A (9:35)
Napping. Napping is the primary reason you should never want to have a child. Clearly this woman is childless. Because I have a lot to respond to this as the mom of a child who doesn't sleep, and so I don't sleep either. First and foremost, a nap will never be on the same equivalency of importance in my life than my child will. And any parent, including those of us who are chronically sleep deprived, would tell you exactly the same thing to quickly respond to her other claims as well. The funnel massage. Everybody freaks out on social media about this, and I don't want to discount the fact that for some people it can be painful. I did not feel anyone even touching my stomach. Did not even feel the sensation of another person's hand on my abdomen. Right after I gave birth to my daughter. She was on my chest. I was happily in the newborn bubble, completely in love with my daughter. And they're like, okay, we're dying, your placenta's out. Didn't feel a single thing. So stop letting people fear monger to you on the Internet about how scary and painful birth is. Did not even notice. Would not have even remotely paid attention if someone hadn't said anything to me about that. And what was the other thing? Parents in the middle of the night. There was a third claim in there. Whatever it is, complete propaganda from this gal, but she's unbelievably successful in reaching Generation Z. She has a million and a half followers on TikTok alone, branding herself as the girl with the list and also presumably selling intimacy toys in her bio. Toys this way fingers down emojis to a link where you can go purchase things from her because because what better way to empower women than to capitalize off of instead of encouraging them to actually have a meaningful intimacy experience. I don't know. Just a thought. And yet if you read the comments of the hundreds of thousands of people watching videos just like this one, it is shocking how effective she is in reaching young women with outright propaganda and lies. Someone posts a picture of a button I heart contributing to the declining birth rate. Ew. I'm getting my tubes tied is a little meme of a knight A female night floating through space in front of a rainbow. Mercy says Getting a full hysterectomy next summer. I'm so stoked. Tigs333 Yep, I'm getting my tubes removed on the 23rd. Literally. Can't wait. Wait. So grateful to have been secure in my choice to be child free since middle school says Mouse and bear, age has only solidified my choice. What up dudes? Says I had my tubes removed for way less than birthing a child. Michelle I'm so early, but good because I get to tell you that I finally got approved to get my tubes removed. Surgery is in a couple of months, so surgery. So, so excited. There are hundreds of comments on this video in particular saying I can't wait for a hysterectomy. I can't wait to get my tubes tied. I can't wait to just take everything out so that I never have to worry about the pain, the unbelievable inconvenience and the destruction of my life that pregnancy and childbirth is sure to bring in to the picture. It's pathetic. A because none of what they're talking about is actually true or it is intentionally misrepresented to sound true, when in reality it's not. It's not at all. Including the sleep deprivation side of things. I will be the first person to be completely transparent with all of you out there thinking about having kids and tell you I have not had a full night of sleep in over a year of my life. My daughter will be 10 months old and at the end of the month she has not slept through the night ever the entire time since we brought her home. And you really don't sleep towards the end of your pregnancy either because you have to get up to pee like 12 times in the middle of the night and you have heartburn and your leg starts cramping and all of it. I have not slept in over a year of my life and I'm exhausted, I'm tired. Don't get me wrong, I would love to have a full eight hours of sleep, but I think that is important, something that we need to be prioritizing. But to act like you are somehow destroying your life is so inaccurate. And also, I think this framing is so pathetic in how we talk to women, because you are capable of so much more than these influencers who do not have children and who are literally capitalizing off of the propaganda that they are shoving in your face are telling you. And what the mainstream media is telling you, you are capable of of a lot more than you give yourself credit for. I have not slept a full night of sleep in over a year of my life. And I am thriving in my career, I am thriving in my relationship with my husband, I am thriving in my friendships right now, and I certainly am thriving in my relationship with my daughter. So they try to get you up front by telling you all of these lies, but even when they fail from stopping you from wanting to have a baby in the first place, by attacking you with when you post cute videos like that, one of the girl who said she never wanted to have a baby and then is holding her friend's baby and immediately starts breaking down in tears, they know they can't get you then. So then they want through the media and through social media alike, to distort the image of the family and what you're capable of as a woman once you have kids. I don't find it coincidental that the same time that video is going viral of the Australian gal holding the baby, the New York Times put out two really bizarre pieces. One is an op ed, one is not published in their newspaper about parenting, and both are spectacularly terrible takes. If you ask me not to ruffle a whole lot of feathers on this first one that I am referencing, but this lady screams, I just want to be miserable. And everything that's my problem is automatically society's problem as well. Listen to this headline published February 1, the secret to marriage equality is formula. As in milk formula, baby formula. I saw this headline the other day and I saved it away for a rainy day having not read the piece until this morning. And by the time I made it through this entire thing this morning, I was genuinely just jaw agape, flabbergasted at the audacity of Some of these people to to call themselves feminists and claim that they are fighting for equality when in reality they're just miserable. They're miserable and they want everyone else to come down to their level