I cannot take credit for this insight, but the young people of today—and by young let’s say under 40—have a decision to make between having kids or going to brunch.
This is not meant to be a dump on the avocado-toast fanciers, but is a succinct way to describe the priorities of the generation who is supposed to be begetting the souls that will carry us forward as a nation.
Brunch-goers are them who like a bit of a lie-in on the weekend. They like a slow roll of the morning. The more ambitious will go to yoga first, but never church. They will show up at their appointed spot, and begin with a Bloody Mary or a Mimosa and continue with an overpriced preparation of eggs, undoubtedly farm-raised, with glorious orange yolks, and perhaps with a scrap of bacon that was smoked on the farm in the next county. There is nothing inherently wrong with whiling away a morning, lubricated with a bit of alcohol and an expensive meal—but what is wrong is what it represents.
Brunch is often accompanied by Friends. Brunch is not really a couples activity. In rare cases it might be, but there is more romance in more intimate pastimes or other meals that are shared à deux. Brunch is really an extension of nightlife—which itself can be costly. Not only is there the meal, the drinks but the trip to salon for the hair style, the manicure, the cute outfit. In a word, brunch is an expensive proposition—it isn’t only the $40 meal with never-ending drinks—the true cost includes the little extras, particularly for the female of the species, that can easily run into the hundreds of dollars.
It should be noted that Brunch aficionados are not necessarily heterosexually inclined males and females. Brunch is the center of the social life of many who declare themselves to be transsexual or indulge in other non-procreative passions. No matter how they present themselves, the common thread is that the decision has been made to prioritize brunch over having children.
Having children is costly. Not only in monetary terms of diapers, daycares, and other things children might need (note that between social classes there wide variation in what constitutes a child’s need). I mean the cost in worry. Worry about their health and the endless cold they can’t seem to shake. Wondering if the deductible was met. Doubts about the future. Doubts about the children’s ability to cope with the world they’ve been given.
In rare cases, intrepid parents, the ones who claim that having a child will not crimp their lifestyle, will ask for a high chair at the brunch table. Junior will dutifully raise his little juice cup in a toast, but the Friends quickly grow weary of such tropes. Sadly, the new parents find themselves left off the group chat, and are no longer offered a seat at the table, and will be left to cope with life without Friends on their own. The exclusion is not voluntary, and it stings a bit more than for the person who willfully forgoes Brunch for children.
These creatures are freed. There is no need to meet up on a regular basis with quasi-friends, acquaintances, workmates, and singletons looking for love. There is no compulsion to go to the same place, order the same plate, smile and nod at the various re-tellings of a stock anecdote, and nurse that same not-quite-a-headache that casts a pall over the rest of a Sunday afternoon. The Brunch-deniers are past caring what other people think, and have given up posturing and preening for those who are not worth the effort.
For the Brunch-free, one’s free time and free cash is devoted to the child, the children, the home, the spouse. One will happily exchange the empty hours leaning against the brunch table vainly trying to catch the waiter’s eye for a refill of coffee for a regular Sunday dinner. There may be modifications in the menu, but the main cast of characters—one’s family—seated around the table stay the same.
One table nurtures and nourishes a family and the other feeds into fleeting Instagram moments that alas, will be forgotten tomorrow. The question is—which one to choose?
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The greatest concern we had as young parents was the exorbitant cost of college for our 3 children.
We did not have to pay the exorbitant cost of childcare since Mom kept home until the youngest was in elementary school and then she worked as a teachers aide for SOL students. She had no college training herself but her students achieved better on tests than those under ‘trained’ educators.
Naturally the floods of government money into ‘higher’ education have made the costs much higher and universities compete via outrageous sports programs and country club largesse to attract socially conscious teens. Government ruins everything it controls.
Hopefully on-line courses (h/t Briggs) will break the insane paradigm of brick and mortar universities. Proctored qualification tests for engineers, architects, chemists, physics. math, pre-med could eliminate the need for these overpriced schools.
For working couples the cost of child care is also very expensive – a large penalty to middle class family life. This travesty, one income insufficient to support a family, (an error of Russia spread throughout the world), is especially aggravating as the government spends countless millions to pay welfare single mothers to sit idly at home and to provide ‘free’ childcare to them and other ‘poor’ families. Why not require people on the dole to train to do child care at no cost to families of middle class or lower income?
There are no consequences for government malfeasance until everything collapses. Are we there yet?
