In 2025, Chile recorded a total fertility rate of 0.99 children per woman, the first time it has fallen below one. That collapse is not a sign that people have stopped loving family; it is a sign that they take the work of care so seriously they have begun to ration it. By care I mean something plain: the hours of attention a child needs, the labor of noticing. Church and state have read the same numbers as a weakening of the family, and I read them as a crisis of care.
I know there is a crisis of care because I keep being interrupted while trying to say it.
The pot is on the stove, the table is not cleared, and I am explaining to a friend on a call why Chileans have stopped having children.
I get about two minutes. Then my younger child appears in the doorway to ask what is for lunch, and I tell her it is ready, that I already told her, that she heard me. The older one has covered the coffee table with books she was asked twice to move, and I say it a third time, esta es la segunda vez que te digo, knowing the count is wrong and saying it anyway.
I move the girls to the small table in the living room with their own chairs and announce, with more ceremony than the occasion deserves, that today we are doing a buffet. They have to eat a minimum of three things.
What follows is a negotiation of real complexity. Corn, yes. Fish, yes. For one of them, cucumber and no lettuce, until her sister explains that a little lettuce is good para ir al baño rápido, an argument that carries weight only within a family.
Mix in olive oil but no lemon; she tastes it on a finger first and correctly evaluates it as sour. Twenty minutes, two plates, one small lettuce-related victory.
Then I go back to my call and find that I have already proved my argument without noticing. The analysis kept being interrupted by the labor it was trying to describe, and the labor was the argument.
Church and state reached, within eleven days of each other, for the same remedy. On June 1, President José Antonio Kast used his Cuenta Pública to launch Plan Chile Renace, declaring that “toda política social debe tener como finalidad el fortalecimiento de la familia chilena”; on June 12, Cardinal Fernando Chomalí addressed a pastoral letter to the families of Santiago. I want to read the numbers another way, as someone who believes the family, including the ordinary Catholic family, is a real and irreplaceable place where people are sustained.
The problem is not that Chileans have too little family. It is that they have too little help, and those are not the same diagnosis. Three pressures meet in the same kitchen: a standard of care that has risen, the help that once shared care work withdrawn, and a cost of living that makes every hour of care an unaffordable (since it’s unpaid) hour. Taken together, these pressures make the call to strengthen the family sound strange, since the family is the one institution still doing all of it.
The question is theological as well. Kast’s fortalecimiento de la familia is the church’s language, so both remedies already rest on a theology of the family that measures the household by its form. A theology of care measures it by what it needs to keep caring and by the tradition’s oldest test of love, whether anyone came: “I was sick and you visited me” (Matt 25:36). It also has to tell apart burdens that look the same from outside.
Marisol Romero, who sells dolls and flowers at a Santiago market, told NPR that she had wanted five children and settled for two (“Life is expensive,” she said), and that it did not make her sad: “I accepted it. And I love my children and now my grandchildren very much.”
Her two children have each decided to have one child. And listen to the words a twenty-three-year-old art student, Florencia Contreras, chose in the same report: “I don’t want it to sound ugly, but I feel like motherhood is a burden.” She is not describing a failure of love but an accurate estimate of what love now costs, and she apologizes for the truth of what she utters. Some of what she refuses— the old demand that a mother disappear into the work— may deserve refusing.
Consider what responsible parenthood is now understood to require, which is not what it required of our grandparents: sustained attention, presence at the school and the clinic and the table, the emotional literacy to name what a child feels before the child can name it. Christina McRorie notes that this “child-centered, time-intensive” ideal now crosses class lines while requiring resources “currently out of reach for many families” (110). It is a standard most parents I know would keep, and it is also a sobering calculation.
A father working fifteen-day shifts, or a mother living paycheck to paycheck, can run that calculation and conclude that a third child would be paid for out of the two they already have. That is not indifference to family; it is fidelity to family, practiced as subtraction.
Parenting is a practice, and the virtue it asks for is care, the attentive love that keeps showing up for another person. Has that care become what Lisa Tessman calls a burdened virtue?
In Tisha Rajendra’s plain formulation of Tessman’s concept, a burdened virtue is one “that does not lead to the flourishing of its bearer, but instead exacts some kind of cost” (101). The child may well flourish, since that is what the care is for; the cost falls on the one who gives it, in sleep and wages and the potential third child quietly subtracted.
