A new year is a time to reflect upon past events and make future plans. Priorities shape plans and plans construct our reality. At a time of new beginnings, we ask, “where do I want to go?” and follow that with, “how will I get there?” While it is crucial to have a plan for achieving our goals, most of us are pretty good at making plans once we have goals, it is actually determining where we want to go that proves difficult. My generation (20-30 somethings) is famous for our flurry of activity to arrive…we don’t quite know where—think of the jobless college graduates who managed to dodge the career services arm of their universities while studying ferociously. So, as 2012 opens, “where do I want to go?” is a good question to ask; but perhaps the more fundamental question to ask is “what is important to me?”

Brazil’s declining fertility rate

Just before the turn of the year, I read, over breakfast, one of the leading stories on washingtonpost.comⁱ. “[Brazil]’s fertility rate has fallen from 6.15 children per woman in 1960 to less than 1.9 today.” While that represents a significant shift in Latin America’s largest country, it seems in chorus with declining rates across the world. The reporter pointed out that across the continent’s diverse spread, “from sprawling Mexico to tiny Ecuador to economically buoyant Chile,” fertility rates have dropped almost as sharply as Brazil’s. What seemed incredible to me was that the drop occurred despite laws prohibiting abortion, few government-run family planning services, and strong opposition to birth control by the Catholic Church. Brazil’s fertility rate is now below the United States, 2, and quite below the 2.12 generally required to replenish the outgoing generation.

So, the decline in Brazil is not due to what many point to as the causes of the US trend—easy abortion, accessible government programs, and weakening religious influences. “Then what could have caused this phenomenon?” I wondered. Perhaps modernization.

Well, I was wrong again. Brazil’s almost 200 million is an ethnic melting pot with a large economic gap between rich and poor despite a growing middle class. “‘Brazil started coming down and had this big drop that amazed everybody, everywhere,’ said Suzana Cavenaghi, a Brazilian census bureau demographer. ‘We wouldn’t expect that in a country that’s so diverse, with a lot of poverty in so many places and so unequal, economically speaking.’” Brazil’s baby drop has not only swept cosmopolitan Sao Paulo but also Amazonian villages and the central farming belt.

With my initial theories now smashed, Veronica Marques, communications director for Elas, a group that helps women start businesses across Brazil, gave hers: “This idea of doing what she really wants to do, and having the power to do it, is the thing that has changed this country.” Numerous U.S. and Brazilian researchers have pinned the nation’s popular soap operas as heavily influencing the drop in fertility rate. “The protagonists may be perpetually anguished about lost love, but they inhabit an appealing, affluent, high flying world, whose distinguishing features include the small family.” “‘They are all young. They live well. They are comfortable. They are beautiful,’ said Maria Immacolata Vassallo de Lopes, coordinator of the Center for the Study of the Telenovela in Sao Paulo. ‘Why do they need children?’” Zeitgeist attitudes seem to mirror Jaqueline Ramos, who, along with four others, recently opened a restaurant: “Her grandmother had 19 children, but Ramos, 24, said she may not have any. ‘It is too much work to have children,’ she said, busily chopping cilantro.”

Misplaced priorities

Have we missed something if our ambition for achievement means no children? Children are a significant time and freedom constraint, it is true; those who have and raise children cannot do some of the things they want to do. However, the idea that one is constrained in his or her choice because of another choice is not unusual—it’s life! We prioritize our time because there simply isn’t enough of it to go around. So, my concern this New Year is that we might misplace our priorities from what we really believe is important. Has chopping cilantro become more important to us than creating the future of our society?

What I‘m saying and what I‘m not

Brazil’s macro fertility decline is an interesting subject and young adult attitudes toward marriage and child-rearing are too, but I want to talk on a micro level. I’m not trying to suggest macro-policies or levy macro-blame; I’m trying to investigate whether our individual goals, yours and mine, align with what is truly significant.

