Why Our Children Don’t Want to Be Parents

Nadya Williams

It’s precisely that idea of the self centeredness that is really baked into our character. All of us want what we want, and it’s really difficult to learn to serve others and put our own needs second. But that is precisely what makes marriage, and especially like raising children a school in those virtues that are essential for how we get along with people in the community, in church and even like in our society. Politically speaking, I think our politics would be a lot healthier if we brought that sort of ethos to how we interact with other people.

Collin Hansen

Richard scary published his beloved bunny book in 1968 it’s one of my favorites to read to my three year old son. I love the way though the young son of my guest today, Nadia Williams, responded to that book just like it says in the end, he wanted to grow up to be a dad like his own dad. It’s sweet, it’s it’s normal, but it’s quite uncommon today. There was another probably more influential book published in 1968 that was Paul Ehrlich The Population Bomb, which created a panic about overpopulation amid limited natural resources, and it took more than 50 years for many people to realize that we’re in the middle of the complete opposite problem, an unprecedented global collapse of fertility. Well, Nadia Williams connects past and present with her new book, mothers children and the body politic, ancient Christianity and the recovery of human dignity, published by IVP academic. Williams earned her PhD from Princeton and previously published the book cultural Christians in the early church. Now, Williams sees how modern, Western culture devalues children as too costly, too demanding. She sees reversion today to ancient views. Williams writes that quote without an understanding of the value of humans as made in God’s image, there is no need to regard them as priceless. Indeed, that’s exactly what we see in the pre Christian Roman Empire, a low value of humans, especially women and children. I’m just flabbergasted, just trying to imagine Caesar’s cruel genocide. Of the goals. We know that genocides still happen today, unfortunately, but the reason we think they’re wrong today is because we’ve been shaped by 2000 years of Christianity. Well, Williams joins me now on gospel bound to discuss her own story, her historical study motherhood and even some military history writing. Nadia, thanks for joining me on gospelbound

Nadya Williams

It’s a delight to be here.

Collin Hansen

Let’s just start with some basics here. Tell us your tell us your story. How did you how’d you become a Christian?

Nadya Williams

So I grew up in a secular Jewish home in Russia, actually was still the Soviet Union back then, and in 91 right before the Soviet Union collapsed, my family immigrated to Israel, so I am a dual citizen. And then when I was in high school, my family moved to the US. It’s kind of like the jokes right themselves. My dad is a nuclear physicist, like, of course, like all Russians are, right. So anyway, so we moved to the US. I think the plan originally was maybe like a year or two, but obviously it’s been a little longer. So I went to college when we first, when we moved to the US, I started Latin, which I really enjoyed. So I declared my classics major the day before freshman year, started at UVA, and then I went to Princeton to get a PhD in classics. And then the year I turned 30, I went through this, like total personal life meltdown, if you will, even as I had just gotten a tenure chart job and so on the job front, everything was great. So it suddenly made me realize that, like what I’ve been told my whole life, that if you make good grades in school, life will go great this, this whole like academic excellence is path to like success of riches and everything else that you can possibly imagine, I suddenly, like saw in my life, that it was not true, and it led to a complete paradigm shift. And so later that year, I came to Christ,

Collin Hansen

oh, there’s a praise Lord, there’s there’s a lot there. What is it about? Tell us a little bit more about that turning point. What were some of those hopes that were dashed? I mean, we’ve, we’ve talked on this podcast to other historians, and I don’t know if it’s, it’s part of what’s happening in the academy, or to historians in particular, really sure. But what was it that helped you see? Really the kind of the emptiness of that narrative that you had been told your your life.

