What does it mean to want children? I think, often, of a strange conversation I had with a friend I had known for many years. In her early twenties she began dating a man significantly older than herself. Some time into their relationship – when she told me this, they had been dating for years – he indicated that he did not want children because of a health condition he would risk passing on. When she held a baby in her hands, she told me, she wanted to cry. But did that mean, she said, that she really wanted children? On the one hand, I think that one could ask for no more proof that she does; on the other hand, they have since moved in together, into a beautiful, small and affordable apartment; they travel constantly and seem to have a fine life. If she woke up pregnant tomorrow, I wonder how she would feel. What does it mean to want something you’ve never experienced? How can you be sure you don’t really want it?
I am now at the age when almost every woman I know seems intimately involved with the question of children. One woman tells her long-term boyfriend she is fearful of ageing out of her fertility; he says he needs another year to decide; she dumps him, and within a month they’re back together, engaged and expecting. Her pregnancy, she tells me, is the worst time of her life. Another woman, who has not quite figured out what type of work to do after a liberal arts degree, has a child in her mid twenties once her husband gets a good job. Her child is adorable, charming, “easy”; she is passionate about alternative parenting and home-schooling and, constrained by her child’s bedtime, she never sees her friends. Another has children with a man she has been seeing since high school. Pregnant again, she has to leave her high-income job a few hours early each day, radiantly beautiful and tottering on heels, lest she vomit on the subway.
It is a terrifying time, of course, but there is something I find thrilling about this: the sense that our problems have suddenly become far more serious, that our lives have suddenly become more serious, that something essentially human and unavoidable is so much closer to the surface now.
Around the time a friend, unexpectedly pregnant and very happy, told me her boyfriend wanted another year “to have fun”, I found myself reading What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice. Co-authors Rachel Wiseman and Anastasia Berg – both edit the Point magazine, and Berg teaches philosophy at the University of California, Irvine – explore why millennials, at least those of the knowledge-worker class, are paralysed about the decision to have children. The fertility rate in higher-income countries is dramatically decreasing, even in places such as Denmark that have implemented policies to try to encourage people to have children. Indeed, Wiseman and Berg demonstrate through surprising statistics that these initiatives seem to have had very little effect; nor, they show, do commonplace arguments about millennial economic precarity convince, once equally surprising data demonstrates that university-educated millennials are almost exactly as prosperous, ceteris paribus, as their parents were at childbearing age.
Nor is the explanation for falling fertility rates melting ice caps, rising sea levels, or any vague pleas to inevitable human suffering. Nor tough businesswomen clocking in as their biological clocks run out. Wiseman and Berg’s answer is much deeper – and much more interesting. The Point, founded by doctoral students at the University of Chicago’s venerable Committee on Social Thought, bills itself as “a magazine founded on the suspicion that modern life is worth examining”. Refreshingly beyond the culture wars, at its best it is one of the few publications to deal in an intelligent and dignified manner with our suffocatingly idiotic and undignified reality. According to Berg and Wiseman, the decision not to have children now, as their subtitle indicates, is about our generation’s most fundamental attitudes towards our own lives.
This is not a book aimed – at least not primarily – at convincing you to have children, nor at criticising the child-free. Berg, who has a young daughter, writes that motherhood is harder than she expected it to be, not easier. You may think you love children’s books – try reading one a hundred times. You may think you are patient – try sitting in the dark for hours, helplessly waiting for an infant to fall asleep. Try doing that every night, for months. If you are running the rational calculations, attempting to figure out “when it makes sense” to have kids – too early and you aren’t “ready”; too late and you can’t get the break from your career – you never will. “Not only is having kids no longer a necessary part of human life,” the authors write, “but having children is steadily becoming an unintelligible practice of questionable worth.” Having children is difficult and demanding. Why do it?
Much of the book is spent poking holes in the common arguments against childbearing: if it’s unethical to have children who will suffer, do poor people, they ask, have less of a moral case for raising children than the affluent? They spend plenty of time on the melting ice caps and student loan crisis, but their arguments in favour of children are in a very different, more emotional register. Berg relates a story of hearing two elderly male artists at a café complain about how their adult children don’t want to worry them with their health issues. “What do I get up for in the morning?” says one of the men. “What do I live for, if not for these worries?”
