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Should Women Have Kids or Get PhDs? (Reddit Reaction) · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  Which is the greater achievement, getting a PhD or having a child? This is, of course, very subjective, but I found it fascinating that on Reddit, there was a conversation in the Child Free subreddit about this collision that was happening within a family where she was sort of trying to figure out why does her family value her
• 0:25
  her cousin who's having a child above what she just accomplished. And that is to get a PhD. Fascinating the way that she describes this collision. She said, am I allowed to be bitter and petty here for a moment? I'm going to vent. And then she says in a disclaimer, I fully realize I'm being petty and bitter. I should not be this immature at 36, but I'm going to allow myself because I've been holding it in. Nobody gives a crap about my accomplishments because having a baby is the accomplishment, apparently.
• 0:55
  Well, I guess I'm being unfair. My partner and my mom are my biggest cheerleaders, as is one of my aunts, my brother and the rest of my family. Nada. I got a PhD, which was met with lukewarm likes on my Facebook post announcing that I had just passed my oral examination.
• 1:12
  I published my first book and none of my family came to the launch except for my mom, my partner, and my aunt. Plenty of coworkers and friends came and it was local. I get tenure. Again, no congratulatory gift, visits, or even a phone call. They don't buy my book or even ask for a free copy. Yeah.
• 1:31
  Even while I was doing my PhD, I get the occasional, you're still in school comment. When a younger family member chose to go into a two-year program, which is great, it was all, that's such a good choice. They'll finish in two years and find a job. The year I finished my PhD, my cousin decided to have her first baby at 20. It was planned. Let me tell you, it's like she won a Nobel Prize.
• 1:55
  My family started sharing all of her posts. There's a huge gender reveal in a rented space, a lavish catered baby shower, plenty of gifts. A family group chat is started for the sole purpose of keeping up with baby things.
• 2:09
  She then has her second and third child back to back. Guys, it's the best thing in the world. Biggest celebration. You go. So proud of you. More gender reveals, more parties, two girls and a boy. Wow. Meanwhile, my new book is due to be released soon with an award-winning publisher, Crickets. Nobody gives a crap.
• 2:27
  Okay. So this is interesting. Actually kind of surprising to me that I would say a lot of families, there would be the opposite reaction. I hear from people all the time whose parents are like, what? You're having kids? Don't wait. You know, whatever. But in her family, they are obviously really valuing having children. Now it's really fascinating. Some of the comments,
• 2:52
  Consistent comments with something like, you need to get rid of your family. Go no contact with everyone who didn't attend your book launch. Delete the family group chat about the cousin who can't seem to figure out how birth control works. Oof. There is such a crazy divide between the way that we value these things. And I think that part of the challenge here is that we cannot figure out how incredibly valuable a child is.
• 3:20
  And part of what women have been taught for so long is that having children is so humdrum. But to a family, to a multi-generational family line, it is like winning the Nobel Prize. It is a massive deal. And I think what's really difficult and really hard on some women is that they assume that this was not something that was valuable. It's so common.
• 3:42
  There's been such propaganda through feminism to try to convince women that having children is not incredibly valuable. And so they go after other things. And now that pendulum is starting to swing back. And a lot of them are getting really frustrated and confused and shocked by that. So one of the things that was also commented is your family is more excited about a contribution to the family than something that only affects you. Shocking. Yeah.
• 4:08
  Committing 18 years of your life to raise a person is a lot more meaningful to family than a PhD. Getting a PhD is for you. Raising a child is for the child and the world. I would say also that's a win for the family as a whole. And it doesn't mean that getting a PhD isn't for the world. I think this is a little bit extreme. I think that you could...
• 4:28
  Yeah.
• 4:47
  having the baby is the end of the process. It's the beginning of an 18-year journey. And so the comparison is what is being accomplished through the 18 years of raising a child versus what is being accomplished through the 10, 12 years of your education and trying to get a PhD. And as you begin to think about what is being accomplished in the process,
• 5:08
  There's a lot more work that goes into raising a child. Raising a child is much more central to the actual goals and aims of the family itself, whereas the PhD is likely to be something more specifically around your personal individual life or your own personal individual mission.
• 5:24
  So part of that is really important to understand. The commenter goes on to say, one of them is continuing the family line and the other one is probably going to be a genetic dead end. Why would you celebrate the genetic dead end for ending her family line? Because she got a piece of paper instead.
• 5:40
  That, you know, brutal way of describing it. I think that, again, we don't know a lot of the details of what this PhD was in. It doesn't mean that that's not a legitimate accomplishment. It doesn't mean that in a kind of more general situation, you wouldn't want to be supporting a family member who's accomplished something. An achievement of that size is significant. But...
• 6:06
  Probably there is something going on behind the scenes in terms of what the family is sensing and why the family is not supporting this person. It's not as simple likely as a PhD versus a child. But I do think the way that this is being framed is really interesting to take a step back and consider.
• 6:22
  The difference between something that is for the larger family, something that is benefiting the entire family, something that does involve the whole family and is furthering the family line versus individual pursuits. And part of what we need to be sensitive to is to say, look, anytime somebody in a family line or family team has a child, that is a massive win for the entire family.
• 6:45
  And that we need to celebrate that in those ways. And this is, I think, what was missing when women were beginning to wrestle with feminism. Instead of choosing to become more like men and to go after achievements that are within the marketplace or within academia, we should have been celebrating the family, having children, raising children, multiplying the family line, and finding ways for...
• 7:10
  Creating and deepening that family culture. Had that been something that we were championing, I think that a lot of women would have gotten a lot more excited about having kids. And so I get so excited when I hear about a family that is actively engaging in supporting the mothers of their family and their decision to have children and raise children.
• 7:31
  That is such a massive win for that larger family. So part of this is a huge paradigm shift that we need to go through in order to think about our families like multi-generational families. And if you wanna go through that paradigm shift, go over to familyteams.com slash transform. This is where we kind of walk you guys through each of these shifts to begin to understand thinking about your family as a multi-generational line can completely transform the way that you are raising your family, the kind of culture you're creating in your family.
• 8:00
  And this is where we're going to start to see and recover from a lot of these really bad messages that we've been giving to our daughters about the value of having and raising children. So go to familyteams.com slash transform if you want more information on that. But man, yeah, this is a conversation that is absolutely overdue. We need to understand the collision between what is best for the individual and what is best for the larger multi-generational family team.