Nadya Williams

There’s this expectation that you are what you achieve, this Your worth is determined by what you produce and what you do, which is very much a modern like it’s baked into our society. And that’s actually even something I address in my book on motherhood, that, like, the whole idea of what do you contribute to the GDP is this common way that we judge people’s worth. But what really struck me finally, like, what finally brought me to realize, like, this is true, was reading the gospels and account after account of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection, and realizing like this is true. And of course, historians care about truth. It’s not just about like relative understandings of particular trends and whatnot, but the question of what is true, and if something is true, what does it demand of me? And it’s really overwhelming, but there’s also, there’s also, of course, the supernatural aspect, which I still can never explain, but I guess that’s like, that’s the reality of every person’s coming to Christ. Every conversion is a miracle, and miracles are really difficult to understand and explain to other people. Well,

Collin Hansen

let’s talk more about that miracle of conversion. Where did you encounter the church? Again, you said you were in a secular Jewish home. You’d been in so many different different settings. What was, what was that encounter like with the church?

Nadya Williams

In retrospect, all along, I’ve had certain small encounters. I mean, even in Israel, the study of the Torah, really the entire Tanakh is part of school education. So I grew up kind of knowing the Old Testament quite well, memorizing chunks of it and so on. Of course, it meant absolutely nothing without any sort of paradigm to plug it into. Growing up in a home where my dad is my dad still is an atheist. I think my mom is somewhere like closer to agnostic than atheist. It’s really hard to know, but I’ve been fascinated with this idea of belief before. It’s just that I never quite thought that it would apply to me until I hit that point of in my life where I was exploring like, what does it all mean? What is the meaning of life? Those those questions that like you, you just kind of go along with it, right? We don’t normally like the cliche fish. Don’t analyze the water they swim in. Well, sometimes you hit a point where you start thinking about the water.

Nadya Williams

Yeah. Oh,

Collin Hansen

praise the Lord that that you did. Now this will lead into our discussion of the book, how have your own decisions about your own career, and by the way, we’ve had, I think, Tim and Kathy Keller, they appeared together on this podcast, but you might be the first couple to appear separately. Your husband, Daniel K Williams appeared on this podcast of one of my favorite scholars and and brings so much insight to bear on so many different things. You could maybe talk about how you guys met and where that encountered as well, but you’ve made some own, some significant decisions about your academic career. How does that align with your historical assessment that you lay out in this book, mothers children and the body politic. Yeah,

Nadya Williams

that’s a good question. And by the way, Dan is my favorite American historian, but yeah, it is a perfectly unbiased judgment. Now, Dan was actually on a committee that hired me for a job at the University of West Georgia, he did not vote to hire me so that I was his second choice. But anyway,

Collin Hansen

first in his heart, second in his whole world, that came later.

Nadya Williams

Anyway, so we’ve, we’ve made these kinds of decisions together. So part of it is early on in our marriage. We did make ways to flourish academically together. He’s always been very engaged with our children. And I mean, there’s a reason like Richard Scarry plays such a central role in our lives, because Dan is just like he’s an incredible dad, he’s an incredible husband. He’s a wonderful scholar, like you can be all those things like, I want to remind people, because a lot of times people think like to be a serious academic, you have to sacrifice. No human sacrifice is never like, worth it. Your family is a gift that will enrich your life, including your scholarship. And I think Dan’s scholarship is better precisely because he’s so wonderful, like with people in his life now the university we were working at, state, secular university, it was just becoming untenable to be a Christian in that environment. Part of it had to do with a change in leadership most of the time. That I worked there. The university president was actually member of our PCA church, and he was fantastic, and then he was too good at his job, so he got promoted to be a president of another university, and the person who replaced him was just really utilitarian, but in the worst kind of way. So that’s when it was easy for me to think, like, do, what? What am I doing here? Where is my time and my efforts more valuable? And I realized that, like, I could do a lot more at home with my kids. And eventually I realized my writing also that this, this is where I can serve God much better than in this university, like very secular and unfriendly environment.

Collin Hansen

Well, perhaps we can talk more about that, but I want to dig in really on some of the thesis of the book. And let’s just look at a few different ways that Christianity changed attitudes toward women and children in the ancient ancient world. Give us a few examples.

