What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice
By Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman
St. Martin’s, 336 pages, $27
Last week, Democratic opposition researchers dug up a 2021 interview in which J.D. Vance referred to the people running the country as “childless cat ladies.” The subsequent controversy has pitted those who view having children as one legitimate lifestyle choice among many against those who view the declining birth rate as a “civilizational crisis,” as the GOP vice-presidential nominee once put it, that demands government intervention.
But those who believe the state has a role to play in encouraging family formation can’t alter the basic fact that becoming a mother today is, for the majority of women, a voluntary act undertaken after a long period of deliberation—in a way that wasn’t true for most of history. In recent decades, the mean age of childbearing has risen into the early 30s in all OECD nations, and the share of women pondering whether to reproduce at all has increased so much that a vast literature has emerged to cater to their specific predicament. A new entry is Anastasia Berg’s and Rachel Wiseman’s What Are Children For? For all the nuance and sophistication of the answer provided by the authors to their titular question, the book is unlikely to counteract the anti-natalism that is becoming a default setting across much of the world.
Berg and Wiseman commence their investigation from a feminist framework, turning first to the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, who viewed motherhood as the main impediment to women’s freedom. In Beauvoir’s account, since motherhood can’t be done only for a woman’s own self, it deprives mothers of the freedom, enjoyed by men, to transcend “biological, familial, social, and political conditions.” The rest of the feminist theorists considered by Berg and Wiseman don’t fundamentally reject Beauvoir’s insight, regarding motherhood as, at best, contradictory, enhancing a woman’s life while simultaneously draining it. They find that rigorous attempts to reconceptualize motherhood in a “woman’s own terms” have failed: “For most feminists, pro-motherhood positions have by now come to seem hopelessly sentimental, woo-woo, or reactionary.”
Turning toward literary analysis and survey data to reveal the status of motherhood in contemporary culture, Berg and Wiseman uncover a deep ambivalence around the subject, including for those women who have already become mothers. Works of literature are replete with mothers thwarted by the difficulty, boredom, and “identity oblivion” of parenthood. Women depicted as active and impactful in the world are almost always childless; mothers are generally described as struggling to come to peace with their decision. Motherhood has become so unappealing that many of the previously important external sources of pressure to have children, such as encouragement from prospective grandparents, have dissipated. Male partners in committed relationships often see it as inappropriate to take a definite position on the issue, instead reiterating their support for a woman’s choice. Under the guise of respecting women’s choices, men and society at large have thus offloaded the responsibility of resolving this complex question on the woman alone. The consequence is a shirking of the duty to address “the broader, and more essential, question of whether children are good or bad in the first place.”
For much of human history, the “value proposition” that children provided was unambiguous. They were seen as an economic, social, religious, and cultural boon. Moreover, raising children was a given part of adult life, something “people did, not something one had to weigh against a sea of other options. Like sleep, children were something one had to work around.” Now, in contrast, children may seem like a net drain on resources and a drag on professional advancement, and aren’t a straightforward source of emotional benefit for mothers either. Hence, according to Berg and Wiseman, we need to return to the fundamental question of children’s value. The authors find only lukewarm support for the goodness of human life among the philosophers they review, and even contend that Christianity, Islam, and Judaism have all failed to provide a definitive answer to the question of whether humanity should have ever existed in the first place.
“To affirm that life is worth living, one must decide to have children.”
Berg and Wiseman’s original intervention in the debate goes roughly as follows. A human life is at least partially composed of activities and experiences that don’t necessarily end badly or well. These activities, such as enjoying a friendship or engaging in a vocation, don’t have “ends” to which they are ordered—instead, “the end is contained in them at every moment, and therefore, they never reach exhaustion.” In other words, we do them for their own sake. The value of a human life can be understood similarly, Berg and Wiseman argue. That the specific course of a child’s life is fundamentally indeterminate from the start is a core feature of the human condition. Choosing to have a child regardless of this uncertainty is the most “basic way to affirm our existence.” To affirm that life is worth living, one must decide to have children.
In this way, Berg and Wiseman conclude, the value of motherhood arises from its power to answer the philosophical quandary of whether life is worth living. This conclusion will doubtless resonate with some academically inclined women. But is it meaningful outside of this small subset? Women today have many child-free years enjoying freedom to pursue prosperity and professional success. As the authors note, Millennial women are on their way to reaching the (inflation-adjusted) benchmarks of income and homeownership that the Boomers enjoyed at a similar age. Millennials of both sexes report prioritizing travel and their careers over starting a family. They spend a prolonged period securing the ideal spouse before even thinking of having children. The direct questions that most women are asking themselves (when they get around to it) are: How will a child improve my life? How will having children change my status?
Feminists are right that motherhood represents a sacrifice of women’s personhood and individual freedom. What Berg’s and Wiseman’s answer does not offer is recompense for this sacrifice, a type of motherly transcendence to counter Beauvoir’s ideal of individualistic transcendence, which is only available to women who forgo motherhood. To joyfully accept the costs of children, as Berg puts it while recounting her own experience with motherhood, is to “stand in a relationship whose essence is not determined by the benefits it confers or the prices it exacts.” It isn’t by accident that all major religious traditions accord a high social and spiritual status to mothers. This is a direct acknowledgment that the sacrifice mothers make is so enormous that even ample thanks in this life is insufficient and must be accompanied by rewards in the next.
Motherhood today comes with many costs and no guaranteed reward. As Berg herself recounts sobbing to her husband the night she came home from the hospital with her newborn daughter: Why ruin a good life? Berg and Wiseman offer a poetic answer to the question posed in the title of their book. Yet judging by current trends, more women will be inclined to listen to the answer given, often indirectly but forcefully nonetheless, by the dominant culture: “nothing.”