In a recent Guardian article about “America’s premier pronatalists,” the journalist mentions her own assumption that “the most important thing that [makes having kids] hard [is] that it’s now so incredibly expensive to boost children.”
“No,” the daddy of the profiled family replies. “Not in any respect”—and in a major sense, I believe he’s right. So do Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, authors of the newly released What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice.
That’s to not say Berg and Wiseman (or I) would ever be dismissive of the true financial hardships many would-be parents face. On the contrary, they devote the primary of the book’s 4 long chapters to a sober examination of such “externals.”
But the delight of the book is that they don’t stop there. Berg and Wiseman equally reject the belief—seen in lots of lesser entries in the youngsters conversation—that the externals are the entire of the matter, that every one this ambivalence would melt away with just the suitable package of policies to increase parental leave and make childcare inexpensive.
It wouldn’t, and What are Children For? is a welcome complication of that simplistic account. As the title signals, Berg and Wiseman aim to deliver a pointy cultural and philosophical evaluation, giving rigorous but sympathetic examination to a “world that’s each pro- and anti-natalist.” Though they embrace on the last moment a significant claim they appear to withstand throughout the text, their project succeeds.
A sea of options
Readers acquainted with the Christian philosopher Charles Taylor’s idea of secularism in A Secular Agemight be well-prepped to grasp a core contention of What Are Children For?: that having kids once was not a selection, and now it’s a selection, and this colossal change is integral to the fashionable experience of ambivalence about children.
Taylor defined secularism as what happens when a society changes from one “where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to at least one wherein it is known to be one option amongst others, and ceaselessly not the best to embrace.” Likewise, where once having children was “just what people did,” Berg and Wiseman write, now it’s something we feel we must “weigh against a sea of other options,” a lot of them not less than superficially easier, more pleasurable, less dangerous, and simpler to do well.
A quote Berg and Wiseman share from psychologist Nancy Felipe Russo, writing in 1976, drives home the recency and totality of this shift. Having children was then so assumed that “even when the right contraceptive were developed and used,” Russo thought, the “social and cultural forces that implement the motherhood mandate would proceed.” Today, in my judgment, the alternative is true: Even if all contraception were to vanish tomorrow, our agonizing wouldn’t vanish with it.
Nor would we be any closer to knowing how to choose. For a lot of our peers, Berg and Wiseman contend, “having children is steadily becoming an unintelligible practice of questionable value.” With the web’s help, we mainline reports of human evil and suffering, then doubt the wisdom of prolonging human existence. “We lack the resources to reply such questions,” the authors muse. “The old frameworks, whatever they were, not appear to apply. And the brand new ones have left us far less certain concerning the very desirability of kids.”
Life, history, literature
What Are Children For? begins and ends with single-author sections, Wiseman writing in the beginning about her selection to pursue motherhood and Berg reflecting at the tip on life after reaching it. In between, the chapter on externals is a well-rendered map to mostly familiar territory for anyone following the natalism debates: financial concerns, worries about lost freedoms and disappointing careers, inability to search out an acceptable romantic partner, and so forth.
Key passages on the novelty of kids as a selection are found here, as is a remarkably dreary section on modern dating, portions of which appear in a 2022 Atlantic essay, “The Paradox of Slow Love.” I don’t have room here to do it justice, but Berg and Wiseman’s sketch of a heightening wall between romance and family is alarming.
The second chapter, on the history of feminist debate over reproduction, provides useful mental context—albeit context that, for readers from more conservative evangelical backgrounds, may explain others’ motivations and impulses higher than our own. Some of the thinkers Berg and Wiseman explore listed here are far outside the mainstream, but their gravitational pull on the broader culture is evident.
Perhaps the strongest portion of this chapter is its critique of an all-too-recognizable male abdication of responsibility performed within the name of progress. “In center-left circles,” Berg and Wiseman write, “the conviction that girls must have the ability to find out their very own reproductive fates and exercise as much autonomy over their bodies as men has transmuted through the years into the presumption that the query of whether to begin a family is the purview of ladies alone.”
Sometimes, they acknowledge, this male passivity could also be well-intended: If motherhood is as costly as our culture has come to imagine, “how could a person ask the lady he likes to submit herself to such a fate?” But sometimes, what “might at first look like an act of selfless deference (in case you want a toddler, we are able to have one) functions more like an evasive maneuver”:
Lukewarm offers of cooperation can stand in the best way of creating the selection confidently and without reservations. Who would wish to bring a toddler into the world with someone who, when asked whether he desires to be a dad, has only a feeble “in case you insist …” to supply in return? The remark “whatever you would like—it’s as much as you” is annoying enough when trying to select a movie to observe or a restaurant to order takeout from; it’s unbearable as a response to the query “Do you wish to have a toddler with me?”
