To Procreate or Not to Procreate
In the introduction to What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice (Macmillan, $27.00), author Rachel Wiseman contemplates how one arrives at the decision to have children: “How do you figure out how to throw yourself off a cliff ?”
For Wiseman, as well as co-author Anastasia Berg, the answer to “Do you want kids?”—the ever-present question for young women—wasn’t a clear yes or no, but an area of genuine confusion. Wiseman’s mother’s answer to the same question: a confirmation that she had always known she wanted children, only served to confound Wiseman further. “I wanted to understand why this desire had been so available to her and yet felt so alien to me.”
As someone who’s always known she didn’t want kids, I was looking to this book to illuminate the experience of being ambivalent, to help me better understand what it feels like to be genuinely unsure about something that’s so consequential. Instead, the book appears to answer its own question. What Are Children For? If you’re picking up this book in hopes of resolving your own ambivalence about having kids, you should know that this isn’t an instruction manual on how to do that. The authors themselves are no longer ambivalent; Wiseman has begun IVF and Berg has a daughter, and they haven’t written a book chronicling how they arrived at their decisions to be mothers. What Berg and Wiseman have written is an examination of ambivalence and its manifestations.
According to a 2018 poll of millennials by the New York Times, the second most common reason for not having kids is the lack of a partner. At the same time, the portrayal of women (and it’s always women) who bring up kids or marriage on a first date, even to establish that she and her potential mate are on the same page, is one of desperation. “To date authentically—naturally, organically, traditionally—one must suppress the desire to have kids,” write Berg and Wiseman. The expectation is that forming a meaningful partnership will take time, and during that time, one will figure out whether or not they want kids, and the relationship will either endure or it won’t, maybe because of the decision that’s been made. But a relationship timeline doesn’t necessarily mirror that of deciding whether or not to become a parent, regardless of the pressure one puts on oneself to make a choice.
“People do not just want to know it is okay to feel the way they do, some also wish to feel differently,” write Berg and Wiseman. “The pressure to arrive at a resolution about having kids (ideally, the conclusion will be to have kids, lest one become a childless cat lady) isn’t easily alleviated by a partner who promises that having a child is “up to” the person who would potentially carry the child. Instead of agreeing to do whatever their partner wants, an actual step towards gender equality in relationships, argue Berg and Wiseman, would be to engage with the question, rather than cast it aside for them to deal with alone. “Often, they understood their lack of clarity and mixed feelings as aberrations before learning that others share similar feelings of uncertainty and doubt.” It’s this assertion—that those who are ambivalent need genuine support in whatever decision they arrive at, instead of scare tactics and dismissal, that make this book worth a read.
A large part of What Are Children For? contemplates whether or not it’s a good idea for people to be having children in the first place, taking into account climate change and the other ways the world is teetering on the brink of disaster. While having kids, the authors say, is perhaps the most basic way to affirm existence, it’s not the only way, and the extreme commitment one makes in having children isn’t to be taken lightly.
If not knowing if you want kids (and/ or deciding not to have them) are taboos, Anastasia Berg’s essay that ends the book, “Hello from the Other Side,” adds another to the pile, when she dares say that motherhood has not transformed her identity, or at least not in the ways we’re told it inevitably will and should.
The experience of parenting creates more questions than answers. “What one’s children will give and take is not for anyone to know in advance,” writes Berg. For every reason we’re told to have kids, she argues, there’s a discomfiting equivalent. It will bring you joy like you’ve never known, and at the same time, “Why would someone choose more worry? More pain?” Children equal a sort of immortality, and yet, if all goes according to plan, and children outlive their parents, one’s fate will go perpetually unresolved. If we confront these intellectual realities, ambivalence is perhaps the only appropriate initial reaction to the question of whether or not to have children, regardless of the questioner ultimately lands.
Chanel Dubofsky is a writer and editor in NYC.
