A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Friday installment of its Letters section suggested a solution to our nation’s baby-birth dearth.

The problem isn’t finances—it’s perceived inconvenience.
Children are a responsibility: a limitation on us in an age of careerism and radical individualism. But they also contain a hidden wealth that exceeds anything else—and hope for the future. We need to stop framing decisions about childrearing as simply another cost-benefit analysis and present young people with a more beautiful vision of what family life can be and do for the world.

The problem, though, also includes this simple, critical fact: today’s young people have already experienced what family life is, not hypothetical “can be’s.”

It’s necessary to address that realized experience in these proposed presentations. Absent that, such presentations will be perceived as just another installment in the empty words of lectures by older generations.