of misery, to sink to their level in order to empower all of the rest of the women in the world. She writes in this op ed piece about the back and forth frustrations of breastfeeding her first child and how she felt like she and her husband had a lopsided dynamic, as she says, actually an infuriatingly lopsided lopsided dynamic with their first baby because she decided to breastfeed her baby. Interesting. She says this about the whole experience, also attacking the press conference that we spoke at the other day with Secretary Kennedy and Secretary Duffy. I am not quoted in this piece, heartbreakingly, but she does quote Secretary Kennedy as like truly evil for saying this. Called breast milk the infant formula that God made. She continues this piece at the very end by comparing formula and breastfeeding to talk about equal parenting and equalizing the contributions that mom and dad make to the baby raising experience. Years before I became a mother, she writes, dom, her husband and I agreed that of course he would be just as involved in parenting as I would. But then we had Dory, her daughter. Presumably, I breastfed for eight months, not because I particularly enjoyed it, but because it seemed to be the default. I did all the bedtimes, all the night feeds. The bottle we did use mostly contained breast milk, the result of many hours of being sucked by a breast pump. The bonding effect with Dory was real, but it also meant my ability to understand the contours of her needs deepened as Dom became more and more sidelined. The resulting resentment nearly broke us up as a couple. The unfair burden and slightly sleep deprivation nearly broke me. When Pearl, their next baby, came along, we vowed to do things differently. We've become much more liberal with our use of formula, and the result has been the parenting dynamic I have always dreamed of. It's not only taken the pressure off of me, but also given Dom the ability to bond with and learn his baby right away. He did overnight feeds that provided me with long stretches of sleep. We traded tips on soothing methods. Formula gave Dom autonomy to feed as he saw fit, to experiment and fail and try again without worrying about wasting liquid gold of breast milk. Many parents discover the equalizing magic of formula or combo feeding on their own. They experiment with only using formula at night, or perhaps see how one formula bottle a day can provide much needed relief to a nursing mother. But parents are left to conduct this trial and error alone without much counsel or transparency. I go down a couple paragraphs here, and then she ends the piece with this Lots of parenting decisions involve trade offs and it is time to explicitly tell parents to be before they are in the trenches that the two worthwhile enterprises of exclusive breastfeeding and equal parenting are a zero sum game and that it can be utterly life changing to choose the latter. In other words, it is impossible to have equal rights in your marriage, to have equal exhaustion in your marriage, to have equal contributions in your marriage as each respective parent if you are breastfeeding your baby. Before I get completely off into my tangent about this, I will say this. You are not a bad parent per se if you are formula feeding your baby I've been incredibly fortunate that I have been able to still breastfeed my daughter all the way through almost 10 months now of this journey and it's been beautiful and challenging and and incredibly rewarding in so many different ways. But I realize that's not the experience that everyone has. That said, I will never be the first person to tell you that you are a bad person. You are less than as a woman. You are unequal to your husband if you formula feed your baby while I breastfeed my baby. However, this author is telling you that she is saying that you are basically reinforcing the patriarchy in if you choose to breastfeed your baby, which is bat crazy if you ask me. That genuinely stems from such a deep place of personal insecurity and wanting to drag everyone into your choices that you are making. All while these people probably ironically call themselves pro choice but different conversation for a different time. It reeks of elitism in the worst possible way. The two enterprises of exclusive breastfeeding and and equal parenting are a zero sum game. It is impossible to be equal to your husband if you have to put your baby to sleep every night and you wake up with them in the middle of the night to feed them from your body, which is an incredibly worthwhile and beautiful bonding experience with your baby. A lot to respond to there. My husband got up with me every single time I fed the baby for the first three, four months of her life. So we both were a little sleep deprived, but we had a great system worked out where I would feed my daughter Isla and then I would immediately hand her to my husband. He would burp her, change her, get her back to sleep so I could immediately go back to sleep. And that worked really, really well for us. You can obviously Pump milk to have the husband take an overnight shift with a bottle if you want to not be using formula and continue feeding your baby breast milk. And there are undeniable health advantages to giving your baby breast milk for as long as humanly possible. Formula cannot replicate the antibodies, the nutrients, all of the things that you are delivering from your breast milk to your baby every single day. It is completely irreparable in the lactation world to substitute that with formula. That's just scientific truth. But honestly, even if that weren't true, I'm just sick and tired of these angry, miserable, liberal women insisting that you are less than your man for whatever reason under the sun because you want to breastfeed your baby, or because you're maybe getting a slightly less rigorous sleep schedule than your husband is, or because you had to birth your baby and your husband didn't have to experience that, or yada yada, yada, yada, yada. It's gross, right? And it is so undercutting what, what women are actually capable of. It's not being the village. When we say it takes a village to raise a child, it's destroying the even necessity for a village because you are destroying a woman's desire to have a baby. And any empowerment that comes through that process right out of the gate, you're going to hate the experience because it will automatically