Nadya Williams

One example valuing like who is valuable in society and in the ancient world, before Christianity, the one obvious way of ranking everybody. And by the way, just even the whole idea of ranking people is something baked into the ancient ethos today, when we think about human beings, like people rightly get uncomfortable if you if you’re asked, like, can you rank categories of people, like, who is more valuable? That is something that we feel really uncomfortable with, even if a lot of people might not be able to articulate precisely why they don’t think it’s right. But in the ancient world, that was perfectly understood that, of course, some people are more valuable than others. Some people are kind of disposable. I mean, it’s really cruel language that we see used throughout and especially in times of war. There was the idea that the most valuable members of society are the ones who will fight for your city state defend it. And that’s where my training as a military historian has been so useful in seeing like this is how the ancient world functioned in terms of who is worth something and who is quite literally worthless to the state in time of war. And of course, Christianity challenged that by saying, like the weak are priceless.

Collin Hansen

What makes jumping to today you have to assume that if Christianity is in significant decline across the West, at least, and especially in environments like the academy that you have, you’ve experienced that we’ve been talking about there, then attitudes toward women and children the week in general would begin to change and perhaps revert. I’m wondering what are some ways that our surrounding culture has become increasingly hostile toward motherhood and family.

Nadya Williams

One example, every now and then you see those stories about like, restaurants and other public spaces that say, dogs welcome, children are not welcome. Like, here’s so like, what does that say about us? Where you say animals are welcome in this space, but image bearers are not but there’s just, in general, a hostility to people, people who are perceived as not behaving in a certain way or not being, again, like almost a hierarchy not being as valuable. And in the case of mothers, especially, there is this idea of, again, productivity, like, what are you producing? So it’s been striking to see that certain companies now, for instance, will pay for egg freezing or IVF for employees. Well, what does this mean? It tells you, keep on working. Don’t have children. Essentially, essentially, the message is, your work is where it’s at. So it’s presented as a benefit, but actually it’s erasing motherhood.

Collin Hansen

What was the response that from your family to your colleagues, your friends, what was their response to your decision to step away from the Academy? Well,

Nadya Williams

it’s related to your previous question, like the question of where, what is worth doing, and even, like some really thoughtful, lovely people who have always been supportive, have said, like, what a waste. And I always think about that like, what does it mean if we think that for for someone like me to stay home with my children is a waste, whereas if I were educating other people’s children, it’s not a waste. It’s worth something like, what does it say about how we think about. The Home, the work of the home.

Collin Hansen

Yeah, that’s something I think about fairly often with the Scandinavian model that is highly incentivized to discourage women from having the option to stay home. I had a had a friend in in Denmark and and she was telling me about the policy of essentially, what is it? At least a year off from work. I think you get with every new child, and they had given families the option of being able to split that between the father and the mother however they wanted. The problem was, from the government’s perspective, that women preferred to take that time to be with their children, and then the husband would work. But that isn’t the way that the Scandinavian society wanted to engineer gender relations. So they mandated that it had to be divided equally between both of them. So it’s interesting, and of course, part of that is to sort of whether women want to be with their kids or want to be in the home. The government does not want them to have that option. They see that as a highly negative thing and something that they need to economically disincentivize. And we don’t see quite as radical things like that. But every so often here in the United States, we’ll see something about universal preschool or something like that that comes up in these things where you or certain tax incentives, where you realize, oh, what this is really about is that they want women to work, and women working is going to make labor more plentiful. It’s going to drive salaries down. And of course, we want women to have the option to be able to work. But what’s interesting is that these incentives are trying to give them, not trying to take away their choice, or to strongly encourage them in one direction or another. Am I wrong along the same lines there? Yeah,

Nadya Williams

I think that’s absolutely the case. It’s It’s ironic to see these policies presented as something that is very much pro woman, but in and very much like part of the pro choice ethic, even like with childbirth. But ultimately, what it is is misogynistic erasure of anything that makes women distinctive. It’s been fascinating for me to learn, for instance, about the phenomenon, I guess, called Mom Brain. So there are things that happen to you when you have a baby, like for at least the first year after you have a baby, a mom’s brain essentially dumps out anything that is not relevant to the baby. And it’s been fascinating to like think about how our society is trying to push back against just the basic biological differences and saying like, no, no, that’s just all in your head. Get back to work and do these other things, but at the same time, we are denying women the opportunity to do this really beautiful work of relationship building.

