May 2009 – They seem to be everywhere, ubiquitous little pests who are not only gobbling up the world’s resources but, as a result of their noxious emissions, are threatening mankind’s very existence.

The culprit? Pollution-spewing mutant cockroaches? A new species of super rat that is devouring the world’s crops? No, nothing quite so dramatic.

The dirty little scoundrels are children who, despite being ever-present, seem to be falling out of favor among Westerners.

Too many pests
An entire culture is springing up around the growing numbers of child-free adults, according to Newsweek. The magazine ran a cover story that noted the popularity in the U.K. of books like Child-Free and Loving It and a support group in Vancouver, Canada, for childless couples called “No Kidding!” 

Stefan Theil, European economics editor for Newsweek, said some hotels and resorts in Italy are proudly displaying the fact that they are for adults only. One in particular promises customers that their holidays “will not be shattered by the clamor of children.”

Of course, anyone who has actually raised children can certainly sympathize with the thought of a vacation without “the clamor of children.” Most parents are probably nodding at the thought of how good it sounds to have a peaceful vacation without the responsibility of making your kids happy campers.

But that is not what these trends are revealing, according to some observers. It’s not a few vacation hot spots promising parents a handful of heavenly days away from the kids, but an increasing number of people who think that kids are inconvenient pests to begin with.

This attitude was boldly expressed by Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert when he told a conference last year that being married without children is the key to happiness.

“[Married] people are extremely happy before they have children and then their happiness goes down, and it takes another big hit when kids reach adolescence,” Gilbert said. “When does it come back to its original baseline? Oh, about the time the children grow up and go away.”

Patrick Meagher, contributing editor for the online ethics and policy site MercatorNet, said Westerners are increasingly irked by the presence of kids. “You know the Western world is hostile to children when you have them,” he said. “Couples know this from the looks they get, the comments, the smirks. It’s as if it were illegal, like smoking cigarettes in a public building.”

Meagher related an incident that happened when someone he knew took her five children shopping: “When the clerk at the checkout counter learned that all the kids were hers, the clerk observed: ‘Aren’t we greedy.’ How odd.” 

In the U.K., Jonathon Porritt, former chairman of the leftist group Greenpeace, now heads the nation’s Sustainable Development Commission. He believes that children can be an obstacle to a nation ‘going green.’

“I am unapologetic about asking people to connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate and how many children they think are appropriate,” he said. “I think we will work our way toward a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible. It is the ghost at the table.”

Detaching marriage and procreation
It would certainly be overstating the case to argue that everyone in the West thinks children are an inconvenience. It seems that there are still kids galore and lots of couples are having them.

Nevertheless, experts say there is a growing indifference – and in some cases outright hostility – to the notion of children. In other words, someone seems to be absorbing the attitudes of Gilbert, Porritt and the “No Kidding!” crowd.

Facts are facts. People in most Western societies are simply not having as many children, creating potentially dangerous demographic trends. (See AFA Journal, 4/09.)  

According to the National Marriage Project, directed by Rutgers University professor David Popenoe and social critic Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, it’s a matter of simple math even here in the U.S. In 1976 only about 10% of 40-year-old women were childless, while in 2004 it was about 20%. The percentage has doubled in roughly three decades and is continuing in the wrong direction.

One of the reasons for this, according to experts, is that marriage is no longer viewed as an institution connected with producing children. A 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 65% of respondents defined the main purpose of marriage as “forming a lifetime union between two adults for their mutual happiness and fulfillment.” 

As LifeSiteNews.com writer Elizabeth O’Brien noted, this selection was chosen “rather than the more traditional understanding of marriage as being for ‘bearing and raising children.’”

For cultural observers like David Blankenhorn, founder and president of the Institute for American Values, this shifting view of the purposes for marriage becomes painfully obvious as debates swirl over issues like same-sex marriage.

“There is another word almost entirely missing from the current prevailing definitions of marriage. It’s a word closely related to matters of sexual embodiment and sexual intercourse,” Blankenhorn said in his book The Future of Marriage. “That word is ‘children.’ … Children rarely make an appearance in the thin descriptions of marriage as a personal commitment or an expression of love. Mostly, they are not seen and not heard.” 

