Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice is an ambitious book that addresses arguably the most pressing questions of both our time and all time: Are people good? Is life worth living? What does it mean to be a parent? What is motherhood, what is fatherhood, and how are these roles similar and different?

In four lengthy chapters, bookended by personal essays that serve as the evocative introduction and conclusion, authors Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman methodically walk readers through the sociological and cultural factors that are, they argue, responsible not only for America’s marked decrease in the birth rate but also for the introduction of a new kind of widespread indecision around the philosophical idea and the practical matter of parenthood. Drawing on interviews with mostly 30-something prospective parents and non-parents—as well as on personal anecdote, feminist theory, literature, and philosophy—Berg and Wiseman ultimately make what amounts to a progressive, secular case for the goodness and worth of parenthood by way of a progressive, secular case for the goodness and worth of humanity itself.

The New Parenthood Ambivalence

This argument is unique and fresh, on multiple counts. To start, most arguments for having and raising children (my own included) are conservative in some sense, predicated on the religious understanding of children (and, by extension, of people) as “immortal beings.” In different ways and to different extents, other recent books endorsing (larger) families and (more) parenthood—most notably, Family Unfriendly by Timothy Carney and Hannah’s Children by Catherine Pakaluk—are premised on the belief that religious community and family prioritization are mutually reinforcing.

Berg and Wiseman are outliers in this regard. They also break from their own progressive milieu to argue that nearly everything about the way that today’s secular 20- and 30-somethings tend to approach (or not) love, marriage, and family formation is flawed and fouled on its own terms.

The authors challenge several tenets of what has become the conventional unwisdom of college-educated millennials and Gen Zers. First, they take issue with the popular assumption that “slow love”—as seen in today’s courtship rituals, in which one “must suppress the desire to have kids” if one wishes to “date authentically”—is the truest love. Dating divorced from any idea of household or family formation seems, to Berg and Wiseman, rather counterproductive. Second, they address the modern tendency to view parenthood (and motherhood especially) as a totalizing identity that razes any prior identity. This unnuanced perspective, they argue, currently presents a more significant impediment to parenthood than any economic obstacle. The authors acknowledge that this view of parenthood as a totalizing identity now transcends political identification and might in fact be strongest among the very secular progressives who view childbearing as just one more lifestyle choice. In other words, for young people who lean left today, unlike for older generations, parenthood is not inherently worthwhile in and of itself. In part, as a result, there is now an assumption that if one does choose to have children, motherhood is justified by its resemblance to self-imposed martyrdom.

Third and finally, Berg and Wiseman explain how moral, environmental, and political concerns give young people pause: they worry about human cruelty, violence, the environmental impact of family life, and also about women’s political and social inequality with men.

There are very real merits to the authors’ approach, but it is ultimately insufficient to quell the existential ambivalence about parenthood plaguing many of my fellow 30-somethings. In the end, Berg and Wiseman do persuade readers that many of the personal trends, political considerations, and philosophical arguments militating against parenthood fall short. They do not, however, provide any holistic or convincing answer to the provocative question posed by their title: What are children for?

Slow Love in the Fast Lane

Berg and Weissman offer an excellent window into the “slow love” that constitutes a new norm among the young (and not so young) people comprising today’s dating market. Apparently, “personal, romantic compatibility” is considered by many to be at odds with the “search for a co-parent.” Online dating helps to foster the illusion that there is a person out there who could offer “super compatibility” and assumes a landscape in which daters scoff at compromise and are unwilling, when it comes to romantic partners, to accept the truism that “people aren’t perfect.”

Egg freezing now provides women who can afford it—and even those who struggle to do so—with the equivalent of a requested extension in the search for a life partner. So, today, Berg and Wiseman explain, many young women will throw a “‘93rd percentile match’ back into the pool so that they could wait ‘just a little bit longer’ and find someone ‘that’s even just a little bit better.’”

Among those who are not so young, the question of motherhood becomes not so much about what one will take on—but about what one will give up.

