Perspective: Bring back children at weddings

A while back, a video crossed my social media feed showing a small girl clandestinely scooping a bite out of a six-layer wedding cake. It struck me as a charming example of the way serendipity and chaos sometimes coexist, and how often kids facilitate that chaos.

But when I scrolled through the comments, I was surprised to see that many people did not find the episode charming. In fact, a multitude cited the cake-defiling moment as evidence that children shouldn’t be allowed at weddings at all.

“This is exactly why more people are going with child-free weddings,” one person wrote, summing up a popular opinion among the video’s viewers. “Getting married in June and there will be no kids! NONE,” wrote another.

It’s hard to know if, as the comments suggest, child-free weddings are becoming more popular. I couldn’t find any real data on the trend over time. But a deluge of social media posts and news coverage on the topic certainly give the impression that the practice is gaining steam. Which is a tragedy, because marriage ceremonies are not just photo shoots and adult celebrations. They are rituals that represent the creation of new families and the joining of disparate tribes. Perhaps most critically, they help younger generations understand a family’s values. Excluding children robs them of a primer on a critical rite of passage, while sending the message to everyone else that children are not important members of a community.

In short, even if they’re fun, child-free weddings are shallow, one-dimensional affairs.

The trend toward child-free weddings seems to be coming at a time of growing antagonism toward children in public generally. To better understand what’s going on, I reached out to Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who focuses on pro-family policies. Brown said that it’s hard to quantify this trend because it largely manifests on social media or via informal rules, such as a shop that disallows kids . But Brown did say that the public marginalization of children is real and seems to be an “indicator of a society in which children are thought to be outside the norm.”

While that might not be common in Utah, or in various suburbs across the country, there are spaces where animosity toward children is celebrated and where parents are dismissively called “breeders.”

A popular community on the social platform Reddit, for instance, is called “r/childfree” and has 1.5 million members — putting it in the top 1% of the myriad communities on the site. Recent posts have included people swearing about children , and seemingly arguing that the gorilla Harambe should’ve been allowed to kill a child at the Cincinnati Zoo in 2016 rather than be put down. Assumptions that kids make public spaces miserable , or that procreation is selfish, are common on this and similar sites.

The views expressed in such communities don’t exist in isolation. The first several months of this year brought extensive news coverage of DINKs — an acronym for “dual income, no kids” — and the alleged pleasures of having money and no dependents. Last year, Vox published an article suggesting that lavish birthday celebrations for adults are filling a void for single and childless people who haven’t been able to enjoy their own weddings and baby showers.

These articles highlight a growing fascination with a child-free life — and come despite recent research showing that a majority of young people do in fact still want kids. They also highlight a kind of prescriptiveness that crops up in the child-free movement. These people not only don’t want kids themselves; they don’t want others to have them either.

There are all sorts of problems with this trend. On a large scale, the U.S. and other countries are facing declining fertility , which could have dire consequences down the road as older cohorts gradually outnumber the younger people whose labor sustains the economy and programs such as Social Security. A culture that’s hostile to children is a culture that is not thinking critically or long term about its own survival.

But there are more metaphysical downsides to child-free life as well. Brown pointed out that kids “actually inject life and energy” in the public spaces they inhabit. The great parks and public squares of the world are in part great because they welcome people of all ages. Remove kids, and the public sphere loses some of its life and energy — and kids lose the chance to learn what proper public behavior actually looks like.

Still, against the backdrop of a world that’s increasingly hostile to kids generally, it’s not a surprise that the child-free ethos is now spilling over into weddings. If a crying child is too much for some people to bear at a restaurant, it only makes sense that they’d exclude kids from the vastly higher-stakes experience of getting married.

The problem, though, is that weddings are not just another event. They aren’t a grown-up birthday party, a summer barbecue or a game night with friends. Across cultures and time periods, weddings are consistently laden with symbolism — to the point that they are the most significant rituals that many people will ever participate in.

In the West, we can trace these ideas back to the dawn of our civilization. For example, the historian Karen Hersch has written that weddings in ancient Rome functioned as rituals that saw two families “implicitly or explicitly joined before the larger community.” Even more relevantly here, Roman weddings were a prime place for kids to mingle with adults, and also showcased “what a boy and especially a girl needed to strive to accomplish to possess full membership in Roman life,” Hersch wrote.

Wedding practices vary from culture to culture, but Hersch also argues that weddings serve as an act of cultural identification all over the globe. And indeed there is a whole body of work on this topic. Among other things, researchers have explored the way physical objects at weddings symbolize a couple’s entrance into a community, the creation of a common cultural identity , and even how weddings can function as acts of resistance to state power or new ideologies . And in many cases, researchers have observed that one of the purposes of the wedding is to provide cultural instruction to younger generations.

The key takeaway from this research is very simple: Weddings almost universally function — and are supposed to function — as deeply symbolic events that involve a couple’s entire village, whether literal or figurative. And children that are a part of the village are supposed to be present at these ceremonies, in large part so they can learn.

That remains true today, according to Rabbi Goldie Milgram, an author and founder of the nonprofit Reclaiming Judaism, who has officiated many weddings herself.

“If you’re not going to include your kids in your wedding, then you’re depriving them of a major rite of passage in their lives as much as your own,” Milgram told me.

But what of people who don’t care about symbolism and ritual, but just want to throw a big party where people bring them gifts? Stop overthinking it, I’ve often been told when debating these ideas.

The problem, though, is that, like it or not, couples can’t escape the symbolism inherent in a wedding. It’s not just a party. And a child-free wedding isn’t neutral regarding kids. It’s an argument that kids matter less than, say, good Instagram photos or vibes. It’s an insinuation that kids aren’t real members of the community, and that the marrying couple has few obligations to their tribe beyond paying for dinner and renting a venue. A child-free wedding is anti-child, and by extension, anti-family.

But Milgram also argues that couples themselves miss out on a richer experience by excluding kids.

“I would say that they’re missing out on the meaning of their lives,” she said. “They’re losing their opportunity for a physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritually profound experience that builds who they are as a person, and allows them to have much more fun and much more connection, and much more meaning than they would if they view it as all about themselves.”

None of this is to say that every couple need invite every child they’ve ever known to their wedding. It doesn’t mean kids need to play a role in every moment of a couple’s big day. The question, instead, is how to deepen a wedding so that everyone in a couple’s figurative village can share in their joy and, in the case of the youth, follow in their footsteps.

Near the end of our conversation, Milgram recalled an example of how a rabbi at a wedding she attended did just that. As the rabbi was officiating, a child wandered away from her parents and pulled down some decorations. A clang rang out across the room. But the rabbi didn’t miss a beat.

“He looks up and says, ‘Oh, do we have a yingele here?’ A yingele, a little one, that’s Yiddish,” Milgram said. “He (the rabbi) looked like Santa Claus. He was just beaming at the thought of there being a child in the room.”

The child’s father quickly scolded her for the disruption, but the rabbi beckoned the girl to come to the front of the room.

“He says, ‘You made music for the wedding.’ And then he picks this kid up, puts her on his shoulders and says, ‘You can help me.’”

Suddenly, the moment of chaos transformed into one of beauty and inclusion.

The episode offers a poignant counter to the video of the girl sneaking wedding cake, showing what happens when a community values its children. Even the chaos that children might bring becomes a feature rather than a bug. I want to live in that world, not the world of r/childfree.