About a year ago, I wrote a long story about how my wife and I chose to live in Westwood, MA after relocating back to the Boston area after 7 years in Silicon Valley. But a much bigger set of choices for us has been:
- having a child
- my wife becoming a stay-at-home mom
- having two more children
Now before everyone clicks away to something less personal, let me toss this out there:
Our lifestyle choice is a radical, progressive deviation from cultural normalcy.
It’s dangerous to talk about “normal” and parenting in the same breath. We all invest ourselves in our choices, and I do not mean to criticize other parents or imply that our choices are superior. But I think our choices are the kinds of choices more and more people will be making sooner in their lives than we did because of the same kinds of changing work/life dynamics that are affecting Millennials’ entry into the workforce.
First, our choices:
1. Children were not the purpose of our marriage. We were married 8 years before we changed our minds about having kids. We never had a planned schedule—it was not that we postponed things to get our careers going or anything like that. When we decided to go for it though, it took priority over everything else.
2. We both had careers. It’s not fair for me to speak for my wife here because my choice is the far easier one, but as we visualized raising a child, the idea of her working and putting our daughter in daycare seemed pointless. We sold our expensive house, bought a smaller one, and figured out how to live on one income for the foreseeable future.
3. Baby #3 was kind of my “fault.” But what the heck, might as well go “all-in.” It is so different from what I expected when I was in my 20s, but it just feels right for us.
In Malcom Gladwell’s book Blink he counter-intuitively concludes that big decisions are the ones best left to our subconscious. After the fact, I can find explanations, justifications, rationalizations… and I feel that in addition to our own personal changes the following things changed externally:
Career track is less important because we know that we can figure something out. There are no guarantees of employment. And my blog is not exactly a cash cow. But the nature of the work I do and the opportunities out there have changed to become more creative and flexible than any generation before me. We adapt. We evolve. We survive and flourish.
The value from career is not enough to make our lives whole. Maybe it never was. But so many folks have burned out of unsatisfying careers that the idea that you need to sacrifice, pay your dues, bide your time—whatever—just seems naive. So when evaluating your career in the context of starting a family—we do it with a much more critical eye today.
Life is more precious and precarious. My Dad died in 2000 and a year later we watched 9/11 unfold, having flown back from DC a few days earlier on one of our yearly visits with family on the East Coast. I still wish we’d see more of my folks, but at least we are in the same time zone now. It’s almost a bit of a cliched idea, but I think 9/11 made a lot of us wake up to the humanity around us.
So, if I’m right, I predict the following trends for young professionals:
More kids sooner. Fewer women postponing marriage to establish careers. More attempts at equally shared parenting.
Increased social activism. Many young people will take up a banner of building the next generation responsibly… and with young children in tow, far from being inhibited by family responsibilities, they will be unstoppable in their convictions. When you hear of children in Darfur being raped, murdered and mutiliated... and then look at your own 2-year old, it makes you sick and it makes you want to do something NOW.
Strengthened community. As Millenials raise children, I bet teamwork will take on more complicated forms than Moms’ playgroups. There are already cooperative nursery schools; I suspect we will see more and more innovative arrangements as young people consider what options exist today and create new ones in their communities.
I’d love to hear what young people think. I think if I’d read this when I was 25, I’d have said “not applicable to me.” But then it was, a decade later. Did I just get older or is there also a social change going on that will influence younger people as I predict?