What Are Babies For?

In a world that views babies as demographic data, economic burdens, or lifestyle choices, what if babies are here to teach us empathy, selflessness, and the essence of human connection?

Nov 17, 2024

During my time in China, working on my master’s degree, I witnessed something extraordinary. It was the height of the one-child policy, and every baby I saw on the street seemed to draw the world’s attention. Strangers would stop what they were doing—vendors would break from haggling, elderly men on park benches would pull out a piece of candy or fold a paper crane—and everyone would smile. Babies weren’t just the center of their family’s universe; they were the center of everyone’s universe.

It was stunning to see how people engaged with these babies. Bus passengers would instinctively make room for a stroller and help. Parents weren’t alone in the challenges of caregiving; the entire community stepped in. This wasn’t an obligation; it was joy. And it struck me: in a country with over a billion people, babies had become rare, and that rarity made them precious.

Back home, it’s a different story. Babies cry on public transit or airplanes and are met with side-eye and sighs. Parents often navigate the challenges of raising a child in isolation, and the idea of collective care feels distant.

But in China, even if only for a moment, I saw what happens when we all share responsibility for the next generation. It softened the grind of daily life, connected strangers, and reminded everyone of what really matters. Babies brought out the best in people, and I couldn’t help but wonder: what would our world look like if we embraced that ethos again?

Meanwhile today, TikTok hosts a vibrant community where individuals, particularly women, discuss and advocate for child-free lifestyles and the DINK (Dual Income, No Kids) lifestyle. These creators share personal experiences, reasons for choosing not to have children, and the perceived benefits of a child-free life. For instance, the hashtag #childfree has garnered significant attention, with users sharing content that explores the decision to remain child-free and its implications. They emphasize the challenges and disadvantages of parenthood, portraying them as awful intrusions into life. This includes highlighting financial burdens, lifestyle changes, and personal freedom considerations associated with raising children.

It’s time to reframe how we think about babies. They’re not burdens, lifestyle choices, or economic units. They’re the foundation of everything good in the world. They teach us how to love, how to persevere, how to think beyond ourselves.

So, what are babies for? They’re for everything. They’re for growth, for connection, for hope. They’re the answer to what’s broken in our lives, our communities, and our world.

Let’s bring babies back—not just into our homes, but into our collective consciousness. I’m not saying we need to have more babies — the demographers can handle that. I’m saying we need to reconnect with the greatest teachers human beings have ever had… babies. Let them remind us of who we are and who we can be. Because when we care for them, we learn how to care for each other.

What Are Babies For? Relearning the Lessons of Our Smallest Teachers

There’s a narrative we’ve all grown up with, a cultural story so pervasive that it’s almost invisible: progress is about getting smaller, more efficient, more self-reliant. It’s about tightening the circle until it’s just you, maybe your partner, and, if you’re lucky, a robot vacuum cleaner that works half as well as the guy on the box promises. This narrative has invaded every corner of our lives, but nowhere has it been more destructive than in the realm of raising babies.

We used to say, “It takes a village to raise a child,” and for a while, we meant it. Not in the Hallmark-card way it’s thrown around now, but in a real, structural, hands on sense. Extended families lived together or close by. Babies passed from lap to lap, absorbing the collective wisdom and love of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins… and everyone was a cousin. Parents weren’t the sole providers of food, care, and attention—they were part of a web, supported and supporting.

The Evolution of Isolation

Then came the nuclear family. A tidy little package: two adults, one house, two-point-whatever kids. At first, it seemed like an upgrade. Privacy! Autonomy! Your own front lawn! But as we got better at insulating our lives—closing the doors and pulling the shades—we began to chip away at something essential. Raising a child became the job of two people, then, as divorce rates rose, one.

Now we’re at a point where even the single parent is expected to do it all and clock in at a nine-to-five. Babies, meanwhile, are shipped off to daycares where the ratio of caregivers to infants might be 1:6 if you’re lucky. From there, they enter the factory model of modern big-box education, where they’re taught to be quiet, compliant, and standardized. Worse, they’re taught what to think, rather than how to think. The village is gone, the extended family is gone, and now even the nuclear family is eroding. Babies are still being raised, sure—but who’s raising us?

