What the Mormons Can Teach You About Not Living in a Dystopia

Or at least raising a family while being happy and sane.

Yes, this is an AI image because I didn’t want to use real LDS people without permission. But this looks EXACTLY like what is honestly the total norm and standard family that you see around here.

If you had told me, when I moved to Utah 20-odd years ago, that one day I’d be writing exhortations about how everyone should become more like the Mormons, I would have been appalled.

I moved here for the weather, the mountains, and the low cost of living (sadly, that last bit is long gone). And though I was always a super-fan booster for Utah’s breathtaking natural beauty and quality of life, I was frequently caught saying things like “it would be the perfect place, if only it weren’t for all the Mormons.” The first several years I lived here, I was so disoriented living around true-believing religious adherents with their shiny, happy, too-perfect-seeming lives that I spent all my free time on ex-Mormon chat boards, trying to figure out what the hell was up with these weirdos. I honestly thought at first that they all must be faking it, because being so happy while living such structured lives did not seem possible otherwise.

Also, I legitimately used to feel like an oppressed minority here, which sounds ridiculous because no outsider could tell the difference between my vaguely Scandinavian appearance and the millions of blonde Mormons who all look exactly like me (though if you live here, it is instantly clock-able who is LDS and who is not).

But back then, they were still quite insular, with the Olympics having just happened and the world only beginning to learn that Utah was not a flat dusty desert filled with Little House on the Prairie style polygamists. Twenty years ago, the population here was 95% native Mormons and 5% hardcore ski bums and outdoor enthusiasts. And the former were sheltered and suspicious. God forbid they heard you utter the word “shit” or noticed a beer can or coffee grinds in your trash, or saw you in a tank top indicating you weren’t wearing garments – they would look at you like you might be a contagious child molester — mostly out of lack of familiarity, and fear you really might be!

That’s all long gone though. The world opened up and everyone got online, businesses and people flooded here, and it’s now a golden era where LDS culture is still dominate enough to keep Utah from turning into a dystopian hell-hole that reeks of marijuana, but cosmopolitan enough to enjoy the best that modern life has to offer. In another ten years, it may jump the shark and end up like everywhere else. But I sure hope not. And before Utah becomes exactly like every other place in the American monoculture, let me tell you about just how right they’ve gotten things.

Because all the modern ills that I hear everyone talking about online…kids that don’t play outside, anxious teenagers that don’t date, events where everyone is staring at their phone instead of interacting …it’s not visible here, at all. I literally would have no inkling of any of this, if not for reading about it on the internet.

I have multiple east-coast friends who visited for a ski vacation and were so impressed by the seeming normality and healthiness of the local young-person culture that upon returning, they demanded their teenagers apply to go to college here. Of course, these were the same friends that 15 years ago sneered at me for electing to live among the vanilla cookie-cutter suburbanites in a lame-o flyover state, and I don’t have the heart to tell them that by college-age, it may already be too late.

But still, I get it. I used to scoff at them too, with the particular form of American Beauty-style Xillennial scorn for middle class stability. You couldn’t have paid me to live in some cookie-cutter homogenized suburb – gross. I lived in city center, where all the sophisticated people who spent their free time getting drunk and watching HBO lived. Not out with the conformist dorks with no taste and trampolines in their yards.

Though I also lived a decade in the city without even once knowing a single one my neighbors’ names. And I now live in a trampoline-filled suburb that I consider to be practically heaven on earth. And in the meantime, society has increased the momentum of its decadence, narcissism, technology-induced brain-worms, and dare I even say spiritual malaise.

So for now, let us praise the Mormons.

Except for the AI splash photo, I have illustrated this essay with photos that I took today, when all I’ve done was go less than two miles from my house to hike my dogs. The photos aren’t great because I was trying not to be a creeper taking photos of strangers, but this is all standard stuff you will see every day if you just go outside here.

1. Bigger Families Makes Insanity-Inducing Over-Investment in Children Impossible

[Okay, let’s just get over the obvious objection. I do not have kids and never wanted kids, so who the hell am I to extoll the virtues of large families for others? Look, people who are solidly uninterested in being parents have always comprised 5-10% of the population, just get over it, this has not changed. We don’t hate kids or families, we don’t try to recruit others, we’re just people who don’t have any instinct for it, and who know we would make bad parents. But you should very much encourage and want to help people who DO want kids to be able to have as many as they can, as I do, heartily. Just leave us out of it, and think of us like gays or redheads or left-handed people: a tiny and mostly inconsequential genetic anomaly.]

