While working at a large electronics conglomerate in Seoul in the early 2010s, none of my colleagues had more than two children. A supervisor explained to me that while he wanted a third child, he just couldn’t afford it. “My parents had to sell half of their business to pay for my education. I don’t think I can provide such opportunities to my own two children,” he told me.
A female manager said she handed her two children to her parents to raise so that she could advance her career and earn more money for their education. She noted she was lucky her parents lived nearby so she could see her children every day. Meanwhile, another manager only saw her 1-year-old on the weekends, as her parents lived on the other side of the country.
This mindset of prioritizing one’s career over having children is common in South Korea, where the cost of raising children is the highest in the world and the fertility rate is one of the lowest at 0.8.
It was a mindset that I initially subscribed to as well.
At the beginning of my career, I often worked overtime and attended late-night company gatherings. Some nights I returned home as the sun was peeking above the horizon, only to go back to work after a few hours of sleep. Working hard at a prestigious company gave me a sense of prestige.
In 2011, I developed a head-shattering migraine that eventually forced me to take an extended sick leave from work. Despite a barrage of exams, doctors could not figure out the reason for my illness. After three months of leave, the company’s HR manager called me to discuss my options. Although my boss defended me, I feared losing the career I had worked so hard to obtain.
Out of desperation, I remembered my mother’s words: “When we pour out our hearts to God, he surely listens.” So I started attending my church’s 6 a.m. service every morning and praying for God’s healing. Almost half a year after the onset of the illness, God answered my prayer in an unexpected way.
One day after my treatment with a pain specialist, I felt a strange urge to visit the women’s clinic in the same building. There in the darkened exam room, I saw on a screen the tiny life growing inside me. It felt like a miracle given the severe pain I was in.
Within a few weeks, I was overwhelmed with terrible morning sickness, but when the morning sickness receded, so did my migraine. I was able to return to work throughout the pregnancy. When my daughter was born, my husband and I chose a name based on the Hebrew phrase Eli-ana, meaning “My God has answered.”
During the first few months of my daughter’s life, God showed me a different mission for my life than the ambitious career goals my colleagues and Korean society had sold me. When my parental leave ended a year later, I didn’t return to work. Instead, my husband and I both resigned. In the summer of 2013, we left South Korea for the mission field with our 1-year-old daughter.
Today I am a mother of five children between the ages of 4 and 13 as I pursue a PhD at Dallas Theological Seminary. Despite living on a single income, God has steadily provided for us through my husband’s marketing job at the seminary, scholarships, and the sacrificial support from my mother and mother-in-law, who helped us raise our children.
To Koreans—both in Korea and in the US—I am a statistical anomaly. Whenever I share that I have five children, strangers and acquaintances are shocked and worried about how we can afford them all.
In the time I have lived outside of South Korea, Koreans have become increasingly intolerant of children. About a decade ago, a debate around “no-kids zones” in restaurants and other public places went viral. Business owners cite “privacy to adult customers” or “safety concerns” as the reasons to adopt these policies, yet the debate reveals a shift in how children are viewed. In internet communities, stay-at-home mothers are often derogatorily called “mom-insects” (mom-choong), women who spend husbands’ hard-earned money idling in coffee shops while allowing their children to disturb public spaces.
Korea’s birth crisis has a deeper root than economic concerns alone. As housing and educational costs skyrocket, a fatalistic sentiment has grown among the country’s highly educated but economically strained younger generation. In various online communities, they describe their despair with the phrase “Better never to have been born”—echoing the title of the book by South African philosopher David Benatar.
The efficiency-driven anti-natalist logic goes like this: Life is full of suffering. A child is a costly burden. Raising children requires economic sacrifice. If someone cannot afford to raise a child to be successful, it is better that the child never be born.
The Bible speaks truth to this kind of thinking. The beginning of Psalm 127 paints a picture of a seemingly active economy that is—apart from the Lord—nothing but vanity.
Unless the Lord builds the house,
the builders labor in vain.
Unless the Lord watches over the city,
the guards stand watch in vain.
In vain you rise early and stay up late
toiling for food to eat—
for he grants sleep to those he loves. (vv. 1–2)
The Hebrew term house in the first verse points to the family, household, or even a nation (as in the “House of Israel”). Like many other wisdom psalms that set two possible ways of life in contrast—for instance, the way of the wise versus the way of the wicked in Psalm 1—this psalm also paints two very different worlds: one marked by vanity and one marked by blessing.
In the world of vanity, people toil on a futile building project, like an economic system that lacks a future generation to inherit its outcome. However, in another possible world, a different kind of building project is underway.
Children are a heritage from the Lord,
offspring a reward from him.
Like arrows in the hands of a warrior
are children born in one’s youth.
Blessed is the man
whose quiver is full of them.
They will not be put to shame
when they contend with their opponents in court. (vv. 3–5)
Our economic calculations of the value of motherhood and child-rearing often overlook the long-term dimension of these projects. Maternity leave taken by new parents seems to incur significant economic loss, and the daily work of a stay-at-home mom seems to contribute little to Korea’s GDP.
However, the costly and seemingly inefficient work of raising children—even the ones shrieking in coffee shops, making a mess at a restaurant, or laughing too loudly on the subway—can rebuild our society from the bottom up when parents and community members raise them with godly love. Like arrows in a warrior’s quiver, these children can pierce the false idols of efficiency and success.
For a long time, the comparison of children to arrows puzzled me. But while studying ancient Hebrew inscriptions in seminary, I learned that some of the oldest Hebrew writings were names engraved on bronze arrowheads from the early periods of Israel’s history.
These arrowheads were reusable weapons that were retrieved and resharpened after each use. Furthermore, the names on the arrowheads displayed the owner’s allegiance—showing whether it was “the arrow of ben-Baal (Son of Baal)” or “the arrow of Eli-Am (My God of people).”
Our children are our arrows, with their parent’s names and allegiance to Christ engraved on their hearts. My quiver currently has five arrows, each one of them uniquely made in God’s image (Gen. 1:27). If God allows me to teach Old Testament after earning my degree, I will add my spiritual children—my students—into this quiver as well.
From this perspective, my job as a mother and educator is more important than the meetings I attended, the spreadsheets I filled out, or the employee award I received while working in corporate Korea. It’s a long-term project contributing to the formation of God-shaped souls in our world.
I pray that I will be able to resist the temptation to see my children as economic investments or to judge their success by worldly standards, forcing them to pursue careers as doctors, lawyers, or venture capitalists.
I pray that I will be able to encourage them to discover and follow their own unique, God-given talents and interests. My oldest daughter wants to become a cellist. My second would love to study insects and reptiles. My third child dreams of becoming an artist. My fourth might pursue an acting career. My 4-year-old—well, I am still figuring him out.
Oftentimes, we face verbal and logical assaults in the “court” of a God-defying society that constantly equates human value with economic productivity. Our children—both biological and spiritual—are not only gifts of God but also our effective weapons in our fight “against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12).
Each morning, I “shoot” my children into the world with the prayer that they will be enveloped and carried along by the divine ruach—the wind, the breath, and the Spirit of God (Gen. 1:2; John 3:8). In the evening, I gather them back and ask them to share their victories and struggles.
Through these moments of laughter and tears, we as parents participate in their sharpening, imparting in them the courage to go out and face the world yet again. Day by day, we trust in the power of the name that is above every name engraved into their hearts.
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