The authors find in contemporary fiction affecting expressions of the pull and power of parenthood. Torrey Peters’ novel Detransition, Baby features a trans woman explaining why she wants children, recalling her time working at a nursery and how she “liked the thoughtless way a child would reach to take her hand”. In Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, a woman, asked why she returned to the children she abandoned, says: “One morning I discovered that the only thing I really wanted to do was peel fruit, making a snake, in front of my daughters, and then I began to cry.”
When she thinks about her daughter’s laughter, Berg writes, it “is so pure, so unambivalent” that she finds herself “already mourning the loss of the ability to laugh like that, the one she will incur in the future and the one I have incurred in the past”. Children are terrifying and terrorising. They are also the reason why anything – history, art, living – matters. Any would-be liberal who claims to prize the things that make us human but not humanity’s continuation itself is speaking in bad faith.
The problem, in Berg and Wiseman’s view, is that millennials, ambivalent about everything, act like eternal children. We are never ready for anything. Earlier generations jumped into parenthood younger and poorer than we did; but we, even – or especially – when we have good jobs, stand nervously at the water’s edge. Largely drawing on surveys and interviews, they poignantly evoke a liberal world of neurotic individuals paralysed by choice, thinking about love, parenthood and creative fulfilment like a grocery shopper in the toothpaste aisle. We won’t have children until we have a perfect love (“I want 90, 95 per cent compatibility,” one woman says, not 70 per cent, like her friends have). Feminists, who spent the sexual revolution debating if and how motherhood could be more fulfilling for women, now have little to offer women except “choice” – an idea so hypertrophied that men now act as if they have nothing to contribute on the question.
As Wiseman and Berg argue very well, we have inherited the idea of a perfect, frictionless love from an era where family was the obvious, unspoken coda to “happily ever after”, but we believe thinking about children would sully that love. Combined with our dedication to “slow love” – spending years before even discussing engagement, let alone children – we sometimes wait so long the decision makes itself.
W iseman and Berg’s most fascinating writing is about how this ambivalent structure of feeling – this eternal putting-off, this hope that a decision will present itself with such certainty that it does not even feel like a choice – plays out in contemporary culture. The TV shows Friends and Girls, they observe, ended with a sudden pregnancy that made the characters mothers without their having to have made any decisions at all; such is our fantasy that we need not consciously plan for children. Instead, the right thing will merely happen all on its own.
In the book’s most quietly incendiary chapter, Wiseman and Berg analyse the “motherhood ambivalence” canon, including books like Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, and Rivka Galchen’s Little Labours. In the 19th-century novel, they write, the central conflict is between the woman’s social world and her internal desires: Emma Bovary cannot align them and dies; Dorothea Brooke aligns them and flourishes. In the 20th century, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing and Elizabeth Hardwick moved the action to the subjects’ consciousness, with “thinking women” who suffer from the “shallowness, vacuity and incoherence” of the societies they live in.
Our current crop of autofictional novels – cloistered, suffocating ones, where nothing happens – take as a given that the woman is liberated to make her choice free of social constraint. Motherhood or art? It is entirely her decision. In Motherhood Heti writes: “Whether I want kids is a secret I keep from myself – it is the greatest secret I keep from myself.” The desire to parent is a deeply buried yet predetermined fact, a stable thing that needs to be excavated. These novels are also premised on the idea that life ends with motherhood (and so does art). “I often think that people wouldn’t have children if they knew what it was like,” Cusk writes; as Wiseman and Berg point out, she wrote this line while pregnant with her second child.
Reading their discussions of motherhood literature and climate change fiction (an achingly self-congratulatory genre), and their quiet probing of our youth-obsessed, shallow existence, I found myself astonished by the lucidity of their insights. We have little notion of the good life, with all the old social certainties dead. We don’t know whether to have children, or when, or why – and if Rachel Wiseman and Anastasia Berg don’t give answers, they prove that the current answers fall short. This is what the philosophers are for: to make us think more honestly about the purpose of living life, and of giving it.
What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice
Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman
St Martin’s Press, 336pp, £22.99
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This article appears in the 25 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2024