The third chapter, on literature, extends this exploration of cultural context into the current day: “The motherhood ambivalence novelists are prescient,” Berg and Wiseman show, “insofar because the broader mood about parenting today is certainly one of doubt.”
By this point, I need to admit, I used to be growing restless, desperate to get to the fourth chapter’s direct tackle of the titular query. But this final little bit of scene-setting was perceptive too, offering a tour of a genre I knew to be influential but haven’t personally read. For those already reading this type of literature—perhaps not very critically—I expect it’ll be enlightening.
A defense of life itself
In the last chapter before Wiseman’s conclusion, the authors take care of two primary arguments against children: “that life is an evil imposed on mankind” and “that mankind is itself an evil imposition on the world.”
To each, Berg and Wiseman give an easy answer: an affirmation of life. This is just not an unsophisticated response—they grapple with serious philosophers over centuries of classical, Jewish, Christian, and post-Christian thought. But it’s boldly asserted and unapologetically grounded in common human intuition and experience.
In temporary, they argue that humanity has value; that alongside our capability for evil is an actual capability to acknowledge and select good; that we are able to pursue unconditionally and universally good ends, “like friendship and justice,” which “make it genuinely worthwhile to live a human life”; and that affirming this goodness doesn’t mean turning “a blind eye to our human struggles and failings.”
As for bearing children, Berg and Wiseman argue, bringing a latest life into the world affirms about others what we already affirm about ourselves. In fact, they write, asking, “What are children for?” is basically “to say, why affirm life?”
What, in spite of everything, is one asking for? An inventory of advantages? To affirm life is just not to present it a theoretical justification, to acknowledge its merits and counter the costs of its detractors. In deciding to have children, one takes a practical stance on probably the most fundamental questions an individual can ask: Is human life, despite all of the suffering and uncertainty it entails, value living?
This is a striking and provocative conclusion, not least in its conspicuously nonsectarian framing. Would I be convinced without already having a view of humanity that accounts for these tensions of goodness and evil, dignity and suffering, probability and virtue? I’m undecided. Reading as a Christian, I discovered myself agreeing with Berg and Wiseman on points large and small—yet often only incidentally. We’d come to the identical place by apparently different routes.
Sometimes, this difference in perspective was constructive. I’d like to see the authors in conversation with the Catholic author Timothy Carney, whose diagnosis of “civilizational sadness” in Family Unfriendly is deeply resonant with the closing notes of What Are Children For? And I’m still chewing on Berg and Wiseman’s statement that “of all miracles performed by Christ, he never helps a barren woman conceive.”
On the opposite hand, I can imagine how Berg and Wiseman would likely square their call to “affirm life” with the book’s multiple endorsements of abortion rights—however it’s not a connection I could make sense of myself.
An issue only you’ll be able to answer?
It is commonplace that a life selection so essential as whether to have children is one we each must make exclusively for ourselves. Berg and Wiseman support that view, but throughout What Are Children For? they appear dissatisfied with where it leads.
They reject a vision of the youngsters decision as a solitary quest of “‘finding yourself’ and discovering ‘what you really need’” to the neglect of “all the pieces else you care about.” They chastise men who shirk their role within the decision-making process and mourn the same isolation from family and friends. They chafe against the motherhood-ambivalence literature’s deep interiority, the best way it deprives characters and readers alike of insight to “the infinitely some ways each of us may be opaque to ourselves, blind to our own weaknesses, deluded about our motivations.” And they praise a author’s reminder “that what’s at stake in the choice to have children is just not only a series of private experiences to be enjoyed and suffered but the potential of human life.”
Altogether, this reads to me as way more than an invite to public discourse. It seems like a plea for community, for individuals with good counsel and real influence in your life, individuals who care about what you care about, who will let you know when you’re misguided or self-deceiving, who will assist you to through this difficult query as much because the challenges that may follow in case you answer yes.
Yet for all that, the ultimate line of the last cowritten chapter declares that because having children is such a weighty, life-affirming commitment, “only you’ll be able to determine whether it is the suitable one for you.”
In a narrow sense, yes, that’s true. I definitely don’t long for the bad old days of forced marriages or a brutal, totalitarian version of pronatalism. But we’re talking about affirming life here. Surely the life we’re affirming is life together?
Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.