Women might know better if they listened to psychologist Lori Gottlieb, who made the case for “settling for Mr. Good Enough” in 2011’s Marry Him. And young people of both sexes might benefit greatly from a read-through of Brad Wilcox’s 2024 Get Married (a thesis of a title if ever there was one).

This is to say that the argument for speeding up the mating and family formation game—especially for women—is not new.

What Berg and Wiseman offer more than anything else is permission: For young women to think about family formation in tandem with romantic compatibility, and for young men to think about family formation at all.

I was genuinely unaware that such a writ was needed (at 36, I have been married for nearly 12 years and a mom for 10, so I would not know). But if young people need a secular blessing in concert with a reproductive science lesson, then good for these authors for attempting to offer both. That said, I do not think that one can get at the root of this “slow love” problem without addressing a broader “slow adulthood” problem that seems to encompass far more than the search for a partner. This is outside the scope of Berg and Wiseman’s project, but it seems to me that ambivalence about all responsibility, of which marriage and parenthood are the gravest, amounts to a contagion among much of today’s youth—whose future ranks are dwindling due to a failure to differentiate themselves from children by having some.

Meanwhile, among those who are not so young, the question of motherhood becomes not so much about what one will take on—but about what one will give up.

What Kind of Mother Will You Be?

In season four of Sex and the City, law firm partner Miranda Hobbes gets unexpectedly pregnant with her bartender ex-boyfriend. It is well-established that Miranda was not prepared for motherhood, both in the specific sense that she wasn’t intending to conceive a child and in the broader sense that she is not what passes for “maternal.” The series’ original foil—women who get married, move to the suburbs, and dote on their children in a saccharine, darkly humorous, and self-abnegating way—are Miranda’s polar opposites. Well into her thirties, Miranda exemplifies the ambivalence about motherhood explored at such length by Berg and Wiseman.

As Miranda’s due date nears, the overworked attorney still has not prepared either her home or her heart for forthcoming responsibilities. In a revealing bit of dialogue, comparatively “normie” Charlotte, who is not ambivalent about motherhood at all, presses the mom-to-be: “There are a million questions to answer before the baby ever gets here! Do you have a birthing plan? Do you know what kind of a mother you want to be?” Miranda, taken aback by these questions, replies: “Yes! I plan to be … a good mother!” Charlotte counters: “But, a marsupial mom, or a stroller mom? Will you be breastfeeding or bottle feeding? And what about baby proofing?” She pushes on: “Because once you have that baby, it’s not just you anymore. You’re not going to be able to control everything.”

Of course, Charlotte wants to help. And Miranda’s deadpan reply to her friend’s detailed queries—“I plan to be a good mother!”—is funny. But it’s not so funny when this sort of third-degree interrogation happens not in conversation with a friend during the third trimester of pregnancy but within one’s own consciousness in a way that makes parenthood seem utterly overwhelming.

In other words, what Charlotte said was: “Once you have that baby, it’s not just you anymore. You’re not going to be able to control everything.” But what Miranda heard was: Once you have that baby, you’re not you anymore. You’re not going to be able to control anything.

When college-educated women increasingly view motherhood as a morally neutral lifestyle choice rather than an innately good vocational purpose, that choice becomes one that they must justify by excelling at it according to an often silly and pointless societal rubric. And if this means sacrificing everything else that they are, believe, and enjoy, so be it. “You made that toddler bed,” says a culture that simultaneously disdains and sanctifies motherhood. “Now lie beside it until your child falls asleep even if it means you can never do anything else ever again.”

Who would voluntarily sign up for that?

As Berg writes in a lovely reflection on mothering her daughter, which serves as the book’s conclusion: “The assumption of obligatory identity change can imply that our myriad other identities will necessarily be flattened, or even lost. For prospective mothers, this can make the decision of whether to have children that much more daunting.” Berg makes the case for parenthood among women like herself—the “Mirandas,” who will not and likely cannot subsume all of our other interests and concerns to a version of modern maternalism in which “good mother” becomes our identity. Berg admits that she “used to believe that the inability to enjoy one’s child, wholly and completely, was a sign of personal failure.” She no longer believes that. Yet, she is glad to be her daughter’s mother, even though she doesn’t enjoy mothering all the time and does not embroider, say, the mind-numbing constraint of sleep training with some new definition of liberty that renders parenthood counterintuitively freeing. Brava.

