The Girls Didn’t Offer to Babysit—but That’s Not the Problem

A viral tweet, a quiet cultural shift, and how young women are being raised at a distance from reproduction

A few days before I gave birth to my daughter, I came across a tweet that stayed with me. A woman described showing her newborn to a group of teenage girls, expecting excitement—maybe even an offer to babysit. Instead, they said the baby was cute, took their candy, and moved on. Her conclusion was blunt: the birth rate is doomed.

At the time, I didn’t read it as offensive. I read it as familiar.

I was heavily pregnant—but not far removed from a version of myself who would have done exactly what those girls did. In my mid twenties, I called myself a “spinster.” I even blogged under the heading Spynster with a ‘Y’. I owned my home, lived alone, and imagined a quiet future—something self-contained and undisturbed. Maybe a place on one of the lakes in Pickens or Oconee County (South Carolina), just me and my dogs.

Children weren’t part of the plan. Not because I disliked them, but because I understood what proximity to them often meant. In a college town, where many people didn’t have family nearby, being friendly could quickly become being relied upon. It was easy to become someone’s emergency contact, their backup plan, their “village.” I didn’t want that responsibility, and I was deliberate about maintaining that distance.

So when I read that tweet, my instinct was not to chastise the girls. It was to side with them. They were out enjoying themselves. They did not owe anyone childcare, attention, or interest simply because a baby was placed in front of them.

That remains true.

Girls are not born into service roles for others. They are not obligated to perform care on demand, and they are not wrong for choosing themselves in that moment. Any analysis that starts by assigning blame to them misses the point entirely.

But that is not where the story ends.

My life changed slowly, and in ways I did not anticipate. I joined a church—ironically, a very liberal one—and began teaching Sunday school to teenagers. I spent more time around families, not as an outsider looking in, but as someone embedded in the day-to-day reality of it. What I saw was not an idealized image but something steadier and more grounded than the life I had constructed for myself.

At first, I thought I might adopt someday. That felt controlled, intentional, contained. But over time, I began to see marriage differently as well. I watched how the husbands in that community interacted their wives and children. I saw a kind of reliability that had been absent from my life. It shifted something in me.

I fell in love, got married, and nearly a decade later we had our daughter.

Now I sit in a position that allows me to see both sides clearly. I understand the instinct to keep distance. I understand the reluctance to step into responsibility before you’ve chosen it. But I also understand something I did not understand then.

After my daughter was born, I kept her close. For the first few months, we stayed mostly inside—doctor’s appointments, grocery pickups, nothing more. When she was close to five months old, I brought her with me into the city to pick up supplies for my craft business. My husband came along. The employees at the store were young, clearly Gen Z.

I wasn’t expecting anyone to fawn over her. If anything, I had prepared myself for the opposite problem—the overly familiar stranger, the person who reaches too close, who assumes access. But that isn’t what happened.

They didn’t react at all.

Not warmly. Not negatively. Just not at all.

We walked the store more than once. She was there in her stroller the entire time. And aside from not being bumped into, it was as if she didn’t exist. No acknowledgment, no passing comment, no moment of recognition that a new human being was present.

When we got back to the car, my husband said it first. He noticed how strange it was.

And if he noticed it, it was not subtle.

That moment stayed with me, because it was not the same thing I had felt in my twenties. What I felt back then was distance—a conscious boundary, a decision not to step into something I had not chosen. What I saw in that store was something else entirely.

It was absence.

There are moments where avoidance makes sense. I’ve done it myself. I remember someone bringing a large, uncontained dog into a small gym I used to go to. I wasn’t familiar with dogs, and I didn’t want to provoke it, so I avoided eye contact and kept my distance.

But that isn’t what this was.

Avoidance comes from awareness. You register something as present and choose not to engage. What I saw in that store was different. It wasn’t caution. It was non-recognition.

There is a difference between not wanting responsibility and not recognizing value. One is a boundary. The other is a cultural condition.

A society that stops orienting itself around reproduction does not become neutral. It becomes dislocated from reality. The continuation of human life is not an abstract concept or a lifestyle preference. It is the material basis of any society that intends to exist beyond the present moment. When that reality fades from view, what replaces it is not freedom, but detachment.

Young women today are coming of age in a culture that tells them their bodies are infinitely modifiable, that motherhood is optional to the point of irrelevance, and that fertility is something that can be delayed, outsourced, or discarded altogether. At the same time, those same systems profit from women’s reproductive capacity—through IVF markets, surrogacy, and lifelong medicalization. What is framed as liberation often functions as detachment: a removal of women from the material reality of their own bodies. I’ve written before about how feminism has been narrowed to “nothing but abortion”—and how that flattening leaves everything else unaddressed.

In that context, disengagement begins to make sense.

If sex is treated as negotiable, if reproduction is framed as burdensome or obsolete, if the creation of new life is detached from any broader social meaning, then the presence of a baby does not register as significant. It becomes background noise. Something to step around, not something to orient toward.

This is not about returning to a past where girls were expected to mother everyone else’s children. That expectation was real, and it was unjust. Women have spent generations pushing back against being reduced to unpaid labor, and rightly so.

But eliminating obligation is not the same as eliminating meaning.

When there is no expectation placed on women, but also no recognition of what women uniquely contribute, something essential is lost. The answer is not to conscript girls into caregiving, but neither is it to raise them in a culture where the creation of life itself holds no weight.

I do not look at those teenage girls in the tweet with contempt. I recognize them. I was them. And I do not look at the young women in that store with anger. What I saw was not hostility, but disconnection.

What I question is the environment that produces that disconnection.

For years, the institutions that once centered family life—churches, extended families, local communities—have been weakened or discredited. In some cases, that critique was warranted. But what has replaced them is not a stronger or more coherent structure. It is hyper-individualism: the idea that fulfillment is entirely self-directed, self-contained, and disconnected from continuity.

That model works, for a time. Until it doesn’t.

Because eventually, a life organized only around the self runs into its limits. It cannot explain why anything should continue. It cannot sustain itself beyond a single generation.

Now, with my own family, I understand something I did not before. Building a family is not simply a personal milestone or a lifestyle preference. It is participation in something larger than the individual. It is how societies persist. It is how meaning is carried forward.

This is the best part of my life. Not because it is easy, but because it is grounded. It connects me to something beyond myself in a way nothing else ever has.

I don’t say that to pressure anyone, and I don’t say it to assign obligation. I say it because there was a time when I genuinely did not understand what was on the other side of that choice.

And I suspect there are many young women now who don’t understand it either.

Not because they have rejected it, but because no one has shown them what it is—or why it matters.