Less than 3% of the planet’s population is in meaningful contact with a Baby today. By that, I mean being responsible for some aspect of a baby’s life at least part of the time. There’s fewer of them than ever, and they are more disconnected from families, friends, and communities than ever. The media often frames babies as a societal challenge: declining birth rates threaten economies, personal freedom debates rage over parenthood, and population policies dominate headlines. But what if we’re asking the wrong question? What if babies are not about economic productivity or personal fulfillment—they’re about rising above it all? Through observing the revolutionary work of Roots of Empathy, I’ve come to believe that babies unlock our innate capacity for kindness, effort, and connection, offering solutions to the clustered crises of loneliness, division, and purposelessness that plague modern society.

The Big Mistake

Here’s where we’ve lost the plot: we’ve convinced ourselves that raising a baby is a unidirectional transaction. They need us—our food, our shelter, our lullabies—and we oblige. What we fail to see is that babies aren’t just passive recipients of care. They are active participants in our emotional, social, and even spiritual education.

A baby doesn’t just teach you how to change a diaper. They teach you patience, resilience, and the art of non-verbal communication. They teach you how to sit with discomfort, how to prioritize someone else’s needs over your own, how to find joy in the small, quiet moments. These are not optional life skills. They are the bedrock of a functioning human being and, by extension, a functioning society.

And yet, instead of embracing this profound opportunity for growth, we’ve outsourced it. We’ve siloed babies into spaces designed to keep them out of the way—daycares, schools, after-school programs—while we chase meaningless productivity, efficiency, and individual success where we don’t grow at all or learn anything. We’re missing out on the transformative experience of raising a baby not because they need it, but because we do.

The Cracks in the System

The evidence of our failure is everywhere. Loneliness is at an all-time high. Mental health issues are skyrocketing. Communities are fracturing under the weight of political polarization and cultural division. And still, we persist in the belief that we can raise babies—and ourselves—through screens, spreadsheets, and isolated hustle.

But the cracks are showing. More and more, we’re hearing calls to “return to community,” to “rebuild social fabric.” What those platitudes miss is the mechanism by which we do this: babies.

Babies are social glue. They are tiny, unrelenting reminders of our interdependence. They force us to show up, to collaborate, to care. When we raise babies in isolation, we deprive ourselves of the very lessons that make us whole.

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SIDEBAR: On Pets and University Educations

Here’s a strange paradox of modern life: Young people are going into debt for pets and skipping babies. And it’s not just the price of acquiring a designer breed French Bulldog or Bengal cat. The real expenses are in the upkeep—specialized food, grooming, premium vet care bills now regularly in the tens of thousands, and even pet insurance to help manage that. Pet ownership has become a luxury, yet it’s a luxury that millions willingly shoulder while simultaneously declaring babies “too expensive.”

Here’s the thing about pets: they offer the illusion of parenthood without the hard stuff. They rely on you, but not in a way that demands deep personal growth. Your dog isn’t going to call you out on your emotional unavailability. Your cat isn’t going to ask why you never chased your dreams. Pets offer love and companionship, but they don’t force you to grapple with the messy, complicated, soul-wrenching work of raising a human being.

And maybe that’s why they’re so popular. In an era where we’re drowning in debt and dispair, pets offer a form of comfort that babies can’t. They’re low stakes, relatively speaking. You don’t have to save for their college tuition. You won’t lie awake at night wondering if they’re going to grow up into a good person. And you don’t have to be part of a community working to build a world for their children.

But that comfort comes at a cost. By opting for the easy love of pets over the challenging love of children, we lose something essential. We lose the opportunity to grow, to build, to contribute to the human story in a way that outlasts us.

Babies, by contrast, don’t operate on your schedule. They strip life down to its essentials. Hungry? Cry. Tired? Cry. Uncomfortable? Cry. You don’t need a PhD to figure out what a baby needs, but in meeting those needs, you learn more about yourself and the world than any seminar or thesis could teach.

