What Are ChOICES For?
A recent book explores our modern ambivalence towards childbearing.
Review by Anna Heetderks
In What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman deliberately eschew the sweeping economic and social analyses that have come to dominate the current child-related discourse, and instead focus on the individual. What Are Children For? is part focus group, part literature review, and part personal narrative. The authors identify ambivalence, a feeling of being mired in a morass of uncertainty and conflicting desires and infinite tradeoffs, as the defining attitude of American millennials toward the prospect of bearing children. Children have fully morphed from unquestioned expectation into one choice among many in the marketplace and as a result, the decision about whether to have them can feel like a “seemingly intractable personal dilemma of life-altering significance.” In the introduction, Wiseman describes her experience with a “parenting clarity” course that purports to alleviate parenthood ambivalence. “Can’t decide? Want clarity? Tired of not being able to figure this out?” reads the website for the course, titled “Motherhood—Is It For Me?” The course requires that participants adhere to a mantra, which contains the following creed: “My true desire matters and no one can know it better than I. I am the definer of me. The answers will come because they never left. Only I can know what’s true for me…. It’s all within me.”
Indeed, What Are Children For? is at its most compelling when it explores the agonizing and absurd positions people find themselves in as a result of considering children without a decision-making framework beyond crudely calculated self interest. The authors highlight several stories of individuals seeking perfect romantic compatibility with a partner while treating the desire for children as a separate question entirely. One woman says, “There is one path where I am moving forward with my plans to have a family. There’s another path where I am moving forward with dating, which could affect the plans to have a family, but I’m not relying on one to make the other one happen.” Another woman—“Abby”—whose boyfriend had made it clear from the beginning of their relationship that he did not want children, told the authors she was planning to stay in the relationship while beginning IVF with a donated embryo. As Berg and Wiseman observe: “What is remarkable about Abby’s situation is that the way she and her partner diverge on the question. ‘What role should family play in our lives?’ did not really affect her estimation of their compatibility.” Outside of romantic relationships, Berg and Wiseman’s subjects worry more broadly that children will upend the lives they have constructed or hope to construct for themselves. One woman expressed concern “that children would destabilize her very identity, and therefore hoped to come well into her own, personally and professionally, before settling down.” “I see having a kid as this extra layer of confining in terms of my choices,” said one of the men they spoke to. “Having children would destroy my career and the fulfilling life that I’ve built for myself,” another woman told them. These interviewees sense that children would reshape their lives—and fear it would be in ways that make them less happy, less free, and, most importantly, less themselves.
The authors further spin out the thread of individual self-determination and actualization throughout the second chapter of the book, in their review of what they term “motherhood ambivalence literature”—a body of “memoirs and autofictional novels” that the book treats as reflective of real-world women’s inner turmoil regarding the decision whether to have children. The stakes of these novels are high: for the protagonists, children represent a potential loss of self, the evaporation of identity. “In motherhood the communal was permitted to prevail over the individual, and the result, to my mind, was a great deal of dishonesty,” one narrator writes. “My own struggle had been to resist this mechanism. I wanted to—I had to—remain ‘myself.’” Accordingly, Berg and Wiseman observe that the heroines of such novels are presented as individual minds in isolation, stripped of their external environments and relationships and even of physical characteristics and reduced to “pure thought and feeling.” “Even though their subject matter involves pregnancy, nursing, and nurturing an infant—which are sometimes described in detail—the speakers are for the most part remarkably disembodied,” Berg and Wiseman write. The literature analyzed in the book assumes that “the question of motherhood can only be truly worked out if one divorces oneself from one’s so-called externals and captures the elusive being that is one’s innermost personal desire.” The undergirding assumption is that our most important and intimate decisions can only be made in private, because we alone know what is best for us.
Children exemplify in a particular way the aspects and elements of human relationships that can easily be forgotten or dismissed in our splintered and self-centered age.
What Are Children For? suggests that the decline of childbearing is economically driven, but perhaps not in the way you might expect. Berg and Wiseman consider, but ultimately dismiss, the notion that economic hardship is driving childlessness, noting that places with very favorable social and economic conditions for having children (such as South Korea and Scandinavian countries) suffer from stagnant or falling birthrates. Berg and Wiseman suggest that birthrates are falling precisely because such societies are wealthy and free, quoting another author who posits that such conditions create “spiritual maladies” by offering “an abundance of opportunities” and “seemingly limitless freedom.” Having children becomes yet one more possible choice in a world of infinite possible choices, and even, as Berg and Wiseman elegantly put it, an “unintelligible practice of questionable worth.”
Berg and Wiseman are not the only ones to recognize the “spiritual maladies” associated with unfettered choice. Writing in The Atlantic, journalist Gal Beckerman decries what he terms “choice idolatry,” the belief that freedom is reducible to maximum options. Choice, he writes, “is revealing itself as a hollow source of identity and a distraction from what really matters.” He examines the widespread assumption that the pinnacle of human freedom consists in the ability to make decisions in private, pointing to the innovation of the secret ballot as an exemplar of a “solitary physical act” (much like freezing one’s eggs) that became “the most fundamental of rights in a democracy.” What choice idolatry fails to provide is any kind of telos for choice, a framework for knowing what options are good and which are inferior or even destructive. This absence makes a book titled What Are Children For? necessary and explains why its subjects end up paralyzed by ambivalence. Berg and Wiseman quote a philosopher who describes “individualistic hedonism” as a hallmark of our culture. “For those under its sway,” they write, “all choices are primarily beholden to the same standard: Does it make me happy?”
And of course, as it turns out, the choices we make and our “innermost personal desires” do not arise spontaneously from within or exist solely in relation to our individual selves. They are constantly and irrevocably shaped by others—our families, our social networks, advertisers, algorithms. If we identify and acknowledge such external influences, we can begin to sift out those that care about our selves from those that would exploit them. Categorically ignoring them allows them to keep on shaping us and our decisions, while deluding us into thinking that we and our choices are our own.
In critiquing the detrimental spiritual effects of unconstrained choice, I am not suggesting a return to a past where women were shunted into lives chosen for them by others or deprived of dignity and agency over their own bodies and decisions. Neither am I suggesting that having children must be the default setting or is always the morally superior choice. But I am suggesting that children exemplify in a particular way the aspects and elements of human relationships that can easily be forgotten or dismissed in our splintered and self-centered age. Commitment, responsibility, and self-sacrifice—values that caring for a child demands—may seem onerous or dull (toward the end of the book, Berg spends several pages describing her experience as a parent as mind-numblingly boring), but they lend depth, direction, and permanence to our relationships in richly rewarding ways. Author Kathryn Schultz articulates this sentiment in relation to her children in a recent interview with journalist Ezra Klein. “I have found a tremendous satisfaction in duty,” she says. “You do it for yourself, you do it for your children, you do it for your partner, and you do it because you have to. And that’s a kind of liberation and a wonderfulness and a whole category of existence I found because I had children who I had never appreciated, let alone valorized before.” Children remind us that our freedom cannot be fully realized in ourselves, and that our individual fortunes and flourishing are bound up in that of others.
Anna Heetderks lives in Washington, D.C., and works in government oversight. She is a native of Charlottesville, VA, and a 2024 graduate of the University of Virginia, where she studied Public Policy and Foreign Affairs. She is an editor at Fare Forward.
What Are Children For? was published by St. Martin’s Press on June 11, 2024. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here.
