The Weight of Small Things

There is a moment in Boyz n the Hood that has never really left me. Furious Styles takes his teenage son and his friend to a street corner in Compton, where a sign offers to buy local homes for cash. Around them is the aftermath of systemic neglect: liquor stores, gun shops, poverty, and gang violence. Furious explains how gentrification works, not just the displacement of people, but the erasure of a culture. And then he delivers a line that feels less like dialogue and more like diagnosis: The best way to destroy a people is to stop them from reproducing.

That line has echoed for years. Not in a conspiratorial sense, but in the slow, unsettling way a true thing keeps surfacing in unexpected places. Like, say, a casual internet argument about whether a child startled by a dog should be leashed like the dog.

I’m talking about a post on Overheard in Banff, you might have seen it. A mother had posted about her daughter, who had run into traffic in a panic when an off-leash dog approached. The child was fine, thankfully. The mother was not calling for new laws. She was simply asking dog owners to be more aware. Children, especially the small ones, are still learning how to live in the world. And public space, if it is going to be anything worth having, must be a space of shared care.

Then came the reply. Sarcastic, dismissive, eager for applause. Something like, "If your kid cannot handle dogs, maybe that is your problem." The comment did not quite say that children should be leashed like pets, but it implied as much. And it was met with laughter, likes, and general approval. Underneath it was a strange and unsettling idea: that children and pets occupy the same moral space. That a child’s fear is no more deserving of consideration than a dog’s comfort. That the solution to a child’s terror is not compassion or care, but tighter management of the child.

It is the kind of thought that only emerges in a culture that has begun to forget what children are.

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Just a few weeks ago, we finalized the legal adoption of my eldest daughter. When I married my wife, she had already been widowed and was raising a child. I became a father at the same moment I became a husband. The shift was immediate and irreversible. My life as a single thirty-year-old ended overnight. Something new began. These thoughts are not theoretical. They are rooted in the lived experience of bedtime routines, early morning fears, the long slow labour of raising a person.

At any rate, I said this in response to the comment, not because I thought it would change anything online, but because sometimes silence leaves something worse behind. And I will say it again here: children are not lifestyle accessories. They are not emotional support animals for adults. They are persons. Vulnerable, forming, still unfinished, and yet already bearing the full dignity and moral weight that comes with being human.

Upfront: I am a Christian, and I believe every human being is made in the image of God, possessed of infinite worth. But even if you do not share that conviction, our shared language of human rights points to something similar. We act as though every person is irreducible, deserving of care not because of their usefulness or beauty or productivity, but simply because they are.

I grew up with pets. I loved them. Cookies and Jellybean, my two German Shepherd Sheltie mixes, walked with me through some of the loneliest parts of childhood. I had parakeets, fish, a turtle that somehow escaped without a trace, a rabbit, and two cats. They mattered. They comforted. They stayed (well, not the turtle). But none of them would have grown into persons capable of moral memory, capable of bearing forward a family’s story, capable of building and breaking and repairing the fragile goods of human culture.

A child might.

And that possibility, that a child grows into someone who remembers, who forgives, who shapes the world, is not just sentimentality. It is the foundation of every enduring culture.

Part of why the confusion between pets and children is so common now is because pets meet so many emotional needs: affection, responsibility, companionship. But the relationship remains, at its core, revocable. If circumstances change, a pet can be rehomed. There will be sadness, perhaps even grief, but the bond can be severed. Parenthood, by contrast, cannot be revoked without deep wounds. The permanence of the parent-child bond is not merely biological. It is moral. And it changes us.

Yes, some parents abandon their children. But the very fact that this is treated as tragedy, that it marks lives for decades, reveals the difference. No one generally needs therapy because their family gave away the cat.

If you want to be a good parent, your self-concern cannot remain at the center. Children wake you up. They interrupt your plans. They reveal your limits. They demand that you teach them things you are still learning yourself. And if you stay, if you endure, you will change. You will be shaped by the slow, costly work of love.

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Earlier this year, while teaching my daughter about Plato in our weekly philosophy class, we spent time with his Republic. Here’s a passage worth considering:

"The father stands in awe of his son, and the son does not feel ashamed to contradict his father. The teacher fears and flatters the scholars, and the scholars despise their teachers and tutors. The old condescend to the young and are full of pleasantry and gaiety. The young have no respect for their elders, and in their impatience to be free, they chafe at any suggestion of superiority. Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike. Extreme freedom must not be expected to lead to anything but a change to extreme slavery, whether in a private individual or in a city."

