There are no children left in Boston

Once you notice it, you can't stop noticing it.

Growing up, I remember jokes being made about the slow death of the Catholic Church — a church my daughter and I belong to and attend. The non-believers and believers alike couldn’t help but notice the people in the pews were getting older and older with fewer and fewer young people and families in attendance. Years later, I heard a priest comment on this obvious and concerning phenomenon.

“If the pews ain’t cryin’, your church is dyin’,” he said.

That was as true then as it is now, thought there has been somewhat of a revival of the faith in young Catholics’ lives across North America.

This problem within the church has stuck with me my whole adult life, and while I’ve always considered the problem from a religious perspective, the absence of children doesn’t just impact our faith communities anymore. It’s a societal problem.

Just last week, I was in Boston for a conference. As my co-worker and I were walking the perpetually gridlocked streets within Boston’s core, he commented out of the blue, “Hey, you know what? I haven’t seen any kids since we’ve been here.” He was right. This was our third day walking around Boston and besides the baby I saw in our hotel, I couldn’t remember seeing a single other child in a stroller or walking with their parents.

I didn’t know it at the time, but his anecdotal observation was not wrong. When I got home, I looked up the birth rate in cities across the United States and, as it turns out, Boston has the third-lowest birth rate, behind only Portland and Seattle.

The 2006 film, Children of Men, began playing in my head. However, the glaring difference between that movie and the current situation in Boston (and across the vast majority of the world) is that we’re not dealing with a mysterious infertility among women. The lack of children in our world is a choice.

Even after I started paying close attention to the people we passed, desperate to prove my friend’s thesis wrong, I was only able to spot two strollers and three children among the thousands of people we passed.

The entire situation made me uneasy once it became obvious. Like I was surrounded by fellow worker bees as we tended to the economy of a hive without a queen. It made me want to go home as quickly as I could to hug my daughter and remind myself that children are the light of this world, the embodiment of hope, and the promise of an eternal tomorrow. Christlike in so many ways.

A day later, I was in the airport, waiting with ever-decreasing patience for my delayed flight of three hours to begin boarding. As is custom in an airport (again, full of adults), I stayed mostly silent as I watched a movie on my laptop and filed my expenses for my trip. That was until a mother sat in front of me with what I am guessing was a one-and-a-bit-years-old boy. He was fussy and couldn’t sit still, which were totally appropriate things to feel when stuck in an airport at nine o’clock at night. We made eye contact with one another for a moment that was just long enough for me to smile and stick my tongue out at him. He let out a giggle and produced a big smile of his own from behind his soother. I kept making funny faces at him as his mother spoke to who I assume was his father on a video call. Each silly face made him more enthusiastic. He tried to squirm out of his mothers arm and toward me. He couldn’t talk, of course, but his body language told me he was elated that someone other than his mother finally wanted to pay attention to him. His mother, who couldn’t speak much English, kept a tight grip on him and made it obvious that she didn’t want to risk the boy bothering me. Before I could let her know that it was fine, it was time to board, and just like that, the worker bees all lined up to be transported to our next hive.

That little boy made my night and brought joy to an otherwise miserable place known as an airport gate waiting area.

Today — two days after returning home — I was at church, and in each direction I looked, I saw children. Children of all ages born to parents of many different ethnicities, joining together in song and prayer. I felt comforted by their presence, by their inability to sit still, by their crunching of little snacks, by their crying…

We’ve a long way to go to bring such hope to the world, but for that hour I sat in those pews, everything seemed right and natural and the way it ought to. If only just for a moment.