The deeper danger is that we become little gods, generating life in our own image and on our own terms, yet with neither the wisdom nor understanding of an actual Creator.
(For further reading, confer with very old-and-ignored literature that most people scoff or roll their eyes at.)
Ruth Gaskovski:
This mechanistic view is a kind of rupture with God. It erases the spiritual dimension of a child growing within a mother’s womb. This mutual participation in creation breaks you open and brings you into contact with helpless love, and also with suffering that produces life.
Notice that the mechanistic is tied to the non-material. It is the mechanistic, non-physical, non-participatory non-things that erase the spiritual. While physical, participatory things break open both material and spiritual reality.
Researchers from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences report that by the age of two to four months, babies eyes can focus on the eyes of adults, creating what they call a “joint-networked state” during which their brain waves sync with those of the parent, bringing them into “mutual alignment”. When this state is activated by a parent’s gaze, babies try to vocalize and communicate more. If a mother’s eyes are locked onto a screen during nursing, rather than meeting the infant’s eyes, the earliest social connection is interrupted. […]
But who needs instincts, intuition, and patience when you can ask Emily Oster’s Al chatbot for parenting advice?
I’ve quoted Mary Oliver before:
Said the poet Robert Frost, “We begin in infancy by establishing correspondence of eyes with eyes.” It is deeply true. It is where the confidence comes from; the child whose gaze is met learns that the world is real and desirable — that the child himself is real, and cherished.
Also from Ruth:
The stories we tell ourselves about having children can be a major factor in whether people have kids.
If we encourage the idea, as some do, that motherhood is awful, that fathers are bad, that family is doomed to be dysfunctional, then, naturally, we will avoid children or else anxiously armor ourselves with every possible technology to shield us from the challenges.
But it we take the risk to become the parents that kids actually need, if we safeguard the sacred space where our most fundamental connections are formed, then—even if we aren’t perfect—and we won’t be—we might instill in those children a faith that it is possible for them to replicate the goodness that they themselves experienced.