Our Star Trek role models were childless
For those not following along, Sir Patrick Stewart passed away in late October. From the outpour of online thoughts and condolences, it is apparent that I am not the only one who thought of the fictional starship captain he was most known for, Jean-Luc Picard of the series Star Trek: The Next Generation, as a role model.
When watching a fan-created tribute video to the late actor full of clips mainland from his Star Trek work, there was a scene from his final series, Picard, where the main characters of The Next Generation (TNG) series are reunited in a bar. The characters, like the actors playing them, were all visibly aged from the 30+ years that had passed since the TNG series was filmed. It suddenly struck me that none of them had had children or even really families to speak of in the TNG.
How strange was it that a generation of children, like myself, grew up idolizing a single, late-middle-aged, unmarried and childless starship Captain and his unmarried and largely childless bridge officers? What makes it even more strange is that the Enterprise D was specifically designed to carry families and their children. So it's not like they couldn't have had families or children, they simply didn't.
I say they were largely childless because there were few exceptions. Chief Medical Officer Dr. Beverly Crush had a son Wes was around for a years but we are given the impression that he's there because his father was killed not because he was wanted there. Worf "discovered" he had a son partway through the series from an out of wedlock pregnancy that he didn't know anything about. And there are several "children" created and "destroyed" within a single episode as plot props for a couple of the other single characters in the series.
As a new parent who lives in a city and a country with extreme demographic challenges, I often find myself thinking about what societies could do to encourage more people to have families. While financial incentives are real and important, I believe one of the most important things is to both raise the cultural prestige of building a family and to de-normalize being single and childless in middle and old-age.
The lesson my generation learned from Captain Picard and Star Trek: The Next Generation was the opposite. None of the cool people warping around the galaxy were married with children, despite commanding a ship that was specifically designed to be crewed with people who were married with children. The unspoken message in the series was that families and children are burdens that will limit your ambitions, career advancement and adventures in life. I'm not sure if creator Gene Roddenberry and the others behind the show intended to teach this lesson to a generation of young, wild-eyed space fans, but that's what they did.
One could imagine an alternative timeline TNG series, largely the same, but written with a pro-natalist and pro-family bias. In this reality, Captain Picard is a happily married family man with a wife and three children accompanying him on his adventures. Riker and Troi are married by Season 4 and welcome their first child in Season 5, born under the care of Dr. Crusher on the Enterprise D. Widowed Dr. Crusher and colleague Picard not only encourage her fatherless-son Wesley to go to Starfleet but also of the importance of finding a wife and starting a family early in his career. And so on.
Instead, Roddenberry created an imaginary future where the leaders of the ship were too busy seeking out new life and new civilization to realize that the most important new lives and civilizations in the universe are the ones that you create yourself with the one you love. My generation looked up to the childless, adventure-seeking, career-obsessed future he dared us to imagine and recreated our own future in its image. Let's not make the same mistake again.