Collin Hansen

I just come back to the simple comment you made there, that if I teach other people’s children or care for other people’s children or whatever, that’s valuable, but if it’s my own children, it’s not that’s such an easy, simple way to be able to put it, and expresses so much of the confusion. Now, one of the other things you talk about in this book, mothers, children, the body politic, is how Roe v Wade made children an economic choice. You just, I think you just alluded to it there as well. And we should also add that Dan is one of the leading scholars of the history of the pro life movement. So a lot of fun dinner conversations there, but explain more of what you mean on how Roe v Wade made children an economic choice.

Nadya Williams

So the idea with making abortion universally available was to tell women like if, if children are, if children are, an economic kind of drain, which, by the way, is commonly the messaging with arguing for abortion rights, the idea that women who have children are losing economic gain potential. Then in that case, while having abortion access allows women to maintain their economic well being and growth and all of that. So in that case, suddenly, when everything is presented in those terms, the irony is, the choice is clear. If you present it in those kinds of callous terms, like you could have a baby or you could have a financially successful life. What will you choose? So essentially, it’s driving women to decide children are a drain and completely unnecessary to my well being. Now, there’s lots of data now, like if you want actual concrete numbers to tell you who is more economically successful and is also just happier and flourishing in life, we actually have data to show that married women with children are doing so much better than. Any other category of women, but that is not the story that anyone outside of kind of traditional, thoughtful Christian circles wants to be talking about today. And in fact, that was one of the catalysts for me in writing this book. Was seeing that pattern in media coverage, story after story, arguing that women who have kids are worse off than the ones who don’t. And it’s like, well, the messaging, if you hit people over the head enough times with the messaging, sometimes it catches on. And as you mentioned in the introduction, like childbirth rates around the world are low, right?

Collin Hansen

Yeah. Well, what now, you mentioned also early on that sometimes it’s, it’s when we’re in the water. We’re the ones who don’t know, I know what the fish in the water? What is water? A lot of these trends Christians do stand out, but at the same time, are completely assimilated into those trends. It’s a kind of a both and and I can so let’s talk about the first side of it, which is how Christians are in this cultural water where motherhood is devalued, children are seen as a cost and a burden. What do you where do you see evidence of how even Christians have bought into this narrative that children are too costly, they’re insufficiently valuable in economic terms.

Nadya Williams

Well, I mean, even the child birth rates, marriage rates and childbirth rates in the church are low, have gotten lower. Most of the time. They’re not quite as low as in the general population, but they’ve definitely gotten lower. So the messaging of you should wait, like, don’t get married too early, don’t have kids too early. Don’t have too many kids. Like that. Messaging is very much part of church culture now as well. And a lot of times, people don’t realize that this is not something, that is the teaching of Jesus, that this is coming from the general culture, and even, like, the way we talk about children, like I I find it fascinating to analyze language. Maybe it’s my literary training roots coming through, but how people talk about things. So for example, even when parents complain over the summer, it’s like, oh, I can’t wait for the kids to go back to school. Like that kind of language, to me, is really disturbing. And I know people usually don’t mean that necessarily quite in those terms, but shouldn’t you rejoice over this time that you have with your kids? Yeah,

Collin Hansen

that that language, I think a lot of times we do mean, as parents, I mean And also, there’s a culture that encourages us to complain, but not to celebrate, to take children for granted and to see them as a burden. I’m wondering, though, what happens when the divide between Christians and non Christians, and I think we could throw in some other religious groups on the Christian side here, as well, more orthodox Jewish groups, some Muslim groups, things like that, in terms of what, what, and certainly Mormons as well. What is it? What happens to our culture when fertility, motherhood, children are so sharply divided in very visible ways, where Christians and these other groups, more conservative groups, are going in one direction, and everybody else is going the other. What do you think happens to us?

