just up and go to a movie anytime we want. | |
| We can't go on a date. | |
| We can do all those things, but it takes planning. | |
| It takes extra money. | |
| You gotta get a babysitter, all that stuff. | |
| But that's just a fact of life. | |
| That's a minor challenge. | |
| That's a hurdle to get over. | |
| That's not slavery. The way people talk about, oh, I don't have kids, I'm free. | |
| Well, what do you think? You think I'm enslaved? | |
| What do you think? You think I'm in jail or something? | |
| It can't be considered an encroachment on my freedom to have kids unless freedom is defined as the ability to live however you want without inconvenience. | |
| If that's freedom, if freedom is just really boiled down to freedom from inconvenience, then yeah, I guess I am a slave. | |
| But that idea of freedom is how you get a brave new world. | |
| Or America, circa 2018. | |
| You could live in a totalitarian state and still have that kind of freedom. | |
| As long as the totalitarian dictator keeps you basically comfortable, then by that logic, you're free. | |
| But if we understand freedom as the ability to live as God intends us to live, with our inherent human dignity, preserved and protected, Then our freedom is actually enhanced when we have kids, because we're doing what we're made to do. | |
| We're growing. | |
| We're changing. We are becoming something. | |
| We're embracing our new identity, an identity with greater responsibilities, yes, but also a greater capacity and potential for love and joy. | |
| The thing is, I am free to do all the things that a person without kids can do. | |
| There's nothing that a child-free person can do that I can't do. | |
| I can go on a vacation. | |
| I can go out to eat. | |
| I can do everything they can do. | |
| There is no activity or experience that's open to them and is completely, fundamentally closed off from me. | |
| Now, it might take some extra effort. | |
| It might cost a little bit more money. | |
| I might really have to make it a priority if I want to do it, but I can do it. | |
| I'm not precluded from it. | |
| But a child-free person is actually precluded from the joys and experiences of parenthood. | |
| So when you want to be child-free, it means that you can do everything that the kids can do. | |
| You can just do some of it a little bit easier. | |
| Whereas when you have kids, there's a whole new life that's opened up to you, a whole new identity opened up to you that is not opened up to people who decide not to have kids. | |
| So who really is the most free? | |
| Third thing about the child-free movement is that it is a celebration of narcissism. | |
| The people who advocate this lifestyle, they're also advocating a philosophy, and it's a really terrible philosophy. | |
| Because they are advancing the notion that the key to happiness is located within our own egos. | |
| And so what they're suggesting is that the happiest person is the person who is most empowered to kind of indulge and entertain themselves. | |
| The person who wants to be child-free, their greatest aim is to keep themselves to themselves, accumulating, Their goal is just to accumulate wealth, pleasure, experiences, purely just for their own sake and for no other reason. | |
| I don't think that's the path to happiness. | |
| I think that's the quickest path to despair. | |
| And I also think that the people who advocate for this path know that it brings despair because they are in despair themselves. | |
| The truth is this. Joy is found through work and love and sacrifice. | |
| It cannot be found anywhere else. | |
| Nobody has ever found it anywhere else. | |
| Many people have theorized, philosophically, that you could find it somewhere else. | |
| Many people have set out on a mission, on the journey, the perilous journey, to try to find it somewhere else, but none of them have accomplished the task. | |
| It's like the fountain of youth or any other mythical treasure that people go out seeking. | |
| This joy, this fulfillment, true happiness that can be found in selfishness. | |
| That is the ultimate fountain of youth, the ultimate mythical reward that people literally kill themselves trying to find. | |
| And they never will. All they find out, all they find out there in that wasteland of materialism and self-indulgence is more of the despair that drove them there in the first place. | |
| So they try to bypass sacrifice and suffering and work to get to joy, but then they discover in the end that they bypassed joy at the same time. | |
| But what do they do? What do they do? | |
| They still come back and tell us that, hey guys, I found the joy. | |
| It's over here. Come with me. | |
| And they encourage everyone to follow them out there into the desert because misery loves company, I guess. | |
| But we shouldn't listen to that. | |
| You don't give up your freedom when you have kids. | |
| You may be giving a lot of time. | |
| You're giving money. You're making sacrifices. | |
| You're embracing a life that's going to be, in many ways, harder. | |
| But you're not really giving up anything meaningful, and you're gaining so much more. | |
| As I said, you're gaining... | |
| Yourself. You're gaining an entire new identity. | |
| There are only a few moments in our life when we really become something else than what we were before. | |
| There are only a few moments when we really change fundamentally to our core. | |
| One of those is marriage. | |
| One of them is parenthood. | |
| And that's a beautiful thing. And that's what we should be talking about in our society. | |
| And that's what we should be celebrating, especially as the birth rate declines and we kind of just fall headlong into self-appointed extinction. | |
| I think it becomes even more necessary to have a message like this. | |
| All right, guys, have a great weekend. |