Beall and I recently returned with our son Providence from the New York International Toy Fair. In preparation for the production of our All American Boys Adventure Catalog and Beautiful Girlhood Collection, we wanted to be able to meet with the manufacturers of some of our products. With more than five hundred vendors present from around the world, the New York International Toy Fair is quite a sight to behold. Available at the fair are every type of knick-knack, whiz-bang, do-hickey, thingamabob invention for children on the planet.

But, the first thing you realize when you get inside one of the gigantic, seemingly endless exhibit halls is that there are no children. Not a single one. Just a lot of adults playing with toys.

Beall and I felt like Caracatus Potts and Truly Scrumptious from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. We had landed in Vulgaria with a baby under our arm, to discover a city without children (but with plenty of spoiled adults who want to play with toys and behave like children). Surely, it was just a matter of time before the child snatcher came, lollipop in hand, to whisk our infant son off to the dungeon for children.

The most humorous part of the adventure for me was the fact that many of the people we passed in the aisles assumed that Providence was a stuffed doll—a very real looking stuffed doll, but a doll nonetheless. After all, everyone knows that you never see a child in Vulgaria, much less Toy Fairs. Not a single guard even stopped us to comment about the baby in my arm—-they either did not care, or they just assumed that he was an it.

One episode took the cake: We were browsing through a lovely booth of very expensive and refined dolls, when the representative of the doll company approached us in absolute astonishment. She had never seen such an authentic looking doll before.

“We call it the Providence Doll,” I explained. “He’s the latest in baby technology.”

“May I touch it,” she asked.

“By all means,” I replied.

“That is amazing,” said she, as she pressed her finger to his forehead. “It’s is so real, just like a baby. It’s just wonderful.”

“Yes, wonderful,” says I, at which point, unable to take it any more, and noticing that Beall is about to pop, I spilled the beans.

But I am still not sure what was more astonishing to her—-that a businessman would bring his baby to work, or that my son was not a technologically advanced doll.

No Kids Please

Of course, the absence of children at a toy fair does not indicate the downfall of Western civilization. (It probably has much to do with liability issues.) But the growing absence of children from corporate worship in the local Church, from the economy of the household, and from the life of our communities does signify such a downfall. Once an ever present reminder of the covenantal nature of family, church and community, children rarely follow the historic patterns of living, working and learning alongside their parents in the spirit of Deuteronomy 6.

But the situation is worse than that. It is not simply that men and women are shipping their children off for 24,000 hours of their children’s youth to government indoctrination centers, its that these men and women don’t want to be parents. (Or if they do want to be parents, their parenthood is part of the hypothetical future——you know, after they are “economically stable” and have comfortably secured two volvos, and a nice mortgage. In the meantime, the designer cats and dogs will suffice for the needed emotional companionship.)

A tragedy of our day, and a sign of the growing selfishness and cold-heartedness of our people, is that one can walk for hours in many of America’s cities without seeing a single child, or a mother with an infant. An even greater tragedy is that most of us have forgotten that it is not supposed to be this way.

To the extent that anyone, Christian or pagan, views children as a potential economic burden, or as a drain on their time and energy too heavy to be borne; to they extent that they would accuse anyone who desires children of treating women as baby machines, to that extent at least, they have ceased to think with a Christian worldview, and have embraced a humanistic philosophy of life and culture. No amount of caveats can mitigate the fact that such thinking is not biblical.

A more extreme example of the anti-family, anti-child philosophy gripping the nation is the growing number of individuals who shamelessly boast about their anti-child sentiment. The title of a February 22 article by Boston Globe reporter Carlene Hempel says it all:

“No Kids, Please: They don’t want to have children, they don’t want to be bothered by children, and they’d just as soon not live near children. It’s the child-free movement, and it’s growing.”

The following is an excerpt from her story:

They don’t appear to have much in common. Mike Crutcher plays bass in a Lowell band and teaches piano and guitar. Kathy Reboul is a social worker and, she reveals during dinner, allergic to peanuts. Lori Schneider is a former cop from Connecticut who’s going back to school. Todd Larson of Allston writes about real estate for the Brookline Tab. They’ve gathered, along with 10 others, at Polcari’s in Cambridge on a wintry Saturday night. They convene this way once a month, because that’s what social clubs do. Except that while most clubs organize around something — a model-train fixation, an interest in needlepoint, a love of good books or fine wines — what this bunch has in common is what they don’t have: kids.

And here’s the point: They don’t want them.

“Here, we know we don’t have to listen to touching stories or about home schooling or what kind of diaper anyone is using,” says Schneider, 40, a four-year member of the Boston chapter of No Kidding. She’s here tonight with her husband, though he’s still in the closet and declines to give his name. As a teacher in Framingham, he fears his anti-kid sentiment might cost him his job.

This is life for the child-free. In a culture often defined by breeders, those who dare not have children feel they must band together. They need support to help fend off parents who are desperate for grandchildren, or friends and co-workers who wonder how these seemingly productive members of society could be so selfish. They’re not interested in hearing about the latest family-tested flick from Pixar. They’re tired of hearing: “But you’d be a great parent.” They don’t need tips on using a Chinese adoption agency. They can have kids, they just don’t want them. And they’re fighting back.

This story is absolutely chilling. These societies are dedicated to the virtues and glories of barrenness. This article is a “must read” if you hope to understand the growing anti-family philosophy. To read the story in its entirety, click here.