Birth rates in the U.S. have been on a downward trajectory since the 1970s. And in the past decade, growing numbers of women, prioritizing education and careers, have been delaying decisions on childbearing.
Anastasia Berg ’09 and Rachel Wiseman say many women in the 21st century increasingly are asking themselves: Do I even want children? That is the main question at the heart of their new book “What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice.” The book seeks to explore all of the factors — historical, societal, and financial — that have led to the present moment.
The Gazette spoke with Berg, now an assistant professor of philosophy at University of California, Irvine, and an editor for The Point magazine, to share her insights into the history and philosophy of this question. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You write that “the age of maternal optimism has ended.” What do you mean by that?
In the book, we’re interested in addressing the kinds of concerns, anxieties, and lines of reasoning people encounter when they’re considering whether or not they should have children.
We look at material concerns, like the difficulty of finding romantic partners with whom to start a family. We look at ethical concerns, like climate change. But we also look at concerns that women (in particular) feel, which are often the types of feminist concerns reconciling the demands of motherhood with female empowerment and a woman’s desire to lead a fulfilling life.
“But one thing that everyone could really agree on was that ultimately, the choice of whether to have children was something women should make completely on their own.”
There’s a history of very lively debates within feminist theory and practice about the role of motherhood in women’s lives. We see that in the ’60s and up to the ’80s we had a real contest of divisions — with anti-motherhood camps on one side and on the other camps who wanted to reform the institution and practices of motherhood so they could once again be a legitimate source of meaning and value in life.
But one thing that everyone could really agree on was that ultimately, the choice of whether to have children was something women should make completely on their own. So they said, “We’re going to stop arguing about this in public,” and that’s where that line comes in: In a feminist context, celebrating the virtues of motherhood became no longer possible and no longer welcome.
It seems in the last few decades we’ve gone from a situation where women felt compelled to want and have children to one where they now feel some pressure to consider not having children at all. What are some of the factors in that transition?
Many people today say things like, well, the opportunity costs of having children have risen. But children didn’t use to be seen through the lens of opportunity cost at all. Children were understood as part of the very framework of human life, which was understood as essentially generational; a person understood that they have a past, and they will have a future, and they will (probably) take direct part in creating the next generation.
It was the kind of thing that you did, no matter the risk or the cost. And so the radical change today is that we look at having children as a project among many projects. We can ask questions about it the same way we ask about career choice or travel plans.
And it’s not just a choice among choices. In our more recent imagination it is very much a life-ending choice. There’s a narrative that for parents, especially for women, parenthood is something that is completely shattering of their identity. It will transform you, and you will become a completely different person than you were before, losing everything that you held dear, and that you won’t be able to do anything that you care about ever again. Part of that has to do with the fact that we’re having children later, when we’re much more established in our identities.
Do you think this transition of viewing children as a “project” is a positive or a negative development?
Great question. I don’t think we can simply go back to a time where the choice to have children is one that’s kind of obvious. But what I see today, and what we try to diagnose in the book, is that it’s very hard to make this choice because there are all sorts of social issues that are contributing to that choice being made for us.
Some people have the tendency to say, “Oh, well, people used to feel like everyone was doing it, so they had to, so they weren’t free. But today is different, we have choice, and we use it freely.” But there’s so much about the way that we go about thinking about having kids that makes us unfree.
I’ll give an example. We take it for granted that in every arena of our lives, there are milestones and standards of readiness that we have to hit and achieve. We have to spend our entire 20s chasing fulfillment and self-accomplishment. We have to establish ourselves professionally, in our careers and financially.
Romantically, we have to not just find somebody who we think would be a good fit to have a family with, but also test the waters through long dating, moving in together, then we get married, then we spend some time “just us,” and only then can we even start thinking about having kids.
And so what happens today is that it’s not just that people are having children later, it’s that they’re thinking about children so late that for many people, especially women, the choice is made for them. Because if you’re only authorized or legitimized to think about kids when you’re in your early 30s, it can take years. By the time you’re trying to have a child, you may find that you’re having fewer kids than you would have wished or not having any at all.
That “standard of readiness,” as you put it, seems to be a moving target. Is that contributing to the complexity of conversations around parenthood?
Oftentimes when people describe us millennials, they tend to say we’re immature. They’re looking for us to grow up; we’re dithering.
And there’s a perspective from which millennials can actually be viewed as too mature. Because when you look at what it means for millennials to be ready to have a family, you see that they have incredibly high standards regarding what it means to be sufficiently ready.
From that perspective, they refuse to be frivolous; they refuse to take the risk. What we’ve seen by talking to hundreds of millennials is they believe they must guarantee a standard of living that is equal or higher for their children than what they had. They must first meet their own independent standards of success.
And personally, there’s this narrative of, “I don’t even know who I am. How can I have kids?” Something that’s forgotten a lot of times in these conversations is that you will change a lot whether or not you have kids.
You mentioned the common conception that when people have kids, they will lose themselves. Why is that a scarier reality to face today than for previous generations?
I don’t think it’s a reality at all. Here’s something that we can certainly learn from the past: Having children was understood as much more continuous with your life. I think today we are tempted to frame the vast changes that having children no doubt introduces to our lives as an identity break, or as a kind of rupture.
Now, the reasons for this are multifaceted. We tend to think about the things that matter to us in terms of identity, and we’ve lost other conceptual frameworks for doing that. I think we also want to see women’s experiences for all their challenges and obstacles, so we find ourselves affirming a script of saying motherhood is a complete transformation. Oftentimes that makes the decision to have children much more anxiety-producing.
In the conclusion of the book, I talk about how the script of a motherhood being a transformative experience, particularly in the sense of it annihilating your identity, didn’t apply to me. And what’s amazing to me was how many women felt liberated by having somebody say that they were happy to see this perspective represented.
People are really wrestling with this paradox of parenthood, which is that it can be both wonderful and terrible. What advice do you have for people who are currently asking themselves these big questions?
I would say I have two bits of advice. The first is to free people to be asking the question of children all the time and in the kind of setting that would allow them to really take hold of their destinies.
I think the question of whether we should have children raises a profound philosophical human question of the value of human life. This is not a book that’s trying to get you to have kids. It is a book that hopes to encourage you to think about it a little earlier than you would otherwise think about it.
And it also encourages conversations with others. So many people who we talked to said that when they’re dating, they’d bring up the question of children a few years into the relationship. That’s a recipe for disappointment for a lot of people, because at this point, you’re very much committed.
The second piece of advice is to not approach the question of whether to have children by coming up with a pros and cons list. And let me say something that I find freeing: There’s more pain and difficulty and challenge and obstacles than there is fun. Start from that perspective. There’s something liberating about it.
Once we put aside the pros and cons list, we can ask the question of the shape we want our lives to take, and what kind of contribution we want to make to this project of human life. We could be great uncles and aunts and godparents; we could be teachers; we could be artists; we could be pursuing intellectual life.
And we can also choose to take a direct part in ushering in the next generation, bringing light into the world, nurturing and educating it. For me, that is what I would encourage people to consider when they’re asking this question, should I or shouldn’t I have children?
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