Blankenhorn said marriage trends are being driven for the most part by a new view of marriage that has taken root, “the belief that marriage is exclusively a private relationship, created by and for the couple, essentially unconnected to larger social needs and public meanings.”

A ‘sexual complementarity’
This new view has resulted in the idea that marriage is not tied to procreation – that marriage and children aren’t somehow linked.

That philosophical shift did not occur in a vacuum. It resulted from the West’s increasing detachment from its Judeo-Christian foundations, which in turn dislodged the things that were built on that bedrock worldview – like the traditional views of sexuality, marriage and family. That, in turn, has created the conditions under which cultural debates over things like same-sex marriage have flourished.

In response to the moral confusion over the issue of homosexual marriage, in 2003 the Catholic Church released the document, “Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognitions to Unions Between Homosexual Persons.” 

In that document the Vatican said: “God has willed to give the union of man and woman a special participation in His work of creation. Thus, He blessed the man and the woman with the words ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ (Gen 1:28). Therefore, in the Creator’s plan, sexual complementarity and fruitfulness belong to the very nature of marriage.”

“Sexual complementarity” relates to the gender differences between a man and a woman that allow a true sexual union of partners – whose bodies fit by design – that creates a harmonious totality. In our culture we used to call this the consummation of the marriage – a concept by which we expressed the completion of the wedding vows and indeed, the entire ceremony.

Thus sex between a husband and wife is meant to bind the two together, not only in a literal, physical sense but also in an emotional sense. After all, the Bible states that the husband shall cleave to his wife and “they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24).

In The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market and Morals, Roger Scruton, professor of philosophy at the University of Buckingham in England, said there is no doubt that marriage has this sexual union at its core.

“Marriage is not a contract of cohabitation, but a vow of togetherness,” Scruton said. “Its foundation is erotic, not in the sense that all marriages begin in or exist through desire, but in the sense that, without desire, the institution would rest on nothing in the human condition.”

The fruitfulness of that union
But the purposes for marriage do not end there. By also pointing to “fruitfulness” as a core purpose of the marriage union, the Vatican was stating that marriage was not simply for the personal enjoyment of the participants. Likewise the capacity for sex is not simply and solely for personal enjoyment. 

Sex – and the marriage that it helps to create – is also a procreative act. This is why the sex organs are considered biologically to be reproductive organs. 

As a result, the fruitfulness of marriage provides a blessing to human societies – and in fact makes human societies possible. Scruton said that, “looked at from outside, with the eye of the anthropologist, marriage has a function, which is to ensure social reproduction, the socializing of children and the passing on of social capital. … The inner, sacramental, character of marriage is therefore reinforced by its external function.”

How does marriage do this? Jean Bethke Elshtain, the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago, says that by joining a husband and wife into a strong, vigorous bond, a couple provides a safe place for the raising of children and making decent folk of them.

“Throughout human history,” Elshtain said, “societies have created many laws, customs, and institutions that have influenced the institution of marriage and the family, in ways planned and unplanned; but the overall social aim has always been to secure a safe place to rear children and establish an institution that helps to ‘moralize’ – without necessarily being moralistic – human sexual behavior.” 

The resulting family unit provides the vehicle for the transmission of the beliefs, values and skills that will serve the greater community. And for the Christian, of course, the most important transmission between parents and children is the Christian faith.

Seen this way, marriage is not simply a way for individuals to find a committed partner with whom they will spend the rest of their lives together in DINK (Dual Income No Kids) bliss. 

It is an institution created by God for a man and a woman to become a husband and wife, and then spread the joy of their love to the new lives that their love creates. In other words, God created “love-making” to be a really fun way to be about the business of “life-making” and “love-sharing.”

Despite the growing view of children as an inconvenience or, at best, a luxury that many couples might pass up should they so choose, the Bible makes clear that children are a blessing from the Lord.

They are not pests. They are literally the fruit of the love between a husband and wife. And as a society we should be glad for every one of them.