One of the most crucial things that would make having kids A LOT easier would be dropping all the insane over-investment in children and making an entire family’s lives revolve around the desires of a six-year-old or trying to give teenagers the lifestyles of 19th century royalty.

Out here, people have as many kids as they can afford, and that means two things: 1. No one has the time, energy, or inclination to helicopter parent even if they wanted to, and 2. Even affluent people don’t have extra money to spoil kids, because orthodontists and CEOs just have 5-6 kids and when there’s that many, you don’t have the extra cash for spoiling and indulgence – those kids need to get a job.

So here’s what you see here: teenagers have jobs. If I drive to any fast-food joint in the area, or to the car wash, or basically any retail establishment, it is going to be staffed by teenagers. Just like it used to be everywhere else, 30 years ago. If I drive to the garden store, the site manager is going to be barking orders at some teenage boy to haul my mulch and compost to my car for me. If I want help cleaning my house or clearing out my yard, I could ask a few neighbors and by that evening I will have texts from seven teens wanting to help for cash. They want money, their parents don’t have extra for an allowance, and they’re expected to get jobs – yes, that means upper-income kids too.

And the kids don’t have phones, either, unless and until they have a job and can buy their own – this one is so obvious it doesn’t even need to be said.

2. Give Kids Autonomy and Accept They’ll Break Some Bones

Utah was the first state in the nation to adopt a “Free Range Parenting Act” in 2018, which expressly allows children to engage in activities like walking to school or parks by themselves, playing outside unsupervised, or staying home alone, and protects parents from CPS or being prosecuted for neglect. Since then, eight other states have joined suit – blue and red states alike! But when Utah was the first state to do this, they were just codifying in law what was already the cultural norm.

I see kids every single day running around outside by themselves. They’re playing roller-blade hockey in church parking lots. Groups of girls are running around with the bossy-pants eight-year-old issuing orders to her minions. My neighborhood has what is basically a full-on biker gang of nine year old boys, who have each strapped an old lawnmower-engine onto a scooter or bike, and who terrorize the neighborhood coming blazing around the corner on their loud lawnmower vehicles, screaming over the noise. Any park you go to here, you will find bike-jumps and forts and treehouses that have been built. It’s like…well, it’s like the 80s.

Here are two boys I snapped when I pulled up to my dog-hike spot, about aged 10, who I saw ride up on their dirt bikes, ditch them in the parking lot, and then run off to play in the hills by themselves, with no parents in sight:

Here are three more I saw on my way home, looked to range about ages 7 to 11, hanging out in an empty school parking lot I went by, again with no adults anywhere near them or even within easy screaming distance:

And here’s a girl about 12 who whizzed by me on the street on her electric skateboard, towing her little sister who looked about 6 or 7 along for the ride – again, no adults anywhere around, who knows where they were going:

The reason this is possible is that there are enough kids that it’s easy for them to find kids to play with, no one bats an eye at it, and parents just expect kids to come home with bruises, bumps, poison ivy, and broken bones sometimes – they laugh about it and enjoy telling these stories. I think they’re proud of their kids for getting a sprain! Kids have more band-aids and casts on their wrists here. So what? I don’t think I ever went a week without skinned knees in the summer when I was a kid. That’s what’s supposed to happen, it’s called fun and freedom and good stories to tell later on.

And it’s not as if there isn’t always some uptight safety-obsessed lady to butt in with her opinions. It’s just that when she pipes up, everyone else will ridicule her and shut her down, fast. This happens all the time on Nextdoor/Facebook/whatever…some lady will complain and everyone else will tell her to shut up and let kids be kids. Notably, that is because men participate in those conversations too, and don’t just abdicate the domain entirely to women. Here, men are expected to have opinions on and involvement with kids’ lives – even ones that aren’t their own! – without everyone accusing you of being a creepy pedophile.

3. With Freedom Comes Responsibility, Discipline, and Service

This one is very noticeable. While Millennial gentle-parenting is starting to infect even some families here, it’s not yet the norm. What is the norm is authority, rules, and expectations that kids have responsibility early and pitch in. They are not there for the parents to cater to, they are there to serve the family just like everyone else.