Nadya Williams

It’s harder to understand each other. So the polarization that we’re seeing is part of it, but it has to do also with the fact that how we see mothers and children is really a symptom of how we see persons, all persons, anybody who might be considered inconvenient or weak or not easily lovable on any given day. People are difficult. And the question is like, how do we deal with difficult people? And by the way, difficult people is a category that encompasses 100% of people, at least at some point or another. And so for those of us who are used to being around children, being around, like, really sleep deprived people, by the way, like parents, I mean, there’s a reason parents complain. Like, on the one hand, I’m criticizing, like, maybe we shouldn’t complain about our children. On the other hand, sleep deprivation is, like a real thing. There’s a reason it’s recognized as a torture tactic by the Geneva Conventions like sleep deprivation is a real thing. Parents suffer, yes, but the whole point is that’s a school of suffering that teaches you something really precious and valuable as believers, that we can then take to how we treat other people, ideally, and for people who have no experience sacrificing themselves daily. For other people, it’s very easy to have a short fuse and just kind of look at them and say, like, well, I just don’t want to work with this person, or I don’t want to have to deal with that, with whatever they’re dealing with. Yeah.

Collin Hansen

Yeah, I’ve heard people say the same thing about siblings. That’s one benefit of having a larger family, is that you recognize you’re just not the center of the universe. And that’s one of the simplest, most important things, whether as Christians or to help in our evangelism or apologetics, is to help people to see and starting with ourselves, that we are not the center of the universe when everything, in terms of marketing and technology, these fertility rates, family formation are teaching us, and even modern views of marriage are teaching us that we are the center of everything. Well, you end up with a society where everybody sees themselves as the center of everything. And lo and behold, that doesn’t go very well. And you end up, you end up in a situation like what you talk about in this book with your academic training, where people are ranked, and some people are just not valuable because they hinder our ability to express our desires and to realize them as well. Another thing that I thought you pointed out so well in this book is that children are not made for the convenience of their parents. You alluded to this already, but why is this a good thing for us?

Nadya Williams

It’s precisely that idea of the self centeredness that is really baked into our character. All of us want what we want, and it’s really difficult to learn to serve others and put our own needs second. But that is precisely what makes marriage, and especially like raising children a school in those virtues that are essential for how we get along with people in the community, in church and even like in our society, politically speaking, I think our politics would be a lot healthier if we brought that sort of ethos to how we interact with other people, just the idea that virtues grow when you are not the center of the universe, when you put somebody else first.

Collin Hansen

Amen. This I saw a survey a number of years ago. We published on it at the gospel coalition. It is probably the most disturbing one that I’ve seen. It was a survey of parents, and so this would be millennials, Gen X, boomers, probably more Gen X, and Boomers for when this was when this was conducted, and it asked them priorities for their children, and it said things like financial independence, successful job, being married and then having children. So these are the potential grandchildren. And we hear all about the the classic cultural tropes about the grandparents who are pressuring their children to have children because they want grandkids, things like that. Statistically speaking, that could not be further from the truth. Today, the number of parents who value marriage and child rearing of their own children was shockingly low. I mean, it was, it was almost not even registering for them as a priority for their children. Clearly, what they wanted, overwhelmingly was a good job, meaning paying a lot of money, and then related to that financial independence. So it’s almost like a different cultural trope did take take take flight, which was the I don’t want my child to grow up living in my basement. That one essentially you that maybe this is the simple answer the question, though, we’d still have to wonder, how do we get this way? Why don’t we go back to my introduction, right where I started with Richard Scarry, why don’t more children today dream of becoming parents themselves? You asked that question the book I’m posing it back to you.