Any case for parenthood that does not involve purpose and vocation is really no case at all.

But there is a sacred cow of modern parenthood that goes unchallenged in Berg’s essay, even though challenging it would strengthen her argument: That having children must be “disordered” and endlessly accommodating. Here is how Berg describes time with her daughter: “Pajamas off! Pajamas on! New socks, night socks, no socks. Yes hat, no hat, always hat, not that hat. Slippers on, slippers off, slippers in bed, slippers in bath, slippers to daycare. … Bread, no bread, cheese, no cheese, milk in bottle, coffee in bottle, now we drink the bathwater.” And so on.

I have four children, three of whom have gone through the toddler and preschool years in which such matters can become sources of contention. Here’s what that sounds like in my house: Kid: “No hat!” Mom: “Yes hat.”

When the strongest willed of my sons was two and three, such an exchange might lead to an hour-long tantrum. That was okay. I marveled at his spirit—I still do. And I got AirPods.

It is much easier to enjoy one’s children if one recognizes that parents, not children, are in charge. Moreover, the kind of parental authority that makes children likable is good for children themselves. Indeed, “civilizing the feral” is an apt tagline for a “past conception” of “having children” grounded in Augustinian reality rather than in Rousseauian fantasy.

Contra Berg and Wiseman, we can indeed “recover” and “resuscitate” such past conceptions if we so choose. But they are right that it won’t be easy.

After all, it’s not just the retention of pre-parental identity that makes parenthood more appealing. It’s also the establishment of parental authority that makes it much easier to have and enjoy not just one child, but a bunch of them. This is what one would argue for if one was really invested in human life for its own sake, rather than in parenthood as a lifestyle choice.

To Life, to Life, L’Chaim?

Berg and Wiseman make a case for the essential goodness of humanity that ultimately relies on a sort of “gotcha” about the existence of people that I am not sure their progressive friends will readily accept. “If,” the authors contend in the book’s philosophically and literarily thick final chapter, “it is wrong for anyone to bring a child into the world in the present, it has been wrong for everyone to have brought a child into the world in the past. … Every single human being … was born out of a grave moral failure.”

Well, not necessarily. Many progressives who view human reproduction as wrong might contend in response that we know better now—both about how to prevent pregnancy and about humans’ adverse impact on the environment—than we did 100 years ago. In this light, it is entirely possible to view your grandmother’s birth as an unfortunate accident but your nonexistent child’s nonbirth as a mortal wrong averted.

Beyond this questionable argument, Berg and Wiseman more astutely point out that feelings of moral unease about human reproduction related to war, poverty, violence, suffering, and climate change typically exist alongside ambitions to better a world in which one already assumes the existence of future humans. This is true enough. Even truer is the realization that “however difficult the going gets, however much we complain and protest, most of us still treat our lives not only as valuable but as precious.” Therefore, “the answer to the question of whether life is good does not really await our decision to have children.”

Yet, Berg and Wiseman do not endorse parenthood broadly or unequivocally. “The decision to have children,” they contend, is “as personally consequential as it is philosophically profound. … Only you can determine whether it is the right one for you.” So, at bottom, for all their book’s sophistication and insight into the shortcomings of exactly this approach, Berg and Wiseman are talking about parenthood as a mere lifestyle choice after all. Ultimately, for them, it cannot be anything else because they have no transcendent conception of what either children or people are for.

Of course, some worthy purposes and vocations do not involve parenthood. But any case for parenthood that does not involve purpose and vocation is really no case at all.

Indeed, Berg and Wiseman’s secular argument in favor of having children is perhaps the best that can be made. And it amounts to: To life, to life—if it’s right for you.

Not quite the same ring to it. But better, I guess, than nothing.

*****

This article was published by Law & Liberty and is reproduced with permission.