It was in a short piece posted by a cranky young blogger a little over a decade ago that I first read about dogs replacing children in the lives of young adults. This correlates to cohabitation replacing marriage in this cohort, but it reflects a cultural change in marriage as well. Initially I thought the dog-angle a bit severe. But then I moved to an apartment in the quasi-hip Uptown area of Dallas. Here, where I still live, dogs rule. They frequent stores. Starbucks baristas give them small cups of whipped cream. They have special footies for summer outings on the Katy trail (the paw-coverings are needed to avoid blisters in the heat). Whereas elsewhere one might see warning signs about the effects of the heat on children (be sure they drink water, never leave them alone in a car, etc.) here the warnings are about dogs. Water fountains have multiple faucets, from one for a full-size human down to a ground-level lapping dish.

The observation that dogs are replacing babies as the focus of human affection provides the dramatic grist of the savvy animated film The Boss Baby (2017). Here the source of babies is BabyCorp, a company where new little ones are sorted, diapered, given pacifiers, then tested. Most are placed in the delivery chute for families, but a few are sent down the alternate chute: “management.” These turn out to be adults in the bodies of babies. The boss “baby” of the film’s title is in reality (as it were) a mid-level executive on a mission to get information about a competing company’s secret new dog: an irresistibly cute puppy who never grows up. Puppy Co. plans to squeeze out the market for babies and bankrupt BabyCorp, ending baby production for good. An assumption shared by the film’s characters, good and bad, is that love is finite. In the family that Boss Baby is sent to, a new baby brother means that seven-year-old Tim will get less love from his parents. Simultaneously, puppies are taking away the love adults used to bestow upon babies.

If you don’t expect too much from the film’s plot, The Boss Baby provides lots of laughs, gags, and in-jokes. The whole idea of a baby in a suit with an expensive gold wristwatch, carrying forth about the world-changing potential of a memo, and talking to Tim about how they need to join forces in order to save the latter’s parents while he, the Boss Baby, completes his mission on behalf of BabyCorp and saves the world from irresistible puppies—well, it’s just a lot of fun. The film’s budget was $125 million, and it grossed $540 million; it was a success. But there is more than mindless entertainment here. At the end there is a two-fold discovery. Not only are babies more worth our affection than puppies, but our affections are not finite: When we extend love to a new sibling or child, we are multiplying the love in the universe. The Boss Baby has a kernel of cultural criticism, the insight that, despite the work and difficulty involved (there are hilarious scenes of the parents zonked out on the sofa), we need to be giving ourselves to the care of babies and that which they become. This is shown not only in the parents but even more in the transformation of Tim himself and the Boss Baby, who does, in fact, become his baby brother.

The Boss Baby was recommended to me as an implicitly pro-life film. It certainly contains a lot of pro-human fun, for adults and children alike.