Don’t Overcomplicate Babymaking

By now, most sane people have come to realize that humanity faces an underpopulation crisis. After centuries of philosophes, utilitarians, Darwinists, eugenicists, and environmentalists warning of an overpopulation crisis that would devour the planet in some fashion, recent conditions in the developed world have actually resulted in low birth rates, aging demographics, and inevitable population decline. Many formerly fecund countries like Japan, South Korea, Germany, and Italy will rapidly dwindle over the course of the next several decades.

It’s anyone’s guess how this happened. It’s likely some combination of decreasing religious practice, increasing material prosperity, automation, an increasingly decadent culture, and the misanthropic ideologues scaring people.

However, because the problem of underpopulation is so complex, it becomes equally difficult to offer a comprehensive solution. The usual prescriptions involve some potent ideological cocktail of policy proposals, another great religious awakening, and a full-on cultural renaissance.

But what if the most effective approach to reversing the birth dearth would be none of these things? Instead of pro-natalists tying themselves into knots with the hope of saving Western Civilization from a “Demographic Winter,” perhaps they would be better off by letting go of the prescriptions, taking a deep breath, and returning to nature.

Such was the argument made by Jonathon Keeperman (a.k.a. Lomez) at the recent Natal Conference in Austin, TX. Along with other right-wing influencers and writers, Keeperman offered his thoughts on family formation and human fertility. Yet, unlike other speakers who discussed remedies for encouraging people to have more children, Keeperman took a different approach by declaring from the outset: “I’m going to explain why this conference should be disbanded as soon as possible.”

Far from dismissing the very real problem of depopulation, Keeperman thinks about it more than most people, but has concluded that this is one of those cases where less is more. As he puts it, people “need to care a lot less about their kids” and should stop calling themselves “pro-natalists.”

His first point warrants elaboration since most non-parents usually miss it. For several generations now, parents are expected to devote ever more of their time and attention to their children for the purpose of guaranteeing their material success, boosting their self-esteem, and conforming to an artificial standard projected by mass media. This means following all the new parental trends, seeking out the best schooling options, blocking out harmful influences, spending endless time bonding, and sparing no expense to keep their children happy and entertained.

Keeperman notes how these additional parenting burdens have made having more than one or two children far too onerous: “When parenting is redefined from an obsessive, resource-intensive exercise in micromanagement and resume-building to something much more hands-off and organic, each child no longer represents an exponential increase in parental workload and anxiety.”

To illustrate how this grind works, Keeperman references Vivek Ramaswamy’s politically fatal rant on X where he criticized white American parents for not doing enough to support their children’s academic success. Keeperman remarks that “Vivek’s diagnosis assumes that childhood itself should be structured as one long resume-building exercise — every waking moment dedicated to narrowly defined academic excellence or competitive STEM achievement.”

It’s worth adding that Ramaswamy simply reiterated what the original Tiger parent Amy Chua argued 15 years go — her article and book similarly infuriated American parents across the country. While most critics of Ramaswamy and Chua would concede that spoiling kids can be a real problem, it’s also a problem to fixate on academic achievement at the cost of social and emotional fulfillment.

For his part, Keeperman rightly sees the bigger problem with both views, which is that they make raising kids much more stressful and thus much less appealing. Hence, he admonishes his audience: “Don’t do this [over-parenting]. Stay as far away from this as possible. Actively reject this. Your kids don’t want this. It will not help them. You don’t want this. It is completely and utterly the wrong approach to parenting.”

In the second part of his speech, he articulates his misgivings with adopting the term “natalist,” which he believe politicizes an otherwise natural dimension of being human: “[Being pro-natalist] suggests there is some way of being that is not natalist, and that it requires whole conferences and policies and political labels to contend against this other way of being.”

To this, one could respond that there really are people who are “not natalist,” and they can be seen religiously promoting abortion and prophesying climate catastrophes. Moreover, they have convinced a significant portion of society that babies are bad for the environment and one’s personal well-being. It therefore makes sense to rebut their arguments a set the record straight on these issues.

Nevertheless, on a deeper level, Keeperman is right to depoliticize having children and remove it from political discourse. After all, no normal person has children for the good of the country or to own the libs, nor should they. Rather, they should have children out of love. As Peachy Keenan said in her own excellent speech at the Natal Conference, “any healthy natalism movement must be about more than numbers and technology. It has to be about, simply, maternal love. We should do it for their babies, for our babies, out of infinite love for them.”

And for that infinite love to fully emerge, prospective parents need to distance themselves from the pressures to over-parent as well as disengage from the natalist debates. To do this, they need limit their exposure to the incessant chatter of digital media so that they can rediscover their natural impulses to pair up, procreate, and raise children. There is little need to complicate it, and much to lose from making the effort.

Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He is the founding editor of The Everyman, a senior contributor to The Federalist, and has written essays for Newsweek, The American Mind, The American Conservative, Religion and Liberty, Crisis Magazine, and elsewhere. Follow him on X and Substack.