(Republic, Book VIII, 558c–564a, trans. Benjamin Jowett)

Plato describes a society that exalts freedom and equality so absolutely that it erases the bonds of respect, authority, and formation. Parents defer to children. Teachers flatter students. The old imitate the young. Every natural ordering of life is flattened into preference. What begins as a celebration of liberty corrodes into an inability to name what is better, what is higher, what demands reverence. And without a shared moral structure, democracy decays. Freedom collapses into chaos. In the hunger for order, tyranny rises.

We often describe our choices today in terms of freedom, the freedom to travel, to curate a lifestyle, to keep options open. But beneath that language is the logic of consumerism, of consumption. We curate our lives like we curate our feeds. We optimize. We personalize. We avoid entanglements that bind us too tightly. And in that frame, children do not fit. They are not lifestyle enhancements. They are not optimizable. They require a different kind of freedom, the kind that binds itself to love.

This cultural leveling sometimes shows up in our language, where pets and children are placed in the same frame. But it is worth asking whether we are confusing ontological equality, that children and adults are equally persons, with role-based or emotional equivalence. A police dog may be honored alongside a police officer, but this equivalence is symbolic. It does not mean the dog is a person. It simply means the dog has a role, maybe a venerable role, but a role. A child is not equal to a pet because someone feels more affection for their dog. Our feelings do not ground moral categories. Persons are persons, and that is true whether we like them or not.

But the problem runs deeper than confused ontologies and consumerism alone. Christopher Lasch saw it clearly. "Nothing is more frightening than the prospect of being replaced," he wrote. The real terror is not inconvenience. It is mortality. Consumer culture distracts us from this terror with novelty and endless personalization. But children bring it back into view. They are our successors. They announce, in their small and insistent way, that the world will go on without us.

Lasch put it sharply. "Men and women begin to fear growing old before they even arrive at middle age." When the future is feared rather than embraced, when the thought of being superseded becomes unbearable, "parenthood itself... appears almost as a form of self-destruction." When a culture can no longer imagine a future it will not personally inhabit, it loses the will to pass anything down.

This helps explain why treating children as morally equivalent to pets feels comfortable to some. It flattens the terror. If all loves are interchangeable, then we can pretend succession does not matter. We can pretend there is nothing weighty in being replaced.

There is another way to respond. And it begins with saying yes.

In earlier generations, people were drawn into moral maturity through many different pathways: extended families, shared survival. Even religious life once offered a similar crucible of character, with its shared poverty, communal prayer, and vows that bound lives together for the sake of something higher. Most of those structures have eroded. What remains is often voluntary, fragile, subject to abandonment at will. Except one. Parenting. At its best, parenting is one of the last wide and ordinary paths into real formation. The bond between parent and child, when honored rightly, insists on daily, habitual, self-giving love.

Because children change how we live. They change how we spend money. How we treat strangers. What we expect from our communities. They awaken questions we would not have asked otherwise.

And eventually, they grow. And we grow old. And the arc bends back toward dependence, not because anyone planned it, but because this is how love, real love, moves through the world.

If Furious Styles was right, and I believe he was, then the loss of children is not just a private sadness. It is a cultural unraveling. A society can survive without dogs. It cannot survive without children.

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I often think about my first two pups, Cookies and Jellybean, a gift that came during the slow fallout of my parents’ divorce, after my dad had left and begun a new relationship. Officially, we stayed with my father, but in truth it was my grandmother who became our caregiver, the one who steadied the world when it threatened to slip away. Those two dogs were a gift. Not simply because they were loved, but because they made the loneliness bearable. I remember coming home that day and meeting them for the first time, lifting their tiny bodies up onto an old abandoned boat in our backyard, trying to play. Cookies slipped, fell, and yelped. I worried he was probably hurt. I was definitely hurt. It stung to learn I had failed to protect him, that my play had turned careless. That moment taught me something about care, about responsibility, about how even small creatures deserve gentleness.

Cookies and Jellybean were part of what held my childhood together. I think of them still. I think of Budgie and Tweety, my parakeets, and Milo, my first cat. And I think of Hippo, our current cat, a gormless but impossibly patient creature who endures the chaos of toddlers with a grace beyond what any cat should be expected to offer. And lately, we have been talking about adopting a pup.

Since I married and became both a husband and a father to my first daughter, our family has grown. Three more children now fill our home: a brilliant and wide-eyed little boy, and two girls who bring light into every room. Becoming a dad through adoption and through biology has been its own kind of grace, and its own kind of stretching. Both paths are beautiful. Both are hard. They should never be conflated, and maybe one day I will write more about that. But for now, I will say this: these children have changed me. They continue to.

My hope in writing all this is not that we would love pets less, or disdain them as lesser. It is that we would remember what love, ordered rightly, can do. It does not shrink to make room. It expands. It teaches us how to love more, not less. It heals. And when our loves are rightly ordered, no one is left out. 

We do not need less love for the creatures that accompany us. We need more love for those who inherit the world we leave behind.