Despair by Degrees

Meanwhile, the other debt millstone we hang around our necks is higher education. We forgo children in our twenties and thirties, opting instead for degrees we hope will bring financial stability, fulfillment, or at least a sense of purpose. But university educations, for all their intellectual rigor, can’t teach us the profound life lessons that come from raising a child.

Higher education promises enlightenment, critical thinking, and upward mobility. But while it might prepare you for a career, it often leaves you unprepared for the real work of life: building relationships, creating communities and finding meaning in the everyday grind. Babies, in their relentless demand for attention, love, and care, teach those lessons better than any lecture hall ever could.

The Fear of Baby Economics

There’s a pervasive myth that babies are financially ruinous, a myth eagerly propagated by think pieces and fearmongers who tally the cost of everything from diapers to daycare. But here’s a counterpoint: babies cost whatever you have. They’ve been raised with equal success by nomadic Bedouins and East Coast elites, in tiny apartments and sprawling estates. The truth is, babies don’t need lavish expenses. They need love, attention, and a community willing to invest in their future.

The same can’t be said for pets, which now occupy a strange space in our cultural psyche. We’ve turned pet care into an industry worth billions, normalizing the idea of boutique food, monthly subscriptions for chew toys, and wellness plans for our four-legged companions. The costs stack up, but we rarely stop to ask why we’re so willing to stretch our budgets for pets while dismissing babies as financially untenable.

The promise of higher education has always been simple: invest in a degree, and the world will open up to you. But in recent decades, the return on that investment has dwindled. Degrees have become more expensive while their value in the job market has steadily eroded, leading many graduates into a cycle of debt without the promised upward mobility. Worse, the broader life skills once gained through higher education—critical thinking, resilience, and purpose—are increasingly hollowed out by a system focused more on credentials than on personal growth. They want to teach you what to think, not how to think. Education has become an assembly line, churning out degrees that no longer guarantee the future they once did.

Babies offer a life return that pets and degrees never will: they outgrow you. They learn from you, then surpass you. They become the next architects of the world, inheriting and shaping the future. The money you spend on a child isn’t an expense; it’s an investment in the collective human story.

This isn’t to say pets or education aren’t valuable—they are. But let’s not pretend they can substitute for the transformative experience of raising a child. A pet can teach you to pick up poop. A degree can teach you about identity politics. But a baby? A baby teaches you everything.

Relearning How to Be Human

The great irony is that the very traits we celebrate in adulthood—empathy, perseverance, creativity—are all sharpened and honed in the crucible of caring for babies. Think about it: when was the last time you were forced to deal with someone who couldn’t articulate their needs, couldn’t solve their own problems, and didn’t care about your schedule? Probably not since the last baby you held.

That struggle, that effort, is precisely what we need more of. It’s the antidote to our current malaise, our sense of purposelessness in a world that seems to offer everything but meaning. Raising a baby isn’t just about helping them grow—it’s about helping us grow.

The Big Idea Hidden in Plain Sight

They called it the Baby Boom for a reason. They didn’t call it the tech boom, creativity boom, music boom, housing boom, economic growth boom, entertainment boom, adventure boom, or anything like that, though it was all of those things and more. We call it the Baby Boom because it was the babies themselves who changed the way society lived, thought, planned, and dreamed.

Think about it: nothing inspires us to rise above our limitations like a baby. When a child enters the picture, people who’ve floundered for years suddenly find purpose. They quit bad habits, show up on time, work harder, dream bigger. Why? Because babies demand it.

Babies are relentless. They’re unmercifully needy. They cry, they wail, they refuse to sleep. And yet, in serving them, we grow. We learn patience, resilience, and compassion. We learn how to make sacrifices, how to plan for the long term, how to put others first. These are not just parenting skills—they’re life skills, essential to building strong families, communities, and societies.

Let’s look at something bleak but undeniable: young people today are struggling. Rates of depression, anxiety, and loneliness are higher than ever. Many feel isolated, disconnected, and adrift, unable to find purpose in a world that, on paper, should be offering them more opportunity than any previous generation.