I recall going to a wedding once, hosted by a big family in a gymnasium, which was pot-lock style, nothing fancy. Afterwards, I was helping the family clean up, and was completely astonished when not once but TWICE, a teenaged boy I’d never met came up on his own accord – not because he was nagged into it – and asked what he could do to help, offering to carry things and pack up. This is basically unheard of in America nowadays. A 15 year old kid who is NOT sitting in the corner, staring at his phone?? One who cheerfully offers to pitch in and help people, even if they are not his own grandparents? I was stunned.

I just googled “LDS cultural norms towards parenting” and was hit with a raft of sites preaching against helicoptering, and the crucial importance of giving kids’ early responsibility and letting them struggle. Here’s a doc from the LDS website, over a decade old now: Helping Without Hovering What are their simple rules?

1. Look For Opportunities to Let Your Children Do Things For Themselves

2. Teach Your Children To Work

3. Teach Your Children That Choices Have Consequences

4. Stand Up and Be Courageous

5. Allow Your Children to Have Heartaches and Setbacks

This is all simple stuff, and I know you all get it, but for some reason this seems to be a tragedy of the commons situation where parents don’t feel like they can be the only “mean” parents pushing against the tidal wave of culture. I guess this is why it’s necessary to actually implement laws to set the cultural tone, so it doesn’t degrade into excessive gentle safetyism. So I’ll just note that it is VERY OBVIOUS AND EASILY OBSERVABLE when you see kids actually raised in a culture like this. First of all because they are much more polite and well-behaved, but even more importantly, because they also seem happier.

Hell, this even extends to dogs, here. I know the dog situation and gentle dog “training” has gotten out of control elsewhere. Here, e-collars are used by almost everyone, which allows people to take their dogs hiking without being dragged down a steep pitch by a leash, or to have dogs and kids in the same family without an out of control dog or dangerous situation. Because the second you push the button, the dog immediately stops whatever it’s doing and returns to you, and doesn’t bother people, wildlife, or menace other dogs. I’ve been kicked out of online forums for saying I use an e-collar, and in some US jurisdictions they’re now banned. Petco and other major retailers won’t sell them, because supposedly they’re cruel. Funny bc my dogs do their happy dance when they see the e-collars come out – do they look unhappy on our hike today?

So what’s really cruel, letting a dog live its entire life never getting to run and sniff around off-leash, or being kept in a cage, oops I mean a “crate,” at home? Or implementing some simple discipline via a collar that vibrates, beeps, or if there’s truly a dangerous situation, gives a mild shock that’s over in one second?

It’s the discipline that allows for the freedom and fun, this is what our culture increasingly refuses to accept, and it goes for people just as much as dogs. I have been lectured online by so many (usually, sorry, women) that even using the vibrate function is animal cruelty because the vibration is an adverse stimulus, and god forbid anything adverse ever happen in life when instead we can keep everyone perfectly safe, protected, miserable, and anxious.

Anyway, you be the judge, but here’s another scene I snapped today, of three more 6-10 year old boys out playing alone, with no parents or adults anywhere in sight, in an empty lot with their off-leash dog, who is very clearly and obviously wearing an e-collar, all seeming to have a fine and dandy time:

4. Train Men to Be Dads and Husbands, Starting as Young Boys.

This one is a biggie and is horribly overlooked these days. Here is a piece where

Tove K

lays it out very clearly: her thesis is essentially that a major reason that fertility is plunging world-wide is not just because women are educated and birth control is available, but because culturally, men no longer go through a lengthy period in their teenaged years of hard-core, male-only, disciplined socialization, to develop in them the traits necessary to be devoted fathers: I Don't Want To Give The Title Because It Makes It Sound Bad But Go Read This Excellent Piece.

And what happens is that educated women in modern society do not feel they can actually trust or rely on men who don’t go through these types of initiation rites, who haven’t proven they’re capable of doing hard things. So they just hold off. And wait, and keep waiting. I will admit this was a huge element for myself in my own life, was simply not trusting men to actually commit to their families. This is really not discussed enough as a factor in family formation — seemingly we prefer that women just throw caution to the wind with men who still live like boys, and bear most of the risks themselves.

