The Patriot Post® · The War on Large Families

The broader culture of the United States seems to no longer value family. Unfortunately, this shows up in so many different ways.

Men aren’t allowed to be masculine and the leaders of their families without facing the allegation of being “toxic.”

Women, particularly young ones, face the condemnation of society and the loss of social status for choosing motherhood over being her own professional “boss babe.”

Children aren’t valued at all. The most extreme and vulgar in our society call them “crotch goblins” and want them out of sight, out of mind. God forbid that parents have more than two of them.

One of the ironies is that the U.S. population is facing a crisis-level low birth rate. As historian Dixie Dillon Lane writes:

I’m not talking about a birth rate that is dropping from 6 kids per woman to 5 kids per woman; I’m talking about a current birth rate in the United States that is well below replacement level and that even immigration isn’t fixing. Having an older population that outweighs the younger generation is demographically dangerous and can lead to all sorts of social and infrastructural ills. So researchers are rushing to ask: Why aren’t people having enough children?

Part of the answer is that our current culture sees big families as a threat.

There is a heavy stigmatization of big families and assumptions made about those who choose that path. One common stereotype is that parents who choose to have big families must be uneducated, backwoods, and backward. Whenever examples arise to shatter that stereotype, they are met with suspicion, derision, or outright hostility.

Take, for example, the recent debacle regarding the Ballerina Farms family. Hannah Neeleman, social media influencer and former professional ballerina, and her husband Daniel own a 300-plus-acre farm in Utah. They have eight kids. Hannah is a working stay-at-home mom and is thriving. The Neelemans share their life with millions through social media.

However, they made the mistake of inviting a reporter into their home for an interview. After showing Megan Agnew of The Times their sprawling farm, their beautiful children, and how proud they are of the work they are doing and the life they’ve built as a family, Agnew turned around and wrote a hit piece about them, calling Hannah oppressed and accusing Daniel of being the overbearing husband. Throughout the piece, a preconceived hyper-feminist rage is immediately felt.

As Patriot Post contributor Scarlan Valderaz wrote back in July, “What baffles Agnew the most is that Hannah left a successful career as a ballerina to become a dedicated wife and mother. Hannah describes the sacrifices that both she and her husband made to live their desired lifestyle.” That, and Agnew’s disdain for the children is evident. They are nagging, clinging, and ostensibly taking too much from their mother. Agnew belittles the Neelemans’ choices and derisively labels Hannah a “trad wife.”

Hannah Neeleman is reduced to an ignorant rube, subservient to her husband and children, and not someone to imitate. It was hateful and disingenuous, as well as a direct attack on a successful family.

Their troubles, however, seem small compared to another large family who faced a far worse horror.

JD and Britney Lott, another social media influencer family, are both military veterans from Texas. Their platform is called the American Family Road Trip. They travel full time with their eight kids, homeschool, and promote the beauties of big families. But they were targeted by an anti-Christian Reddit group whose comrades decided they didn’t like the ideas and lifestyle shown by the family.

The Lotts were on the way out from vacationing in Florida when they got the call from Florida’s Child Protective Services that someone had reported their eight-week-old was “jaundiced, lethargic, and sunburnt” and that CPS needed to check on the kids. The family had already left the state, so Florida’s CPS elevated the situation to a nationwide manhunt and threatened to have the kids taken away if JD and Britney didn’t let either a police officer or a social worker check on them. The Lotts drove to a hospital that specializes in newborns so that medical professionals could testify to the health and well-being of the child who was the subject of the hoax. They also met a police officer there to satisfy CPS.

The Lotts’ innocence was proven, and the police officer and doctors were all horrified by what this family experienced. However, the scariest part of this ordeal is that evil-minded people sought to use the government to destroy and traumatize an innocent family. Nor was this an isolated case. According to the Council on Contemporary Families, “Nationwide, the vast majority of reports (over 80 percent) are deemed unfounded by CPS.”

Both Ballerina Farms and American Family Road Trip are examples of families that have placed themselves in the public eye. Some might argue they have only themselves to blame because of their very public lifestyles. This is a foolish notion. When all they are doing is sharing their lives and showing the good and the beautiful that is possible, blaming them for being attacked because they have a public platform is, in fact, victim-blaming.

It also says something very important about the larger cultural conversation regarding big families. The zeitgeist finds them threatening and is happy to try to take them down.

Why are people so threatened by large families, particularly successful ones? On the one hand, so-called progressives tout choice as important unless you want a family (or choose anything else they disagree with).

The anti-family worldview goes deeper than that, though.

The left side of the political aisle sanctions abortion, pushes early sexualization, and even believes that children are a waste of space and put too much of a carbon footprint on this dying earth. They haven’t yet disabused themselves of the “population bomb” lie.

In short, children are only valuable if they can be used as tools in the quest for political power.

Conservatives may have a better idea and a stronger sense of why families are important, but those in the echelons of power are often ineffective at best and inconsistent at worst when it comes to supporting them.

At the individual level, the cacophony of conflicting ideas creates cognitive dissonance. The burden of sorting it out mostly falls on the shoulders of women, who are coaxed into choosing between two options: go to work and be independent and autonomous, or be a stay-at-home mom and put your career on hold.

Clearly, one has more social incentives than the other, although some women who choose the first option are finding out that they actually do want kids, but it’s too late. Moreover, some women choose abortion because they are so convinced of the lie that motherhood is a life-ender. For some, however, that guilt has turned into anger toward women who made a different choice.

Clearly, there are more than two options. Some moms work and have a thriving family. This author does. Some stay-at-home moms have amazing careers after childrearing. Regardless, husbands and wives choosing to have large families is an investment in the future.

It’s also an inherently hopeful act.

One can only hope that by bravely prevailing against the culture and having families, the bad ideas will die out. They’ll have to. We’re out-breeding them one precious baby at a time.

Family is not a life-ender. It’s a life-enricher.