What Are Children For?

March 18, 2024
For today’s millennials, having children “is a question more open-ended and fraught than ever before,” according to this rigorous and wide-ranging debut study. Probing the generation’s “ambivalence” toward having kids, Berg, an assistant professor of philosophy at Hebrew University, and Wiseman, managing editor of The Point, identify a “weakening of the motherhood mandate” and a shift to prioritizing one’s career and friends as sources of fulfillment. Also considered are concerns about having kids amid a worsening climate crisis, though in many ways those anxieties are hardly new, the authors point out; some 19th-century artists and thinkers believed “humans were laying waste the earth” and had “caused too much damage” to expect its repair. (Gustave Flaubert, whose 1838 Memoirs of a Madman features an “eschatological reverie” filled with apocalyptic depictions of civilization’s demise, wrote that “the idea of bringing someone into this world fills me with horror.”) Resisting easy answers and—for the most part—concrete guidance (“Only you can determine” if having kids is “right for you”), the authors instead offer scrupulous analysis enriched by vivid personal meditations. For example, Berg writes that after giving birth to her first child, she noted a “curious sense that nothing really happened” alongside an awareness of the responsibility she’d assumed: “to choose to be a parent is... to become inalienably vulnerable.” It’s an incisive look at a monumental life choice.