I’m also not saying that women should not reach for their economic aspirations. Have you noticed how dull a person is without a compelling ambition? That micro-level observation is genderless! It is both beautiful and thrilling to witness anyone achieve excellence! My concern that many of us, especially my generation, are misplacing our priorities relative to childrearing is also genderless. In fact, I am more appalled at a young man who will leave a child and her mother to fend for themselves than I am about a young woman refusing children. I agree with Jeffrey Holland, a Mormon religious leader and Yale PhD candidate at the time of the feminist movement, who said in a recent interviewⁱⁱ that feminism’s model was misshaped. We shouldn’t focus on getting women out of the home; we should focus on getting men back in the home.

What I am saying is that we ought to take a good, hard look at where we are spending our time and where those decisions are leading us. Professor Clayton M. Christensen spoke at the Harvard Business School’s Class of 2010 commencement and subsequently was asked by the Harvard Business Review to publish his speech in their magazine (which has gone viral). He wrote:

When people who have a high need for achievement—and that includes all Harvard Business School graduates—have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, get promoted. In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.

If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered mostⁱⁱⁱ.

Power versus influence

One of my favorite professors, Susan Walton, the former Public Relations Director of Harley Davidson Motorcycles, taught our class the difference between the CEO and the PR person in a company is the difference between power and influence. The CEO can wield considerable power in terms of financing, hiring/firing, strategy, etc., but the PR person maintains influence over popular perceptions of the company and thus influence over the whole company (a company dies without customers, no matter how good the strategy). While it is nice to have power to direct one’s life and of others, it is more impactful to influence others so that they want to believe and act as you do.

The difference between a career and a child can be thought of in the same way. A career can bestow a person with power to direct that life with greater flexibility. Childrearing provides an opportunity to significantly influence a child’s attitudes and behavior in a way that not only cannot be duplicated but also cannot be measured (generations upon generations). I wonder what our dutiful restaurant owner, Jaqueline Ramos, would answer to this question: “who has had a greater influence on your life and your thinking? Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first female president and cultural icon, or your mother?”

Five generations before me, Susan Allen Goaslind raised nine children alone after her husband died 6 months following their last daughter’s birth. Owing to intense mob persecution in Illinois and a Mormon extermination order from the Governor of Missouri, Susan left with others of her faith to travel by wagon to the Salt Lake valley in Utah when she was 14-years-old. Once her John had passed, she homesteaded land in Idaho and worked it for 14 years until it had turned around enough to sell. Her motive for selling was to move to Logan, Utah, where a Temple, a sacred edifice, still operates. She was a devoted member of her Church all her life. She was noted for her sternness (especially with herself) because she expected people to always to their best. She threw open her door to welcome and provide for travelers in Logan. It is partially due to her genealogical efforts (well before the world-wide web) that I now know so much about my ancestry. I have only one paragraph of her own writing, done when she was 82-years-young, but that short piece has endeared my heart to hers more than any other ancestor I know about.

What could a little, old lady five generations ago write that could profoundly influence a millennial? The stature of her character and the depth of her devotions have reached through her words and the years to challenge me. She challenged me to live higher; she challenged me to serve with greater love; she challenged me to focus on the profound. Susan Allen Goaslind had little of what many of us would call power—fame, money, position, or global impact—but she continues to have remarkable influence on those of us who call her mother, grandmother, and great-great-great-grandmother.

How will we be remembered?

Most of us won’t have statues erected to our names. Most of us won’t be remembered a hundred years from now. But, if we want to have an influence upon the future of the human race, and we have much to offer, we ought to place our priorities in order of our ability to influence, and the greatest opportunity to influence is in a family. I’ll give Professor Christensen the last word:

This past year I was diagnosed with cancer and faced the possibility that my life would end sooner than I’d planned. Thankfully, it now looks as if I’ll be spared. But the experience has given me important insight into my life.

I have a pretty clear idea of how my ideas have generated enormous revenue for companies that have used my research; I know I’ve had a substantial impact. But as I’ve confronted this disease, it’s been interesting to see how unimportant that impact is to me now. I’ve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched.

I think that’s the way it will work for us all. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.

Filed under: Career, Children, Family, Marriage