Nadya Williams

There’s a lot of we live out what we experienced. So if somebody grew up in a home where the family was not joyful, was not happy, the parents didn’t delight in their kids, maybe the parents got divorced, and all of those things that, by the way, like among boomers, divorce was rampant, so seeing major spike in the 1970s so there you have it, like we have a lot of I think some of this is the results people who saw how miserable their parents were, who grew up seeing their parents miserable, and perhaps like inadvertently thinking Like, did I make my parents miserable and thinking like, well, maybe children are just not worth it, which is really tragic, but that makes it all the more important to have healthy role models, and this is where churches have a major role to play if you have healthy role models, couples who model This and can mentor young newlyweds, young families, where this is a way to kind of reset the DNA. Every generation has the potential to reset the DNA. Can we do this in a positive way? And I think we can, but it does take work. It’s one of those things you can’t take it for granted. Whereas the religion of work ism as Tim Carney. Calls it in his family unfriendly. That one comes naturally, unfortunately, in this water like that is the water we’re swimming in, so pushing back against it is, yeah,

Collin Hansen

and Tim Carney’s book, family unfriendly, another one that we featured here on gospel bound. These, these two themes of the change in family and and birth rate and then the trend of historians converting in adulthood. There are two of our major themes here at gospel come so Nadia, you’re bringing them right together for us. I’m going to ask a couple more questions of you. We’ve been talking with Nadia Williams here about mothers children and the body politic, ancient Christianity and the recovery of human dignity from IVP academic, couple questions that are near and dear to me that you touch on in this book, but I’d love for you to expand on, how does your faith inform how you think we should write military history? You’ve got some of that military history background. How does our faith How should our faith inform that?

Nadya Williams

A lot of secular approaches to military history. Kind of glory in the violence, the idea of like, here are great battles, heroes and all of that. And I see it. But at the same time, as people of faith, we should also remember that every single person who has ever lived and died is an image, bearer of God is somebody who is a priceless, just child of God. And the question, and the question then, is, how do we talk about them? Are we going to use the same language that Caesar did in talking about the ones that he did not see as worth preserving, or are we going to remember that God made the people who have suffered in all these wars also and so for me, as a military historian, I talk about writing military history as an act of compassion, seeing the suffering of people, and it’s been remarkably personal, also just over the last few years. I mean the invasion of Ukraine. I mean my mom’s family, like so, many were killed in the Holocaust, and many were from Ukraine. Ukrainian Jews did not have very high odds of survival in 1941 but also, just like since October 7, the Hamas attacks on Israel, just seeing that and the question of like, how do we talk about this kind of suffering in war? It’s a reminder that as Christians, we should feel that sorrow and compassion much more so than looking for heroes in telling military history. Yeah,

Collin Hansen

both of those themes of Ukraine and Israel are part of my new book that’s just out now. Where is God in a world with so much evil, and Ukraine specifically because Vasily Grossman was a Ukrainian Jew, and I think the best military historical fiction writer of the 20th century, that’s just my estimation there. Especially his book Life and fate is in part an account of the fate of his mother and the rest of the Ukrainian Jews in 19 many of the Ukrainian Jews in 1941 in particular there so trying to wrestle with the problem of evil in the midst of that situation the Holocaust. Change literary gears here, a little bit here as we close you and I share an appreciation for Wendell Berry and the counter cultural value on place.

Nadya Williams

How do you live out that commitment? Nadia, the world

Nadya Williams

seems really dark a lot of times, like, as we were talking about these news events, and the question of, like, Where can we as believers, make a difference? And I’m convinced that Wendell Berry is right, that if you are rooted in a place and you serve that place, you get to know that place, you get to love that place, and the people there, that is where you can make a difference. And that is very much something that is a Christian value as well as it. It could be, it could be a key to human flourishing in general, but for Christians in particular, being part of the local church. Love your church, love your community. These are ways to just make a difference in this world and make it a little bit brighter.

Collin Hansen

Amen to that. My guest has been Nadia Williams. The book is mothers children and the body politic, ancient Christianity and the recovery of human dignity, published by IVP academic Nadia. Thank you for bringing together so many really, really important themes, both from the past the present and ultimately into our future. I appreciate it.

Nadya Williams

Thank you.