These weeks of radio silence have been inexcusable. Thank you for your patience with me. The emails have been mounting up with article links, personal stories, questions, and I promise to sift through all of them soon. My absence can be explained (in part, there’s hopefully some other exciting news on the horizon, too), by the story I have just wrapped up for Time, which is now available in abridged form online, and in its full expression on newsstands the world over.
I’m truly thrilled to have been given the opportunity to bring a conversation I care so deeply about to Time’s broad and influential stage. It started this way: I was having lunch with an editor–the amazing Radhika Jones–and we were batting around some story ideas. She asked me what else had been on my mind lately, and I started talking about only children: about the lingering myths of our unfitness, about the stigma still associated with stopping at one kid, about how I felt we scrutinize every parenting choice but whether to become a parent again, about how I saw my own parents’ choice as a liberating one, and which I was considering, albeit with some ambivalence. She mentioned our conversation at an editorial meeting the next day, and just like that a cover story was born.
I mention the genesis of the article, and its reception at Time, because I think it speaks to how ready we are as a culture to finally have this conversation. There’s been a ton of news in the past several weeks, from BP to Lebron, from World Cup to the financial bill in Washington, and Time still felt driven to feature this relatively news-less (what journalists call “evergreen”) human interest story on its cover. It suggests to me that there a shift afoot in terms of how we think about the choices we make, how open we might become in questioning, and how that can change the way we approach happiness, overscheduling, the environment, you name it. If this article can help people to make the decisions they want in their own lives–whether it be to have four kids or one, or none–based on a more honest discourse, sound research, and trusting their own needs, then that means we continue to evolve as a civilization. And any way I can contribute to that evolution makes me very proud indeed, and grateful for my readers.
I think this is obviously a conversation worth having and I agree that there’s a shift in how we approach this issue. The New York Magazine cover story the other week will add to the debate, I’m sure.
http://nymag.com/news/features/67024/?imw=Y&f=most-viewed-24h5
I firmly believe that in the decades to come we will see this view of having less children disseminate throughout America and it will become more of the “norm” for our birthrates to mirror those of Europe.