Bringing new life into the world during the pandemic: What kind of world has my daughter been born into?
Most of my posts are intellectual. In talking about following Christ, I’ve talked about everything from science to sociology to politics. Of my 101 posts, none of them has really been a personal post about my life. This one will be more personal.
As many readers now know, my daughter was born on December 17, 2020. And as any parent knows, seeing your baby born into the world instantly changes something about the way you see the world.
I remember my childhood very fondly, and when I think about how I want to raise my daughter, I find myself wanting to replicate certain aspects of my own childhood. But while it would be great to try and replicate the environment that I remember so fondly, it’s a different world today. While there are certainly some things I hope will be similar, growing up in the 2020s will be nothing like growing up in the 1990s.
Now that my daughter is here, I’ve been thinking about what kind of world she will grow up in. How do you raise a child during this era, and especially, how do you raise a child as a follower of Christ?
The world today’s children are being born into
My daughter is among those who will be known as “quarantine babies.” Born in December 2020, she came into the world during one of the most tumultuous years in living memory. She wasn’t yet born for the lockdowns, the summer protests, and the bitter election. But she came into the world in the midst of the worst phase yet of the COVID-19 pandemic, just in time to be alive during a deadly insurrection against the United States government.
No one was able to visit her in the hospital when she was born. In the six weeks since she came home, she’s left the house four times. Most of the faces she’s seen have been masked. She won’t remember this part of her life, but when she looks back at her baby pictures one day, she’ll catch a glimpse of the world that welcomed her.
Masks might be a thing she sees regularly for the rest of her life, though. Even now, some are suggesting that mask-wearing may never really go away. Maybe it will become common practice for at least some people to wear masks in crowded areas like mass transit and indoor arenas, especially during flu season. Maybe she’ll even be advised to wear one herself. She might never know a world where people didn’t wear masks routinely in public.
A generation of less wealthy parents?
Unlike most of her fellow members of Generation Alpha, my daughter will live her first years during an economic recession. She’ll be part of a generation whose parents, on average, are making less than their grandparents did at the same age even before the pandemic struck. Now, the financial and health setbacks people have suffered will be felt for much longer.
As I was growing up, it seemed that most people of my generation grew up with numerous luxuries their parents didn’t have. More members of Generation Alpha, it seems, will have parents who struggle to afford things (healthcare, for example) their own parents had comfortably provided them. It will be a strange narrative to hear in a culture that loves stories of progress, but present signs point to my daughter growing up in a generation with less wealth than the one before it.
A highly political generation
She’ll also grow up in a highly politically charged generation. When I was growing up, politics was boring and irrelevant. I was never interested in the stories of Reagan, Bush, and Clinton’s elections. That may not be the case for my daughter when it comes to Obama, Trump, and Biden. They will be stories about when politics pervaded our lives, especially with the advent of social media.
She’ll grow up in a world where people make personal judgments about your character because of your political preferences. And when she’s older, we’ll probably tell her stories about where we were on 9/11, when a reality TV star was elected President, and when a mob of thugs incited an insurrection against the United States.
Speaking of that, the idea of an insurrection against the United States government won’t be something she just sees in books and movies. One will have happened during her lifetime. She’ll understand, based on her parents’ experience, that an insurrection doesn’t have to be an all-out violent assault with bombs and guns, but it could just be a band of hooligans with homemade explosives and zip ties.
A generation centered on technology
When I was a kid, the biggest electronic devices were analog TV and Super Nintendo. Certainly these had the potential to be mind-numbing distractions from the outside world, but compared to today, their entertainment value and addictive qualities seem quite limited. My daughter’s generation will be the first to never know a world without ubiquitous smartphones and numerous social media platforms. (Even many members of Gen Z are old enough to remember a time their parents didn’t have smartphones.) This is, of course, a double-edged sword. While she’ll have nearly limitless options for both entertainment and education, with that comes the dangers of social media and its effect on mental health.
One truly unique feature of her childhood and teen years will be the unprecedented open window into her parents’ lives before she was born. Through Facebook in particular, she’ll be able to see what we said and posted online during our teens and twenties, possibly including this article. This will be true for everyone in her generation whose parents had social media. Imagine a 2035 American history class project: access your parents’ social media profiles and analyze what they wrote about current events of the time! And on a lighter note, she will be able to access with ease hundreds of her peers’ publicly posted baby pictures.