An objection comes from a friendly quarter. Tessman developed the concept for “the context of oppression and of the liberatory struggles that take place against oppression” (3), and Christine Koggel warns that without that context “it is all too easy to try to fit what Tessman says about the burdened virtues into a more generalized account of virtues in the idealized circumstances of personal relationships, families, and cohesive groups” (197–98). A couple in Providencia declining a third child is not oppressed.
I take the objection, and I think it marks the concept’s edge rather than its limit. Tessman says the trouble “typically happens under the adverse circumstances created by oppression, where the external or background conditions necessary for flourishing will tend to be lacking or diminished” (159): typically, and through a mechanism, the withdrawal of conditions. Koggel herself grants that, where conditions are favorable, these virtues “may display different sorts of burdens” (198), and different is the word I want to keep.
Kate Ward, writing on moral luck in Christian ethics, gives it a form that requires nobody to be classified as oppressed: unjust structures “harm access to the moral good of virtue for all persons implicated in such systems” (141). Elsewhere she notes that we “will always fall short due to the structural sin within which we navigate” (156). Some of today’s standards sit closer to what Tessman calls “the ordinary vices of domination” (54) than to care: the private school as a precondition for having a child.
Care in parenting, then, is not a burdened virtue as such; to call it one would flatten the difference between a Santiago professional postponing a second child and a woman raising three grandchildren on a pension that does not pay the bills. The cost, meaning what the virtue takes from the one who practices it, is real in both homes, but it does not carry the same weight.
Holding that difference is the work a theology of care must do. Call every parent’s care equally burdened, and you lose the woman with the pension; call none of their caring burdened and you lose the reason the birth rate is falling.
So the claim is narrower: care becomes a burdened virtue wherever a society raises the standard of care while withdrawing the conditions that make care possible. That is now an ordinary condition rather than an exceptional one, which is why the decline shows up among people who wanted children and say so without embarrassment.
Over the last century, Christine Firer Hinze shows, the household “was reconstructed as a locale of unpaid domestic labor and consumption activities” (7). The family did not get weaker; it got emptier of everything except obligation.
The obvious rejoinder is state-funded childcare, which Chile needs. A sala cuna, the public nursery, covers the hours of the workday, and care keeps happening after it: the dinner, the bath, the fever at four in the morning. The state can pay for care, but the state cannot be the one who shows up.
No government can manufacture presence; a government can make presence affordable, buying back the hours in which someone is free to give it, the whole difference between a bonus for a birth and a shorter workweek. And presence takes more shapes than one household form allows: the mother parenting by video call across a border, the grandmother who takes the afternoon off, the neighbor with a spare key.
Chomalí names the wound: a country where la estabilidad es precaria y el salario no alcanza, where el cuidado recae sobre pocos hombros, care falling on too few shoulders and growing más solitario. What he asks of the state follows from that diagnosis and not from the form: vivienda, trabajo digno, conciliación, apoyo a la crianza.
His letter also contains a proposal that is not a policy at all. It suggests that parishes create redes de apoyo a la crianza, networks of support for child-rearing. The state can buy back the hours; a parish can supply the people who show up in them, and in showing up, they practice care alongside parents, and for them.
This is the question I would put to my own church in Chile: what is the parish actually doing on a Tuesday afternoon for the exhausted family three doors down?
Much of what the church has taught about the family in the last half century in its documents has been occupied with defending an ideal against its rivals and clarifying who qualifies; little of it has asked what a family needs to survive an ordinary week, though its theologians have begun to.
Whatever a theology says the family is, the parish builds its calendar around. When the family is defined by its form, the programs come out shaped like the form (preparation, catechesis, the defense of a definition), and the mother who needs three hours on a Thursday finds nothing was built for her. A theology that spends its strength on the shape of the household and none on its conditions will go on producing beautiful documents that no exhausted parent has the time to read.
Ada María Isasi-Díaz insisted that “structural change must be rooted in lo cotidiano” (7). The everyday is exactly where this crisis lives: the pickup at 3:15, the shift that ends after dark, the grandmother who is herself eighty and lifting.
A church that began there would not stop being doctrinal; it would only have to say what the doctrine is for. And it would find, I suspect, that making care less burdened does more for the birth rate than any defense of the family’s form, without asking anyone to be a hero.
Back at my table, the negotiation has resolved itself: corn and fish, no lettuce, a little olive oil, the cucumber conceded. Whether there is ever a third child in this house is not, finally, a question about how much we love the family; it is a question about what the two already here can be given and about who else is willing to show up on a Tuesday.
