Shepherd Well

Kids are a Curse.

Why else would we act the way we do?

If we believed they were a blessing (Ps 127) we would receive them instead of prevent them. If we were convinced they were a reward from a loving God (Ps 127), we would crave and long for that good God to give us those gifts instead of focusing on how small a reward we could get by with (in order that we might focus more on ourselves).

This week I saw a quote that said,

“The Bible calls children a blessing and debt a curse, but in our culture we apply for curses and reject blessings.”

That pretty accurately sums up what we think about children. We want to know how few we can “afford”. We pretend that we trust God, but then do everything from chemically prevent to surgically remove the possibility of conception because in our hearts, we don’t see children as a blessing. We think they are a curse.

The scary truth of this is that cultures across the world that have viewed children as a “cost” or curse instead of a blessing are now finding themselves on the verge of implosion. Japan, France, and even Russia (who are paying people and giving them extra holidays to have relations) are finding themselves with so many old and so few young that the impending crisis may not be avoidable. There are not enough workers producing goods, services, and income to provide for the social programs that the state has promised the elderly. On top of this, with the prevailing attitude toward families and children, there is not much hope of a baby-boom to provide those workers. There is truly a “Demographic Winter” ahead.

The oddity of large families has even made the pages of the New York Times recently. The craze of shows about large families and the news of the recent birth of octuplets have drawn attention to large families. The cause of the shrinking family can be credited to at least two main causes: the absolute commitment to the rightness of birth-control and our unquenchable thirst for affluence. Both of these betray the self-obsession of our culture.

In the NYT article there was a stand-out section on the shrinking family:

If large families are the stuff of spectacle, it is partly because they have become rarer.

In 1976, census data show, 59 percent of women ages 40 to 44 had three or more children, 20 percent had five or more and 6 percent had seven or more.

By 2006, four decades after the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to use birth control (and the last year available from census studies), 28 percent of women ages 40 to 44 had three or more children, 4 percent had five or more and just 0.5 percent had seven or more.

Either the Bible teaches that children are a blessing, or that our comfort is. I believe children are a reward and a heritage, how do you read it?