make you less than your husband. I got news for you. Whoever's discerning marriage or just now recently married before you have kids, or those of you who have kids already, kids are not the only thing that creates imbalances when it comes to contributions in a marriage. A marriage takes a whole lot of work, and that is precisely what makes it beautiful. I saw a video about that the other day and I actually sent it to my husband because it really rung true for me. It was so, so powerful. And this girl posted a video about her and her husband's relationship with battery levels pertaining to their, like, tank being full or empty that particular day. And she says, sometimes it's like this, other times it's like this. But that's how we carry each other through and become better every single day. I want you guys to see this because it's absolutely beautiful. Some days I carry you, some days you carry me. But we are always on the same team. Sometimes we're both at 100%, sometimes we're both at 10%. Sometimes one of us is at 100 and one of us is at 10. But marriage is not meant to be a 5050 equalized game. The way that this author in the New York Times is trying to tell you for equity parenting or equality parenting or equal parenting, whatever she wants to call it. Marriage and parenting is never intended to be 50 50. And newsflash, it never ever, ever will be. It always has to be 100, 100 or it just won't work. And sometimes your 100% looks like 10% and the other's 100% looks like 1000%. But that's how you grow in in humility, in service, in maturity, in powerful ways that no other relationship will ever give you the opportunity to I actually think that's precisely why it's so important that children are raised in a home where parents are deeply in love with and committed to one another. And why we're seeing so many issues of extreme clinical narcissism, loneliness, depression, anxiety, and so much more in our generation. But because we're largely being raised by divorced households and people in single parent households where you don't see that continued laying down of self every single day for the benefit of someone else, where one parent is choosing the needs of the other parent, their spouse, because they love them over their own every single day, day in and day out. So the media will try to stop you from wanting to have a baby. Then once you wanna have a baby, they'll try to stop you from wanting to have a joyful experience and having a baby. And when that's not working and you are having a joyful experience and you do see a revival of the family, which is exactly what we're starting to witness in our society today, then they'll just attack the institution of the family outright entirely. Also published in the New York Times this last week. Is this piece not opinion by the way, just out there as news in search of a platonic co parent Platforms that match partners in procreation are experiencing a post pandemic uptick. They write in this piece that there are mass groups of people in our country seeking a co parent someone to have a baby with and children with that doesn't need to be their romantic partner. Interest in platonic co parenting is growing, they write in this piece, with specialty apps experiencing substantial growth over the last few years. Modamily the app someone that they interview is using connects people to look to start a family through dating, sperm donation or platonic co parenting. In 2020 the app reported having 30,000 users registered to the platform. By 2025 that number was 100,000. By the end of 2023, the year let's be Parents a different app debuted and it reported having 1200 active monthly users. Now it has 10,000 monthly active users. Co Parents A different app reported having 150,000 registered users, up from 85,000 in 2020. One person that they interviewed said this. What she learned about co parenting from people in her circle made the idea resonate with her. I really feel like it let me separate two huge decisions. Who do I want to date and who do I want to parent with? She has only just begun the search for a co parent and she is still having thoughtful, values based conversations with the man that she met in November. But she has been surprised by the support that she has received. Parenthood is complex and some platforms encourage their users to seek out mental health providers to help them understand the reasonings for pursuing this approach and to navigate the complex relationships involved. Some advise seeking legal counsel as well for help drawing up a memorandum A Contract for the Arrangement so we're reinventing parenting so intensely now. Because newsflash, all of the propagandized efforts to make you hate the idea and never want to pursue it in the first place just aren't working. So now we have to reinvent the family to the tune of you needing to consult with lawyers and a mental health professional or well before you ever want to bring a child into the world. Because the person you're going to co parent with is not the love of your life. It's a business arrangement, it's a contract. It's someone who looks really good on paper but you're not remotely invested in emotionally whatsoever. I read this to my husband the other day and he sat there, jaw agape, just completely stunned, listening to this story that the New York Times published just a few days ago. Because I can't tell you how many times we have had experiences in the last 10 months with our daughter that you are so overstimulated. The baby is screaming, the dog is barking, the dishes have piled up in the sink, everything is insane in your house all at once. The TV's too loud from what the other person is watching and you're just like ah. But then we looked at each other and we've looked at each other completely in love, and we just immediately start laughing. Because this is exactly what together in love, we have prayed for over and over and over again for the last five years since we started dating in 2021. This is the answered prayer to everything we've ever wanted out of our life. And whether it's our dog or our baby or our beautiful home or our careers, everything we have accomplished together in the last few years is a growth out of the love that we have for each other that is rooted in the love that we have for God. I cannot imagine what could possibly go wrong in a family dynamic where mom and dad aren't remotely romantically connected