This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
In the UK, amongst many other places, we are having fewer children and having them later in life, if at all. What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice, co-authored by philosophers Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, does not seek to answer its own question, mounting neither a defence of children nor an attack on their utility. Instead, it is about those who equivocate. It is for people who are unsure whether they want children.
That we can individually choose to become a parent is an extremely good and hard-won thing. But Berg and Wiseman are right to point out that merely shrugging and saying, “It’s up to you”, is tantamount to “abandoning the uncertain” to their fate.
Though drawing on dozens of interviews and hundreds of survey responses, the book is ultimately an analysis of the interior lives and worries of well-educated millennials. Berg and Wiseman spend an entire chapter exploring the external reasons that people give for their ambivalence about children.
These are frequently financial in nature, like the 36-year-old diplomat who does not feel it would be right to have a child unless she can pay for the summer camps, sports lessons and private college tuition she enjoyed growing up, though also includes factors such as partners who are on the fence (nearly always men).
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Yet the authors are clear that economic factors can at best only partially explain our increasing indecision about children. Instead, they argue, because we once understood human life as “essentially intergenerational”, we simply did not have to weigh the option of parenthood against innumerable other life paths and options.
Since we are ill-equipped for such a judgement and forced to assess myriad possible risks and sacrifices, parenthood becomes “an unintelligible practice of questionable worth”. Decision paralysis is the result. Wiseman, who grappled with that paralysis herself but has since had a child via IVF, notes that a “decision delayed long enough makes itself”. For an increasing number of people, equivocation means stumbling into childlessness.
Berg and Wiseman deal interestingly with modern anti-natalist sentiment. They refuse to treat doubts about having children as radical and give short shrift to the claim that climate anxiety is a decisive factor. They point out that contemporary anti-natalism is simply the “latest guise of an ancient set of questions that the prospect of parenting has always raised”.
“The best lot of all for man is never to have been born nor seen the beams of the burning sun; this failing, to pass the gates of Hades as soon as one may and lie under a goodly heap of earth,” writes Theognis of Megara in 600 BC.
Similar, teenager-on-Reddit-style angst is found in the Talmud, the Old Testament and the work of Aristotle. Today, we have the philosopher David Benatar, who believes that being born is always a “net harm” and the climate-motivated Birth Strike Movement, which preaches that not having children is the greatest love we can show them.
Berg and Wiseman investigate the arguments that having children is wrong because humanity is evil and because those children will suffer. They are particularly compelling when exploring the complexities and absurdities of the oft-repeated but under-examined claim that we should not have children because life is suffering. Consider the intuitive idea that the more you expect a child to suffer, the more morally questionable it is to have that child.
Does that mean it is morally superior to have children if you are wealthy and can guarantee a high standard of welfare? Is it morally more suspect for a couple in poverty-stricken Haiti to decide to become parents versus an affluent couple in California?
A parent can never know what the future holds for their baby — childhood leukaemia, climate disaster, war — so are all humans the product of “grave moral failure”? Berg and Wiseman point out that this absurd conclusion would remove procreation from the realm of mortals entirely.
Ultimately pro-natalist in tone, the authors approach millennial worries about parenthood with curiosity and kindness. Yet they also skewer those who view the prospect of being less free as a parent to go to the cinema as a sort of ego death: “No one has died, you’ve just grown up.”
What Are Children For? succeeds in hauling difficult questions that beset ambivalence about parenthood out into the sunlight, though it is at its strongest when dealing with the hopes and fears of that small slice of society — middle-class millennials. But the conversation must start somewhere: the uncertain must not be abandoned.
