Jonathan McNair

Let’s be honest with ourselves: We’ve all heard it from our parents in one form or another. How many times did your mother tell you, “Clean up your mess”?

A comment on Twitter recently caught my eye: “Sure, kids cost roughly $14,000 annually, but think about all the money you save from no longer having a social life.” It was tongue-in-cheek, but correct—kids are expensive!

A 2017 U.S. Department of Agriculture report found that the average cost of rearing a child from birth to age 17 is $233,610 (“How Much Does It Cost to Raise a Child in the U.S. in 2018?,” TheStreet.com, December 19, 2018). And this figure does not include the cost of college.

In 2017, author Tom Nichols published a book titled The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. Nichols makes the case that we are experiencing “the growth of an irrational conviction among Americans that everyone is as smart as everyone else” (p. 7).

Do you ever get tired of hearing about all the struggles that so many people face in our world? One day, you hear that three in ten people don’t have access to good, safe water in their homes. That’s 2.1 billion people. The next day, you read that in Ghana, 36 percent of public schools lack toilet facilities. Then, you see a YouTube video highlighting the lack of electricity typical in many corners of the world, making it virtually impossible for vast numbers of people to enjoy so much of the modern way of life that is familiar to the rest of us.