Keeping Up With the Gaineses

Chip & Joanna Gaines are having a 5th child — but should everyone else follow suit?

HGTV Stars Chip & Joanna Gaines have announced they’re pregnant with a fifth child, and everyone has an opinion about it.

I love Chip and Jo. They’re good people. And best to them on their fifth pregnancy; health, happiness and all. That’s pretty much all I should say, if anything at all, since I don’t know them personally and have no stake or right to an opinion on their family decisions. But, you know, they dared to share which means this life choice is up for grabs by any blog looking to milk the Gaines’ most recent 15 minutes of fame. Most of the reactions are positive, and a few are lame. One in particular, however, caught my attention long enough to warrant a response.

Writing for The Federalist, executive editor Joy Pullman not only congratulates the star couple but uses their pregnancy to advocate that “more people should” have 5+ kids. Noting her own experience as a mother of five, Pullman argues that parenting cultivates the gift of self-sacrifice by teaching you “how to lead and serve others.” In making yourself a better person you’re also “doing a service to society in helping refine and develop your local and not-so-local human ecosystems through attention and care,” which is a rather complicated way of saying that raising kids well makes the community in which they live a better place for everyone. (Think: Kids who will actually volunteer to shovel out the old lady’s driveway next door. You know, instead of blowing her off to play video games all day.)

These are two great points that are relative, whether you’re raising one child or a passel. In fact, I’d go so far as to argue that the more kids you have to raise, the less time you have to spend raising each one of them into good human beings. I’ve heard more than one mother of 4+ children woefully remark that they simply can’t spend the amount of time they’d like to with each child. They are grateful that older siblings inevitably step in to essentially help raise younger ones. But they’re still nagged by the feeling that they ought to be doing at least some of that work themselves. The principle stands just as true for today’s working mothers of one or two. Any human being can only be stretched so far. So is more necessarily the right answer?

Pullman asserts the only reason people aren’t having more children is that they want parenting to be “comfortable” both economically and ideologically. “People don’t like to look at themselves in the mirror and see an impatient, selfish, domineering, cowardly person staring back,” she writes, “Yet this is what parenting does to all of us.”

It does?

I’ve never felt as good about myself as I have in my role as a mother. Every other boss in every other job I’ve ever worked or applied for has called me “too smart” as if it’s a bad thing to have a brain. On the contrary, family and friends regularly compliment me for having good mom smarts and the patience to handle the challenges that parenting throw my way. Being a mom feels great. But, perhaps that is because I’m fortunate enough to be able to make it my full time career.

Pullman is right that most couples limit the number of children they have for economic reasons. But, while she focuses a great deal on money she fails to observe the overriding factor in the economic scenario: time. When we as a culture chose to monetize human capital in terms of time, we effectively devalued time spent not producing income. The problem isn’t “bigger houses, pet amenities or social-signaling vacations,” as Pullman would like us to believe. The problem is that earning the kind of capital it takes to either buy into a ridiculous timeshare or feed a large number of mouths takes an incredible amount of time.

The true discomfort behind the economics of child-rearing isn’t generated by how we spend money, but by the time we spend earning that money. Hence two working parents who struggle to raise one child feel just as guilty about sending that child to daycare 40+ hours a week as does the mother of five who can’t spend more than 15 minutes of one-on-one time with each child on a daily basis. Ultimately, parenthood becomes uncomfortable when we can’t devote our fullest energies to the task at hand. Hence we become the grumpy, ugly individuals we’d rather not see in the mirror — not because we have to discipline our children, but because we don’t have the energy to do it effectively.

When Chip and Joanna Gaines announced they were ending their fame-making show Fixer Upper they cited family as the number one reason they were walking away. At the time they both hinted at the possibility of having more children. But, the bottom line remains that they wanted more time with the ones they already have. Given their multiple business successes, finances weren’t an issue when it came to quitting the show or choosing to expand their family. Like most good parents, their main concern was time.

So, should we be pushing couples to have bigger families for the greater social good? Or, should we be focusing on how we value time as a culture; how that translates into the pressures put on working mothers who dare to take time off to have just one baby, let alone two or more; how the economics of child-bearing impacts time spent on prenatal and post-natal care; how valuing time as money pressures both parents to work full time and entrust the care of their children to low-wage, poorly educated and overtaxed daycare staff; how having a large family impacts your ability to spend quality time with each of your children?

In other words, before simplistically encouraging more couples to keep up with the Gaineses kid-wise, we ought to encourage them to examine what it took to get the couple to a place where a fifth child was a decision they could comfortably make.