But here is what the Mormons have traditionally done, though admittedly some of this is now slowly eroding, and along with it, their historically impressive family sizes:

1. Monday nights are designated family-home nights, where everyone stays home and the family participates together in a father-led activity…songs, music, board games, scripture, whatever.

2. Adult men in the church are all regularly given church assignments to help raise up ALL the boys in the church community, not just their own. They take them camping, they meet with them for community projects, they get assigned to give them weekly lectures on family and responsibility, that kind of thing. Until recently, when in 2019 the Boy Scouts decided to self-implode and ruin their own organization by becoming not just for boys (at which point the LDS Church said forget it), scouting was a huge thing culturally here, which almost all boys participated in.

3. LDS boys are initiated into church responsibility beginning at age 12. That’s when worthy boys are eligible for Aaronic priesthood duties, which has expanding levels of leadership and authority so that they can become deacons first and priests by 16. Along with this comes a lot of respect and status within the church, and these teenage boys eat that shit up. Honestly, they’re kind of obnoxious about it, walking around with puffed up chests thinking how great they are. But that’s a hell of a lot better than their only sense of pride being their new high score on a video game, and eventually they mature and their ego calms down.

4. All LDS children, not just boys, are expected to learn social skills and public speaking from a young age. They encourage their teenagers to go to frequent dances and on wholesome dates (we have a plethora of soda-fountain joints here, where kids can go get smoothies or milkshakes, like a bar with no alcohol), and there’s more of an emphasis on formalized social etiquette, like used to be the norm in most public high schools in the 50s but was tossed long ago, elsewhere. They do not really put up with anti-social behavior. Holing up at home and never learning to speak in front of a group or ask a girl on a date is not considered acceptable.

5. At age 18 or 19, LDS boys are expected to go on a two-year mission where they spend two years away from home, living the most spartan and spare lifestyle with no technology allowed, usually in a foreign country, and go walk around and get doors slammed in their faces and told to pound sand for two years straight. That’s a very trying experience. Hardly any of them successfully convert a single person, they just get doors smashed closed for two years. But what it does is toughen them up, teach them that rejection can be survived, that they can get through it, matures their sense of purpose, and then they come home to a big celebration at their achievement and a sense of pride in themselves, ready for the next step of school, career, fatherhood, and being a husband. After living like a monk for two years, all that sounds like paradise in comparison. Sadly, over the past twenty years, young men electing to go on missions have taken a nose-dive, and it does not surprise me that the Mormon fertility rate has plunged at close to the same rate as their refusing to go on missions. The young LDS women no longer have such a big pool of mettle-tested, proven young men available to them, as they used to.

But all of the above meant that historically, by their early 20s, your average LDS boy had traveled the world, had years of experience doing hard things, had been trained his whole life to be a father and husband, and was horny, excited, confident, and ready to take on the world and get started being a real adult. And that’s what they did. That was the goal, and that’s still what MOST of them are doing. Which is why it’s perfectly normal to see what I snapped today, which was a man in his 20s out for a run pushing a double-stroller, with a toddler and baby inside:

I’ve made the point elsewhere, but socialized, responsible, civilized men do not just happen naturally. Women kind of do. Even the wild child girls, or the ones from shitty families, pretty much all eventually grow up and become contributing members of society on their own. Boys…not so much. Some will choose to remain perpetual adolescents, if no demands are made of them. To regularly churn out hardy and responsible men at a young age, boys need to be initiated, and encouraged, and trained, and given respect and status and authority when they do the hard things that society wants them to.

5. Education is a Privilege and Tool, Not a Badge. Entrepreneurship is Worthy.

I grew up in the northeast where higher education is the end-all/be-all of life, and childhood is basically just training to get into the best school you can. I was shocked to learn, when I moved here, that it is not a cultural norm for parents to pay for their kids’ higher education. I think this must be changing now that it’s so damn expensive, but even kids from upper-middle-class families were up until recently expected to figure it out for themselves or at least have skin in the game.

But this does not mean Mormons don’t prize education, because they do! Utah’s college graduation rates rival all the blue states, and stand out amongst the red states. But the attitude towards it is different here. Having a bunch of degrees isn’t considered the highest status possible thing, nor are fancy schools particularly important to them. Most parents want their kids to go to the most affordable school possible, and skipping college to go into the trades or start a business is perfectly respectable and considered a worthy path here. They don’t view college as a four-year subsidized journey of exploration, they view it as a tool to help your family, and if it’s not doing that, best not to go at all, or wait til later when you’re more mature. Most LDS students marry or get engaged as undergrads and many have their first baby in college and are on their second or third by grad school. This all considered very normal here.

