Why have children? Two new books on the ambivalence of millennials.

The new book What Are Children For? might at first glance seem like an exercise in rethinking. Written by two young philosophers – Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman – the book explores the ambivalence many young women feel about the subject of children by looking at the topic from the perspectives of sociology, literature, culture (high and low), interviews and surveys, and the authors’ own lives.

That sounds like a lot of pondering, but the result is a smart, fascinating look at one of the most important questions facing women. (Men face it too, of course, but less urgently: I know two men who had their first children at age 60, with much younger women, of course.)

For most of human history, the purpose of reproduction was obvious: to have help on the farm or in the store, to pass on property, power or a name, to please God, to give meaning to life, to be welcomed as an adult member of the community, to be cared for in old age. Your own deepest thoughts and desires hardly mattered, especially if you were a woman: you grew up, married, had children – and before you could turn around, you were dead, most likely in childbirth or shortly before.

Today, thanks to contraception and legal abortion, having children is more of a matter of choice—at least for those lucky enough not to live in one of the states that outlaw abortion. That is, it requires a decision. And decisions are hard: You can spend decades figuring out who you are and what you want. You can immerse yourself in a wealth of books and articles about women, work, and motherhood, obsessing over what lies ahead. (“Everything I read sounds so terrible,” my daughter said when she was pregnant. Spoiler alert: It’s not.) You can even take a “Motherhood Clarity Course” online, where participants “try to break through their ambivalence” by diving deep into their psyches.

Berg is skeptical of the introspective approach. The main questions raised by the women in the interviews she and Wiseman conducted were practical ones: Where would the money come from to give their children the advantages they themselves had enjoyed? And what about their careers? And child care? It’s no secret that our society provides remarkably poor support for families, while generally demanding little of fathers and trying – quite unsuccessfully, the authors claim – to make women feel guilty if they don’t want to give up everything and have children.

Berg and Wiseman (they write in alternating chapters) are not satisfied with the economic explanation, and I agree that there is something deeper behind it. I know too many people who have tried their best to have children despite difficult circumstances (no partner, job insecurity, no financial cushion for the family) simply because they longed to. The authors acknowledge “the mood of uncertainty, grief and bitterness” that so many millennials feel, but point out that this generation is actually not doing so badly economically.

The real problem is that for many of these women, children are not as important as they were for their parents and grandparents. They are “the cherry on top” after achieving other goals: youthful fun, professional success, a nice quality of life, and, most importantly, a really great relationship with a soul mate. Even less than previous generations, Millennial women are willing to settle for less. (Egg freezing, originally derided as another capitalist ploy to get people to work more, turns out to be a logical answer to the difficulty of finding a partner.)

“Slow love” is in fashion now – you spend as much time as you need looking for a really suitable person, followed by years of getting to know each other and living together. But there’s a catch: you can’t talk about children until everything else is sorted out, otherwise you’ll scare your husband off. The paranoid feminist in me wonders if slow love isn’t just another male scheme. After all, men have plenty of time to have children. Women don’t.

Ambivalence, the authors show, is a reaction to real conflict: “But the growing realization of how difficult it is to pursue a career and family simultaneously has hardly led to a revolution in the workplace. For many women today, the worry that it might be impossible for them to ‘have it all’ is giving way to resignation, to the feeling that we no longer know what it would mean to want any of it wholeheartedly.”

There is a whole genre of contemporary novels and autofiction about women, mostly writers, who confront the baby question in a vague fog of depression and confusion: Sheila Heti’s “Motherhood”, Jenny Offill’s “Dept. of Speculation” and Rachel Cusk’s “A Life’s Work” to name just a few. Their protagonists are like contemporary versions of Betty Friedan’s suburban housewives plagued by a “problem with no name.” It’s interesting that husbands and boyfriends barely appear in these narratives. I wish Berg and Wiseman had looked more closely at how gender inequality influences women’s fears that having children will ruin their lives. Do male writers worry they’ll never be great fathers? As we saw during the Covid-19 lockdown, when many fathers needed time, they simply took it and left mothers to pick up the pieces. Maybe babies aren’t the problem.

Another growing—and legitimate—fear among young people is bringing children into a violent world on fire. For Berg and Wiseman, climate change is rarely the only reason someone decides not to have children, but if you’re already ambivalent, climate change adds to the negatives. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it, quoting Berg and Wiseman’s book, “The real crisis now…is that entire generations are burdened with inhumanely high levels of student debt, low incomes, high rents, no health care, and little action on climate change, creating a situation in which feeling stable enough to have a child feels like a luxury rather than the norm.”

Pessimism – the belief that life is mostly a bad thing and that it is better not to be born at all – is thousands of years old. Today, thanks to contraception, pessimism has the chance to implement its agenda: don’t have children, let the human race die out.

In Begetting, philosopher Mara van der Lugt brilliantly challenges the antinatalist view that procreation is morally wrong. Not just for some people—child abusers and people with horrific genetic diseases, for example—but for everyone. First, you are giving birth to a being that must suffer, perhaps a lot, because that is the nature of human life. Second, you are contributing to ecological degradation and global warming by giving birth to a future participant in our consumption (and sometimes extravagant overconsumption) of resources. Your future child will both contribute to the destruction of the world and suffer the consequences, and it will all be your fault.

The first consideration is difficult to think about: how should one evaluate the interests and preferences of a non-existent person? If one could ask one’s potential future children, they might say: Life, yes! Bring it on, heartache, cancer, roses and wine – I’ll try my luck. Pessimists also seem to me to be, well, pessimistic about the prospects for the baby that doesn’t yet exist. Aren’t most people glad they’re there? Does that just show how superficial they are?

I loved this book, which is far too complex and subtle to summarize here. It gave me so much to think about, and in new ways. I’m glad I had my daughter decades before I wrote the book, so I didn’t have to consider the possible interests of her pre-existing self and the role I played in destroying the Earth by giving birth to her. The ambivalent women Berg and Wiseman write about should read it, if only to complicate their thinking even further, because van der Lugt doesn’t provide answers to their questions. But they should also absolutely read the final chapter of What Are Children For?, in which Wiseman describes her own decision to have a child, and the intensity and heat and passion and ongoing conflicts of new motherhood. If it doesn’t make them want to throw away their contraceptives, they should just let the whole thing go and move on.

Katha Pollitt is a poet, essayist, and columnist for The Nation. Her latest book is Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights.

On ambivalence and choice

By Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman

St. Martin. 336 pages. $27.

What does it mean to father a child?

Princeton University. 272 ​​pages. $35