Previously, while criticizing the French, I made mention of the lower value placed on child-raising.  I made the claim that


[A]assuming secularism makes a genuine offer, a commitment to all that you can have and be, here and now tends to make you a bit self-centered and very much inclined to make peace under whatever terms are offered you as long as your own personal peace and affluence are promised and protected.  The fewer children you have, the more for you.


I don’t like to make claims like that without presenting at least a scintilla of evidence.  So right on cue, MSN.com helps me out.  Here's an article, by M. P. Dunleavey ("Kids: Bad investments, big returns," MSN Money Central. Cited 12 April 2006.) that discusses the cost, to parents, of having children.

Here are a few quotes illustrating my point:


While the benefits of marriage, in terms of health, longevity, resistance to depression and even greater wealth, have been demonstrated repeatedly, the effect of children on your quality of life or well-being isn't so clear.  A study of 13,017 adults published last month in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, found that parents experience significantly higher levels of depression than nonparents.  And in a now-famous study published in the journal Science, in 2004, when researchers asked 909 women in Texas to record the events of a single day and rate how much they enjoyed various activities, spending time with their kids didn't even crack the top five, which were: sex, socializing, relaxing, praying or meditating and eating.


That’s a bit negative.  Here a positive:

Derry-Williams has made it his specialty to keep up with research in the field of economics and happiness. "In the short term, if you look at the dollar value you lose, it can be substantial -- but at the same time, it's like an ongoing, lifelong investment in happiness," he says.

But whether anything said in the article is positive or negative, as you read it, ask yourself one question.  What’s the focus?  The answer is, of course: the Self of the person contemplating child-raising.  On one hand we have the costs—to the Self.  When we get to talking about the benefits, we are talking about the benefits to the Self.  Note the quote from Derry-Williams, above.  He talks about a “lifelong investment in happiness.”  Isn’t that wonderful?  But note that he’s talking about the parent’s happiness—here and now.

Happiness.  Here.  Now.  That’s what I said that secularism promises.  Children optional—depending upon how happy you calculate they can make you.  (Dunleavy writes another article, "Cost of being a stay-at-home-mom: $1 million," which, like the article I’m presently discussing, has its ups and downs but shares the same focus: the cost to the Self of parenthood.)

This raises the question about my own feelings on the matter.  And the truth is that when I was a secularist I had no interest in having children; neither did I have an interest in marriage.  For one thing, I knew I would have a problem with the whole parental authority thing.  When I was a kid and became an atheist, I also became—of course—an evolutionist.  One problem I always had with my parents was their—to my mind—silly conviction that their decision to spawn me gave them authority over me.  I never could see how they got authority over me just by copulating.  How can an accident of birth have such a ridiculous significance?  (What about the “consent of the governed”?)  Also, I wasn’t sure how committed I should be to be to the continuation of the human race.  If the race continued, it could, and no doubt would, do so just as well without my “output” as with it.  And to whatever extent I did believe that the human race should continue, I thought test-tube babies were the best way to go, the way of the future; so it didn’t matter at all.

Back to my point, then, about the French.  They, like the articles I’ve cited here, are secular in outlook.  The people they are relying upon to populate their country are not secular in outlook.  Like me (a Christian—a Reformed Catholic, to be specific) they believe that the purpose of a human being is to glorify God and that one of the ways that one does so is by having children.  After all, according to the Christian faith, humans are the image of God; multiplying that image on the face of the earth is a good thing.  And it requires selflessness, which is a form of courage. And courage is something which many of the French seem to lack—at least from this far away.