And they are an extraordinarily entrepreneurial bunch. Going out and getting doors slammed in your face for two years as a teenager will make you entirely unafraid to pitch your start-up. That’s why Utah has one of the highest rates of entrepreneurship, along with California, Texas, and Florida.

Even the kids are always on the take here! There’s an eight-year old little boy named Eli who lives a few houses down, and this kid is always scheming ways to make money. He knocks on our door constantly, offering to shovel snow, pick weeds, or trade things for cash. He came around once selling his wares and told us it was for a trip to DC…I asked if it was a school or church trip that he was fund-raising for, and he was like “no my parents are just going for a wedding and I want some cash for the trip”. What a delightful little schemer – that kid is going to own a company one day, I have no doubt. Lemonade stands and kids selling artwork or junk on the sidewalks are a regular presence, and they’ll scream and harass you when you go by, till you give in and toss them a few bucks.

They’re Not Perfect, But They’re Kinda Better.

Alright, I’ll wrap this up. Don’t you all just want to move to Utah and raise your kids here now?? Well too bad, you can’t, because too many people have already done so and now it’s totally unaffordable – you need to find a new Zion. West Virginia looks like a beautiful place, why not start there? The Mormons started here in a barren desert with a giant unpotable salty lake…I’m sure it must be easier in a place with water.

I have so many more things to add, little nudges and norms and incentives, that make their lives run nicely. Like their insistence on having a good attitude and cheery demeanor, even when life is difficult. It’s really quite a sight, when you grow up someplace where parents with just two kids who manage to go out in public are harried and bitching and sniping at each other non-stop. Then you come out here and go on a hike and pass a family where the dad has a kid strapped on his back, a toddler in each hand, and mom is managing her own three, and all of them have smiles on their faces and look happy as can be - precisely like the AI image at the top which looks just like multiple families I know.

Or the fact that they constantly build human-scale housing that works for families. Which sorry, urban-lovers, doesn’t mean townhome and condos. It means single family houses with yards. I know you don’t want it to be true, but it is true. Unfortunately, this hasn’t really worked, so despite building an entirely whole new planned-community/city from scratch (Daybreak) and generally developing constantly, it is no longer affordable to buy a house here — because it’s so nice here and they’ve attracted so many people. They had a good run though, til Instagram happened and everyone in the country realized the outdoor rec and views here are the tops.

There are also downsides, naturally. Conformity, repression, high anti-depressant usage, a lot of MLMs and scams. I’m not going into all that because I’m sure some ex-Mormon will come along with horror stories. This religion does not work for everyone, and makes a lot of demands on people: no wine, no beer, no coffee, no sex outside marriage (which is limited to heteros), no porn, they tithe 10% and they spend a lot of time on church activities. And leaving the faith is essentially emotionally traumatizing for people, when they lose such a rock solid social support system, and it can take them years to work through those emotions and the loss. But I have lived in a majority Mormon neighborhood for over a decade and worked in a majority Mormon firm for almost two, and for those it works for, it seems to REALLY work. Mostly they seem like happy and healthy and hardworking people. Like a bulwark against degeneracy.

And I know some of you are going to accuse me of the very degeneracy I write against, and say I’m the type of person that’s ruining it here. Sorry, I reject the accusation. First of all, no one is emulating me, they mostly all just feel sorry for me or pity me. That’s okay, I don’t mind. I’m happy to be the neighborhood pitiable lady that my neighbor dropped off candies for on Mother’s Day because “my dogs and cats count too” (so embarrassing, and no they don’t, but see how sweet and nice they are?). Secondly, they’ve influenced me a LOT more than the other way around. Look, here I am, literally doing free PR for them.

As to whether any of this can be achieved without thinking that one day you will rule over your own Celestial Kingdom and without the supernatural beliefs and secret temple ceremonies? Well, that part, I don’t know. Maybe not. But I don’t know, plenty of neighborhoods here are now LDS-minority, and they haven’t really changed at all. So why not at least try? They have a very good thing going here. They should be studied and emulated. Just don’t indicate that you have any interest in learning about the Book of Mormon or they will never leave you alone.