Now, let’s contrast that with another group of young people—those who returned from World War II and survived at home under siege. Imagine coming home after years in hell: you’ve seen friends die, lived through unimaginable horrors, and survived on sheer willpower. The world you left behind is unrecognizable, and the future, at least in theory, should feel as hopeless as the world today seems to many. And yet, these young men and women did something astonishing. They looked around at the ruins, rolled up their sleeves, and started building.

They built families. They built homes, communities, and economies. They launched what would become the most significant period of sustained progress in human history. And they did it all with babies at the center.

The Power of a Baby-Centered World

Let’s not forget that the Baby Boom wasn’t just about numbers. It was about what those numbers represented: a collective decision to invest in life, in growth, in the future. Babies didn’t just fill cradles; they filled communities with purpose and energy. The so-called booms that followed—the economic boom, the housing boom, the cultural and creative explosions—were all byproducts of this baby-centric mindset.

Imagine living in a world where every decision, from urban planning to workplace policies, was made with babies in mind. That was the post-war reality. And it wasn’t just practical; it was profoundly human. A society centered on babies is a society that prioritizes care, connection, and long-term thinking. It’s a society that values effort not as an end in itself but as a means of creating something better for the next generation.

The Crisis of Today, the Opportunity for Tomorrow

So where does that leave us? In a world where babies are increasingly sidelined—kept out of sight in daycare centers, reduced to budget line items, or avoided altogether—our sense of purpose has eroded. Without babies at the center of our lives, we lose the very thing that drives us to be better, to connect, to build.

Two Generations, Two Diverging Realities

It’s tempting to romanticize the so-called Greatest Generation, to treat their post-war achievements as a kind of moral inevitability, the natural rebound from catastrophe. But it wasn’t inevitable. What they did was a choice. They could have stayed broken, bitter, and disconnected. Instead, they chose to embrace life—specifically, new life.

The returning soldiers and their families didn’t just birth the Baby Boom. They birthed a way of life centered on growth, optimism, and collective effort. Their lives revolved around babies—not just in the literal sense of having children but in a broader, more profound way. Babies symbolized everything they fought for and everything they were now determined to protect and nurture: hope, potential, and the future itself.

Contrast that with today. Young people face a different kind of crisis—not the visceral trauma of war but a subtler, more insidious battle against isolation, purposelessness, and ennui. The world feels overwhelming, and progress seems abstract and distant. In this context, babies are often seen not as symbols of hope but as burdens, economic liabilities, or lifestyle compromises.

The Call to Reimagine

So, what’s the answer? It’s not to return to the past, to some idealized version of extended families and villages that probably never existed as we imagine them. It’s to reimagine what raising babies—and ourselves—can look like in the modern world.

Programs like Roots of Empathy are a start. By placing babies in classrooms, they remind us that even the youngest among us have something to teach. But we need to go further. We need to integrate babies into our lives, not as burdens or responsibilities but as vital contributors to our personal and communal development.

The World Babies Could Build

Imagine a world where every adult had regular, meaningful interactions with babies—not just their own, but the babies of friends, neighbors, and colleagues. Imagine work reimagined to create spaces for people to devote themselves full-time to learning from infants, communities where childcare was a shared endeavor, schools where students learned empathy from the very start.

This isn’t utopian. It’s simply a recognition of what we’ve always known but have somehow forgotten: Babies make us better. They are the catalyst for human growth, the mirror that reflects our best and worst selves, the reminder that we are, at our core, creatures of connection and care.

They called it the Baby Boom because it was the babies themselves who transformed society. They gave life meaning. They anchored communities. They reminded everyone, in the most immediate and visceral way, what it means to serve somebody, to care for something beyond yourself.

We’ve drifted far from that understanding, but it’s not too late to return. The next great chapter in human progress could start with the simplest, most profound decision: to put babies back at the center of our world. Because when we care for them, they teach us how to care for each other—and that’s what it takes to build a future worth living for.

We’ve spent too long asking how we can raise babies better. It’s time to ask how babies can raise us.