Stephanie Murray is a freelance journalist and contributing writer for The Atlantic. Millennial editor Robert Christian interviewed her on her writing, parenthood, and her faith.

You often write about parenthood. Why do you think this is such an important topic?

I think parenthood is one of those things that winds up being overlooked precisely because it is so familiar. Everyone has a first order understanding of parenthood—it’s so big and essential that it’s easy to take for granted. But I think the fact that we take it for granted, mostly leaving it to individual parents to figure out how to manage this enormous and vital task on their own, has made parenting really weird and hard. That’s how I ended up writing about it so much—I have always had a strong sense that parenthood and motherhood are undervalued, but it was really only after I became a parent that I started to notice how strangely childrearing fits (or rather, doesn’t fit) into American life.

I also think that we’ve sentimentalized parenthood in a way that makes it really hard to talk about the work of raising children in a straightforward, practical manner. We call it the hardest job in the world or whatever, but people really struggle to conceptualize it as labor. Depending on who you ask, parenthood is either too transcendent and sublime, or too menial and self-effacing to warrant recognition (let alone accommodation or compensation) as work. I think that’s really silly and counterproductive. Obviously parenthood is not just a job; the nature of the gig draws you into a pretty intense relationship with another human, at least for a while—and I often write about that as well. But it is a job, one that we need people to do and do well. A lot of my work is aimed at getting people to think about it that way, mainly because I think doing so is useful (essential, really) for making sense of and having productive discussions about family life and policy in 2023. If you are unwilling to talk matter of factly about the work of raising a kid, then you are doomed to discuss parenthood as a kind of consumer experience, and the question becomes whether or not kids are worth the cost, which is predictably icky and demeaning and highly politicized. One side is really insistent on showcasing the joys of parenting and the other on revealing its ugly side and both insist the other is exaggerating. But if you start from the premise that kids are humans and raising one is a job then it’s actually pretty easy to discuss the challenges of modern parenthood and the wide variation of experiences therein, all without blaming kids for being kids. Like any other job, parenthood involves doing some boring and frustrating stuff. And like any other job, whether or not raising a child feels manageable and satisfying to you has a lot to do with the conditions under which you are expected to do it. We should be talking a lot less about whether kids are “worth it” and a lot more about whether we, as a country, are setting all parents up for success.

What do you think are the major challenges parents face in 2023 and can anything be done to help alleviate these challenges?

The specific challenges American parents face obviously vary pretty considerably, but in my opinion, many of them stem from the lack of a broad-based policy framework for childrearing. Childrearing is mostly an afterthought in the American social contract. We don’t really step in with support for parents until something has gone wrong (and even then, in a very stingy and frankly demeaning way). This approach doesn’t make a lot of sense—as I said above, parenting is a job! A very, very big one. You have to build a policy framework that coordinates that work with the other duties of American life. At the very least, either you have to create support that allows one parent to scale back on formal employment to care for the kids or you’ve got to ensure that employment is compatible with caregiving. A lot of other countries do both of those things, but America does neither and the result is that families in all sorts of arrangements feel strained and undersupported. If you want even a one year break from employment to be at home with your child, you’re going to be making some pretty big sacrifices—losing your foothold in the labor market, your income (just as your expenses skyrocket, to boot), your social security credits and retirement savings. But if you decide to stay in the labor market, you’re scrambling to handle two jobs in a system that has done very little to ensure that it’s possible to manage both. For some people that means working very long hours. For others it means pretty much entirely handing over the reins of your time to an employer that wants you to jump when they say jump, but won’t let you jump when your kid needs you to jump. I think the best way to help American parents would be to dispense with our sparse, means-tested, difficult-to-access patchwork of supports in favor of a universal framework for managing the cost and labor involved in the parenthood portion of the lifecourse.

Does your faith impact your writing? Does it affect what you find interesting and worthy of exploration or how you approach certain subjects?

Yes, definitely. My faith is sort of the anchor for my thoughts on any given subject. Which makes it kind of remarkable, now that I’m thinking about it, that I rarely write about my faith explicitly. I have wanted to be a writer for a long time and while I never really expected for that dream to pan out, I think if you told a younger version of me that I would end up writing for pretty mainstream publications on mostly secular matters I would have been a little surprised. But then again, maybe it makes sense, because I often find myself communicating, in one direction or the other, across a mental boundary between the secular and the religious. Early in my writing career I sometimes found myself making practical arguments about things that many people consider moral issues—porn, for example. And the intended audience was usually someone who might be skeptical of a religious position on that topic. I think I’m still pretty much doing that, except that now the intended audience is often fellow Christians, who are (in my experience) sometimes skeptical of practical solutions to what they consider moral problems. This is a big thing in debates about family policy—I think it’s a shame that family policy has become synonymous in some more traditional religious circles (and I was in this camp at one point) with a kind of attack on the family, or a doomed attempt at supplanting it. I think some religious folks, at least in my circle of extended family and friends, view the breakdown of the family as evidence of a kind of moral decline, and seem to think that any state support would, if anything, exacerbate it. But I think a lot of the chaos of modern American family life has economic roots, and that the state could be doing a lot more to enable people to uphold familial obligations.

You recently wrote about having an eating disorder, the concerns that raised for you as a parent, and how parenthood actually transformed how you view yourself (“Maybe [parenthood] allows you to see a person more clearly. I am grateful to my daughter for allowing me to see myself through the eyes of a mother.”). I found the piece to be extremely valuable and vulnerable on a subject that I think is so vitally important. How do you muster the courage to be so vulnerable and share your personal experiences in an article like this?

I think the answer to that question actually lies, coincidentally, in my history with an eating disorder. As I mention in that piece, anorexia is a greedy disease. It really does take over your worldview and distorts your perception of reality in a pretty extreme way. When you’re in the thick of it, it’s really hard to tell that anything’s wrong. It’s only after you step out of that blindspot that you realize you were in it in the first place. That is an incredibly disorienting experience. You lose the ability to trust yourself. That’s what recovery was for me—learning to distrust my perception of reality. Figuring out how to spot the lies and distortions in my own thought patterns. I had to develop a muscle for noticing and confronting and scrutinizing my thoughts. It was kind of a humiliating process—I learned that I have a lot of base impulses. Pride can really cloud my vision.  I think a lot of embarrassing and nutty things. But that sort of radical self-honesty was the foundation upon which my recovery was built—truly the only way I could actually get a grip on life—and so it’s where I feel safest. I am way more terrified of deluding myself than I am of sharing publicly what I know—or at least think I know—to be true about myself. Courage has nothing to do with it!

In 2023, why are you Catholic?

Well, the main reason is that I can’t seem to stop believing that God exists. I have tried, but I can’t mentally buy into the idea that creation has no Creator, I guess. And so, then it’s just a question of who God is and what His existence means for me, and I think that I have found the most satisfying and rich answers to those questions through the Church. I have struggled a lot with my faith, especially in the last couple of years. The Church asks a lot of its people. The lifestyle Catholics are expected to lead is pretty radically countercultural. Sometimes it all feels a bit ridiculous. But it’s still the thing that makes the most sense to me.