What will be better than before?
Living in 2020 presents a lot of new challenges, but the world and society has also vastly improved in many ways from the generations that preceded her.
Her generation follows on the heels of one (Gen Z, those born in the late 1990s to early 2010s) with much lower rates of crime, alcohol abuse, and other risky behaviors than those preceding it. As the world becomes more digital and people go out less with friends, these trends aren’t completely surprising. But it would be great to see the patterns of lower crime, drug use, and reckless behavior continue in Generation Alpha.
She will probably experience a more diverse world than I did. I grew up in a town that was 98 percent white, and although towns like that certainly still exist, today the country is far more diverse. That pattern will only continue, and I would imagine it’s likely that she will learn firsthand about different cultures, histories, and religions at an earlier age than much of my generation did.
She will also live in an age where access to information is unprecedentedly fast. Questions that our parents would just have to answer “I don’t know” to when we were kids, we can look up and find the answer for her within minutes (if necessary). Through ebook readers and many online library programs, if she’s a reader (hopefully), she’ll have access to a world of books without ever leaving home. It will be important to help her see the value of a printed page, though. And it will be crucial to ensure that she has plenty of enlightening experiences that don’t involve electronics.
Following Christ in Generation Alpha
Finally, one of the most notable things of all is that she’ll be entering a culture that is more secular than ever before. The data on the future of secularism and religion in America seems mixed. Some will point out that 33 percent of Gen Zers identify as having no religion, the same percentage as Millennials, after that category has grown by several percent with each generation for the past 50 years. Others will note that a larger portion of that group identifies as atheist or agnostic, indicating there is still a general move away from religion and spirituality into a more pragmatic worldview.
I’m not a sociologist, but I can say that based on my personal observation, I think the trends do point to an increase in atheism and agnosticism among young people, probably particularly those who weren’t taught (or weren’t taught accurately) about religion growing up. I also think there is a considerable increase in religious illiteracy among those who do still identify with a religion. As a result, even many believers know very little about what Christianity teaches. They may know Christian-sounding platitudes or even some Bible verses, but it makes no difference in the way they live or think.
The trends don’t seem to be pointing to a mass deconversion or secularization for the next generation. But I think there is a continuing trajectory toward a passionless, nominal, non-intrusive Christianity, one that is mostly unconcerned with eternal matters and feels free to discard unpopular doctrines. Some have even come up with a term for it: Moral Therapeutic Deism, which largely boils down to this: God exists, wants you to be a good person, and is there for you when you need him, but isn’t really very involved in your life. It’s already very pervasive even in evangelical churches, and I think it will only become more so.
Part of the reason for that, I think, is because of the cultural backlash against longstanding Christian teachings that is going to get stronger in the aftermath of Trump. But another part is simply that with the ubiquity of electronic entertainment, her generation will likely spend far less time in contemplative thought about God and about ultimate truth, and will simply go along with the cultural tide on every matter of philosophical belief. Others will turn to more unique forms of spirituality—particularly finding spiritual fulfillment in art, media, and celebrity. Being a literate and informed believer in Christ and following him in a culture where orthodox Christianity is increasingly being replaced by watered-down, culture-friendly semblances of it, will be a challenge for her, as it is for us.
The world is radically different from what it was even ten or twenty years ago. We know how our experiences shaped us in our world, but this is a different world. Why is faith in Christ relevant in a world that is rapidly progressing in technology to meet our needs and replete with alternative forms of spirituality that speaks to our personalities and preferences? Why should we choose the Bible when some of its teachings seem to contradict what 2020s culture views as common sense? Why should we put faith in God when there are knowledgeable people who put forth naturalistic explanations for everything we observe? It’s vital that we teach and model for our children a faith that can answer these and other objections.
The world my daughter is born into seems worlds apart from the one I was born into. While we have many models of raising a child to look at, raising a child in 2020 will present many unique challenges that have never been before. I pray and believe God will equip us to raise her in today’s world.
