Is it even OK to have children?

Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman's “What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice," helps us ask the questions we're afraid to ask about becoming parents — or not

Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman are the authors of “What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice,” a grounded and insightful exploration into the questions people ask about whether to have children. Rachel is managing editor of The Point, a Chicago-based literary magazine that publishes philosophical writing on everyday life and culture. Anastasia is an assistant professor of philosophy at University of California, Irvine, and an editor at The Point, which is where the two began exploring the topic that became their book. 

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Tell me how this book came to be.

Rachel: We started working on this book about four years ago. It came out of a project that we did together for the magazine where we were writing about the kinds of concerns that people were raising about whether it was even OK to have children today, and why people were having fewer children, and feeling sort of frustrated by the shallowness of some of those narratives, and as we were writing that, we realized how deep that question went. 

Tell me more about the shallowness of the narratives that you typically see around this topic: 

Rachel: There are a few go-to answers that people default to when they’re trying to address this question. It’s just too expensive to have kids today, or because of climate change, or because of the political situation or declining sperm counts, or there are no good men, or there’s more women in the workplace. These are all things that get trotted out, but none of them really felt like they were fully explanatory or even satisfactory on a basic level. 

So we felt like we had to dig in and peel back the layers of those default explanations and to see really what is at issue for people when they’re trying to approach this question. We wanted to talk to people and ask, what is at issue for them when they are contemplating starting a family, and what’s in their way? We saw that those basic narratives only tell one very limited side of the story, and that there’s a lot more going on under the surface. 

Anastasia: There’s finances, romantic prospects, the ethical challenges to having children, the feminist challenge of whether or not motherhood is compatible with female empowerment and gender equality and the ability of allowing women to live life to the fullest; but also climate change, which is really this deep philosophical challenge. Are we so evil that we shouldn’t be perpetuating our own existence? And with each of these, what we find is that there’s something even deeper going on. 

So we’re starting with where people are, suggesting there might be something more complicated going on, and then finding something very interesting that we hope will free people from the force of certain conceptions and illuminate their own concerns for them.

You spoke to so many people for this book and heard their stories about their fears or worries about having kids. Did the stories you heard surprise you? Or were these, in a way, familiar stories? 

Anastasia: We were surprised by how many women reported no pressure at all to have children. In certain lines and professions, people reported pressure not to have children. Of the people who said they experienced some pressure, when they expanded, the answers were things like, A mother-in-law asked me, or someone asked me, if I planned to have children. That’s very different from the kind of external pressure that we know women historically felt. 

We saw a lot of evidence in the popular discourse that would suggest everyone felt tons of pressure to have kids all the time. But we interviewed hundreds of women – mostly educated upper middle class and middle class women – who said that in fact this wasn’t leaving a real mark on them. 

So that became the beginning of an investigation. How do we explain this gap? It was a catalyst for an explanation about the feminist movement’s own ambivalence toward parenting. That ultimately led us to conclude that we think we live in a pronatalist and an antinatalist society at one and the same time. That ambivalence and confusion we feel is one that is very much mirrored in the culture as a whole. This is very much an unresolved issue. And that’s where we hope the book comes in – not to resolve the issue, but to shed light on this ambivalence. 

What do you hope readers will take away from this book? 

Rachel: For people who don’t necessarily know how to articulate what’s giving them pause about whether they want to have children, I hope it would help bring to the fore what is actually at stake for them. The book is set up with personal essays with the beginning and the end, so I start by describing my own situation in my late 20s and early 30s when I was trying to decide if I wanted kids. But it wasn’t just a matter of trying to decide; I didn’t even know how to raise the question. It seemed like something that I eventually should just know. But I also didn’t want time to make the decision for me. I didn’t want to passively flow along in my life and realized that I had missed out on something. We would like to help people raise this question for themselves early and have the tools to think through whether it’s the right choice for them. 

Anastasia: I like the idea of the book giving you courage. In the conversations we’ve had, there’s general leeriness and fear and anxiety and uncertainty, and sometimes people know how to give it a name, and sometimes people don’t. We reach for concrete things to explain why we’re worried about making this huge decision. By clarifying some of those concerns, by engaging with them straight on, and by empowering you to talk to your friends and your partners about this early enough for you to make a decision about the shape of your life, my hope is that we’ll also be helping them approach it with courage. 

Rachel: This is a problem and a question that women feel like they have to face completely on their own as a private process of deliberation. And they feel really alone in that decision-making process. And there hasn’t really been a place for women to have these conversations in a way that invites everyone in and is really trying to think through, what is the value of having a child? Not just in a woman’s life, but in life in general?  

Anastasia: Another goal for the book is shifting the framing of the question of whether or not we should have children from almost strictly a women’s question to what it really is, which is a deeply human question that concerns all of us. It is remarkable how often this is framed as about and for women. But parenthood is a possible practice for all humans, so the book builds up to the treatment of the question as a philosophical question about the value of human life. That means liberating both men and women, in and outside of relationships, to recognize that this is a question that concerns them too. 

For men in particular, there is almost a taboo about raising the question, because of an assumption that that’s what being a good ally requires. But empowering women and supporting women means men being able to ask themselves what they want to do with their lives, and being forthcoming with an answer. Within a relationship, men think the supportive thing to say is “whatever you want.” That’s a frustrating thing to hear when you ask about what you want for dinner, let alone when you're asking, “Do you want to have kids?” 

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You can find “What Are Children For?” wherever books are sold, and you can find more about the authors, including links to their social platforms, at anastasiaberg.com and rachelwiseman.com.