to one another. And yet you are continuing to raise children in some sort of weird arrangement, presumably while both of you are also pursuing romantic interests on the side and getting married to people. The legal implications, the emotional implications, the child rearing implications of all of this. It is a disaster waiting to happen. But this is how much those with the loudest voices in our society hate the family and how little they think of your capacity as a woman to be empowered inside the nucleus of the family as God designed. The only way to have true equality in society is to throw the baby out with the bathwater and eliminate the concept of the family entirely. And the writing has been on the wall for this for a very long time. Obviously we've known that there are authors out there like Sophie Lewis, who published a book a few years ago saying we should abolish the nuclear family. There are tech startup companies saying that we don't even really need people to grow babies anymore, we'll just create embryos through stem cells and then put them in birthing pods. What could possibly go wrong? There are countless movies that have warned about all of these things, but ultimately all of this is rooted in the same hatred that you saw in some of those comments on the very heartwarming, beautiful video of that girl holding a baby for the very first time in her life. Women are useless as mothers. Women are less than men inside of the family unit, and the only way out of this is extreme clinical narcissism. Never dying to self, never self sacrifice, never putting the needs of someone else above yourself, but making yourself the God of your life so that everything else can be sacrificed instead. Eventually this gets so bad, by the way, that we get new definitions of women dropped every five minutes. I find it so interesting that the same people who are screaming at you about women's equality are are also the same people who boil down womanhood to the most disgusting level possible. As in people who menstruate or birthing people, or just a womb, a womb to be rented for someone else to have a baby. I don't know if you guys saw this on my Instagram last week, but a new definition of woman dropped last week from women. By the way, reproductive endocrinologists who wrote this entire procedure about when you should go See a fertility specialist and you can't conceive a baby. They wrote this in a post that is now going viral as two female doctors. When should you see a reproductive endocrinologist? When you've been trying to conceive for 12 months with regular unprotected intercourse and the partner with eggs is less than 35 years old. Partner with eggs from the crowd so obsessed with women's empowerment. Between that and a video I saw from a New Hampshire legislator the other day holding her baby, telling you how you should be empowered as a woman. I think we just kind of need to start over on the entire women's equality conversation. I don't know if you guys saw this, but a New Hampshire Democrat was promoting legislation to promote abortion in the state of New Hampshire as she is rocking her newborn baby girl in her arms, talking about how she had to kill her first baby to further her career to make herself a great mom so that she could then advocate for other people to kill their babies. Listen to this. When I was a teenager, I accessed abortion care that has allowed me to go to college, college, to graduate school, to receive an M.E. d, to teach and to be a state representative. And it allowed me to have my children when I was ready, both physically and emotionally, including the baby girl I gave birth to just last week. Nothing like using your newborn baby as a prop to promote killing other babies and preventing them from being born again. Way to undersell women. Way to say it's impossible for you to get an education. It's impossible for you to have a career, it's impossible for you to have a thriving family life, it's impossible for you to run for office if you don't kill your children first. That's where we're at in the equality conversation. To the point that we then go attack women on TikTok for crying the first time they ever hold a baby and talking about how beautiful the experience is after insisting they never wanted kids to begin with. Is that really the best we can do? I don't think so. I hope not. And I hope that we can all continue to band together to present a much different image of. Of the family moving forward. Whatever we can do to let people know that this experience isn't demeaning. It's exhausting and it's hard, but it doesn't hold you back. It actually allows you to grow in ways that were never accessible to you before. You've brought this beautiful, perfect, innocent life into the world. I am 100 times the person today than I ever was 10 months ago, even while I was pregnant. I'm a hundred times the person I am today with the challenges and the love and the emotional depth that I have never had access to in my entire life before I held my baby girl in my arms. And I want that for everyone out there. Why wouldn't we want that for everyone? The media and the girl with the list. And these state legislators would tell you that I am the extremist as a pronatalist propagandizing you into wanting to have kids. But they refuse to acknowledge the propaganda that they are participating in and or have fallen victim to that has gaslit entire generations of women into denying our very biology of baby fever. They'll make fun of you for that. They'll ridicule you for that. I think we deserve a whole lot better as young women. And there's actually two examples that I want to share with you before we switch gears to a different topic of how I think we should be talking about family and kids in 2026, whether it's looking for this from our elected officials and our leadership from the media or from ourselves. And I would task every single one of you watching this to participate in the solution and not the continued ridicule of the family moving forward. Megyn Kelly put together a really fascinating side by side listening to how Michelle Obama spoke about raising a young family in the White house and how J.D. vance speaks about raising a young family in and around the White House. And these could not be more different worldviews or perspectives. Tell me, which one is a country you want to live in and you want to raise your. Your family in?
