In a more personal French Friday, David French shares about the mix of pride and sadness he felt when his adult children and his grandchildren recently moved away. This leads to a wider conversation with Skye Jethani about the challenges and blessings of parenting, the pros and cons of getting married young, and why millennials in nearly every developed country are delaying marriage and having fewer kids. They also touch on the recent Republican primary debate, and what Trump’s indictments mean for the 2024 presidential race.
0:00 - Theme Song
0:17 - David and Skye open up about recent life changes
15:39 - Declining birth rates and prolonged adolescence
47:42 - Sponsor - Radvo Register today for the Radvo Conference (Sept 21-23) at https://radvoco.org/
48:52 - Politics, Republicans, and Trump
1:12:39- End Credits
Other resources:
David French: https://twitter.com/DavidAFrench
Three Generations Under One Roof https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/27/opinion/family-together-health-scare.html
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My 31 year old daughter has no intention of having kids ( she's getting married next year) due to the state of the world (climate change, etc) and fear she'd fail at parenting (I think she'd be amazing)
NPR The Pulse did a happiness episode https://www.npr.org/2023/09/06/1196550020/finding-happiness and they reported on a study about happiness between single, married, and married with children. In most countries, happiness stayed level or increased with children, except the US. In the US, happiness decreased with children, and they found the reason was lack of social supports line affordable child care. Take a listen!
Echoing what many people write here- Millennials and Gen Z are being impacted by the financial burden of having children. It's less about a personal deprioritization of kids & family, but a social one- with healthcare being tied to jobs, and corporations not being required to pay for maternity/paternity leave, much less proving a living wage... I'm a college educated RN, and have been working for several years now- I do NOT make enough money to support my spouse on my own, much less support my spouse and a child, and we do not live lavish, extravagant lives. We are not constantly going on vacation, or living above our means as suggested... Life has simply gotten exceedingly expensive, while wages…
I think younger people do value having children. Does one have a child in a country which overwhelmingly dismisses the impacts of climate change and the strain our large population puts on God’s creation? Does one have a child in a country which continuously refuses to make any policy change concerning school shootings? My child just started Kindergarten today, and in my gut I’m hoping to God she will come home safe. Does one have a child in a country where the average highly educated person who was told that a college education would earn them more than minimum wage is currently making $40,000 and if adjusted for inflation that 40k is less than minimum wage. A potential parent m…
The parenting conversation made me laugh so hard. Sorry. It felt like nonsense to the world I'm living in.
Let me situate myself: College educated, older millennial, ordained minister living most of my life in a Northern state (IA, IL, PA, WI - one year in TX). For the sake of my social location - maybe what you're saying is true in the Southern Bible Belt? But it makes no sense to my entire life experience.
[In the following, I'm talking specifically about college educated people, because that's my experience, but that was also the focus group of your conversation]
When you sluffed off all the economic factors [16:30] (and, as one commenter below said, completely ignored the moral factors…