I received Start Your Family: Inspiration for Having Babies as a wedding gift from a good friend, and I was really excited about reading it because I used to be a regular reader of Boundless. I loved this book when I read it, either just before or just after we got married. I decided to reread it to see what I thought about it post-baby and to see if I would like to give it to a few couples I know just married or about to be.
While I did enjoy the book the second time, I don’t think I liked it as much as I did the first time. There is a lot of really good stuff in this book, but there are a few little things that just didn’t sit right with me that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
I really liked that they said it’s OK not to have some really well thought-out reasons as to why you should have kids. It should seem obvious enough in the Bible and all of history; we need to procreate. They do give four reasons for having children, though: it’s part of our design; they are a blessing; children help sanctify us; and children provide hope for the future. Unfortunately, nowadays, even Christians need to be reminded why they should have kids.
I think the most helpful thing in the section on “when” to start your family, especially for older couples, is the reminder that fertility is not something that lasts forever. In our culture of immediate gratification, we think that when we want a baby, we get a baby right then. We think that fertility works like a switch that we can turn on and off at will. But it doesn’t necessarily work that way, and people need to know that they don’t have forever to have a baby unless they want to spend a fortune on fertility treatment at age 40.
I think the best chapter in the section on “how” to start your family is “Nest,” which encourages couples to change their lifestyle expectations and challenges the notion that you need 2,500 square feet before you start having kids. Throughout the book, there were references to giving up that awesome Pottery Barn furniture and other things, which seemed just sort of silly to me. The book’s audience is probably mostly college-educated people who come from middle-upper class who expect nice furniture when they settle down. Maybe that resonated with me two or three years ago, but not really anymore. If people really are complaining about not being able to afford $5,000 worth of furniture because kids are just so darn expensive (and I’m sure there are), they need to get a grip on reality. But I was pleasantly surprised by what they said here. They quote Edith Schaeffer’s What is a Family?: “From a castle to a tent…it does not matter much – the basic need is the existence of a shelter into which one can run to be separated from the rushing world outside, protected and welcomed to some degree, a place to go out of and come back to!”
I didn’t necessarily like everything in the chapter “Sacrifice” which talks about what you need to give up to start your family. The major point of the chapter is that you can’t have it all as far as career and family, and the wife should give up her career to stay at home. I agree that this is ideal. But I think that this encouragement could negate the book’s main encouragement to couples to start their families. Should only the couples that can afford to live on one income have children? Would it be better for those that can’t live on one income to put off having children so that the wife could stay home later? If so, what about that fertility window that they discussed earlier? I think there is a big difference between a mother who wants to work or needs to work to keep up an inflated lifestyle and a mother who wants to stay at home with her children but can’t. And I would rather see women have children than put it off because they would feel guilty going back to work. I think, too, that many of these women who take the plunge, have a baby, and go back to work will find that they will do anything to be able to stay at home. They wouldn’t have tried to make it work or known that they could make it work until they actually had a baby that they had to leave everyday. Yes, women ideally should be at home with their babies, but I don’t think making that point so thoroughly in this book is helpful at encouraging couples to start their families.
They also encourage date nights, which is just sort of a pet peeve of mine. “It will be at the point they are the hardest to arrange that you’ll need most some kind of regular date with your spouse,” they write. By all means, if you want or feel like you need a date night, have a date night. But it just really seems to me like date nights are becoming some weird, modern legalistic measure of a thriving marriage.
Overall, I really do like this book even though it felt like I was finding a lot of little issues with it, but I don’t know that I’m going to buy it for the couples I was thinking about buying it for. It is one, though, that I would recommend that they read to at least get some discussion going between husband and wife about the baby issue. It doesn’t really get into the ethics of birth control or fertility treatments (which I liked), and I found it a little lacking on biblical counsel. So, it would be good to pair this read with some others on this issue.
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