Wow! Right on the money article- unfortunately by the time the “brunchies”realize their mistake of forsaking marriage and children it will be too late- that will be a bill unlike they ever paid at brunch…..Susan
This is more stupid Boomerism. The reason young people don’t get married and have children is not that they are selfish. It’s because they can not afford to have children. Boomer feminists destroyed marriage, and Boomer financial lies destroyed the economy. I’m not pointing the finger at you, Briggs, but it is clear you don’t know any young people with or without children. This is obvious because YOUNG PARENTS GO TO BRUNCH WITH THEIR FRIENDS ALL THE TIME. Young mothers LOVE to get together with their girlfriends and bring the baby to show off. They will drag their husbands along to help carry things. The whole brunch thing is not a childless/children divide, it is urban/rural. People who live in a city go to brunch, because shopping is hard and going out is easy. People who do not live in a city do not go to brunch because they would have to commute to the city and find parking. That’s it. That’s all. It has nothing to do with having children.
In fact, before the COVID lockdowns there was a small town near me that had a restaurant run by a Christian family with 9 children, and guess what, every Saturday there were a bunch of farm families there…having brunch. The restaurant is, of course, now permanently closed.
I see this all the time from the aged religious right. You people have got to get it through your graying heads that It’s The Economy Stupid. This is what everyone who is in the trenches is telling us. Why not try believing them? This year a big meme was “unrealistic expectations of young women who say they will only marry a man who makes six figures.” Well, that’s because these girls are smart and they know that is the minimum their husband would have to make for them to be able to be a stay at home mom. And yet they are laughed at and called stupid. Nobody on the right asked the obvious question, “why do these girls think it is so expensive to be a mother?” Good job tradcons, you played yourselves.
No worries. People learn to live with their current conditions and find happiness, even without having children. Having children may not be an ingredient for a successful life for some men and women. Or it simply doesn’t happen for various reasons. Or, the overall cost, financially or not, of raising children is too high to partake. So what?! People did not choose to be here. Now, it’s their life, their choices.
Went to brunch once, because everybody gets so excited about it. Middle-aged people, the men in baggy shorts and sandals with socks, filing past a buffet to pick up a little bowl of diced fruit and a plastic pee cup of box champagne. Never again. Brunch-free forever.
Serious case of BDS (Boomer Derangement Syndrome) there, Natureboi. Don’t forget your meds.
Now you tell me! I’ve been doing brunch all wrong, always in an intimate twosome with a charming member of the opposite sex.
This screed smacks of the kind of articles in women’s magazine that exploit the female propensity for cattiness and pit women against one another. But now you, Naturebot, are doing a similar thing with the generations. “Boomer” insults are getting really tired. We didn’t drive the economy into the ground. We didn’t have the power. That was done to ALL of us in order to benefit the powers that be and further the communist agenda. What some of us are guilty of is going along with the indoctrination of the times just as your generation is guilty of going along with the indoctrination of later times. We were as ignorant of the real objective to turn us all against one another and totally corrupt the already fallen human race as your generation remains today. And who can blame anyone of us? This kind of evil is so aberrant as to be beyond our comprehension. We need to stick together and put the blame where it belongs.
Humans are a pair-bonded socially monogamous species, a rarity in nature. Many social scientists and anthropologists have studied this feature/behavior of people and posited a variety of explanatory factors from energenics to affective hormones to reproductive success. The fact, however, of mated pair practices extending beyond seasonal to life-long is evident throughout human history and across cultures. We are family creatures.
The destruction of the family in modern times is not due to economic or egocentric reasons. Brunching is not the reason families are fracturing and disappearing. Nor is material poverty, quite obviously. Something much more sinister is dismembering the family, attacking motherhood and fatherhood, devaluing babies and children, and rending our social fabric. “Aberrant evil” is as good a term for it as any.
Natureboi, no need to lambaste allies. But you’re right, there’s more to people not having children than sociology.
It’s goes beyond economics, though. Most people being able to have many children is not the norm. For most of human history, roughly 50% of people didn’t make it to adulthood and of those that did, many died due to accidents, diseases, or wars, and others weren’t able to have children for various other reasons. And of those that did have children, many died as infants or in early childhood. The situation of most people being able to have many children lasted for about 200 years (or less depending on where you were in the world). But while some features of that era such as prosperity and widely available food are still around, many others are gone. The current era is substantially unnatural in many ways (including what Faith pointed out about the oligarchs siphoning off workers’ productivity into their coffers). This has been going on long enough and is so entrenched that there’s not going to be an easy or quick fix.
Unfortunately, for these reasons, many people living now aren’t going to be able to have children. It would be better if this was not the case, but I believe that it is indeed the situation that we’re in. All that people in this era can do is make the best of the situation; but it’s up to the individuals to find out how, there’s no formula that applies to everyone.