{"id":11551,"date":"2025-09-10T15:10:04","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T15:10:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=11551"},"modified":"2025-09-10T17:44:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T17:44:06","slug":"what-are-children-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/10\/what-are-children-for\/","title":{"rendered":"What Are Children For?"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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What Are ChOICES For?<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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A recent book explores our modern ambivalence towards childbearing.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Anna Heetderks<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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In What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice<\/em>, 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? <\/em>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 \u201cseemingly intractable personal dilemma of life-\u00adaltering significance.\u201d In the introduction, Wiseman describes her experience with a \u201cparenting clarity\u201d course that purports to alleviate parenthood ambivalence. \u201cCan\u2019t decide? Want clarity? Tired of not being able to figure this out?\u201d reads the website for the course, titled \u201cMotherhood\u2014Is It For Me?\u201d The course requires that participants adhere to a mantra, which contains the following creed: \u201cMy 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\u2019s true for me…. It\u2019s all within me.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>

Indeed, What Are Children For? <\/em>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, \u201cThere is one path where I am moving forward with my plans to have a family. There\u2019s another path where I am moving forward with dating, which could affect the plans to have a family, but I\u2019m not relying on one to make the other one happen.\u201d Another woman\u2014\u201cAbby\u201d\u2014whose 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: \u201cWhat is remarkable about Abby\u2019s situation is that the way she and her partner diverge on the question. \u2018What role should family play in our lives?\u2019 did not really affect her estimation of their compatibility.\u201d Outside of romantic relationships, Berg and Wiseman\u2019s subjects worry more broadly that children will upend the lives they have constructed or hope to construct for themselves.\u00a0 One woman expressed concern \u201cthat children would destabilize her very identity, and therefore hoped to come well into her own, personally and professionally, before settling down.\u201d \u201cI see having a kid as this extra layer of confining in terms of my choices,\u201d said one of the men they spoke to. \u201cHaving children would destroy my career and the fulfilling life that I\u2019ve built for myself,\u201d another woman told them. These interviewees sense that children would reshape their lives\u2014and fear it would be in ways that make them less happy, less free, and, most importantly, less themselves.<\/p>

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 \u201cmotherhood ambivalence literature\u201d\u2014a body of \u201cmemoirs and autofictional novels\u201d that the book treats as reflective of real-world women\u2019s 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. \u201cIn motherhood the communal was permitted to prevail over the individual, and the result, to my mind, was a great deal of dishonesty,\u201d one narrator writes. \u201cMy own struggle had been to resist this mechanism. I wanted to\u2014\u00adI had to\u2014\u00adremain \u2018myself.\u2019” 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 \u201cpure thought and feeling.\u201d \u201cEven though their subject matter involves pregnancy, nursing, and nurturing an infant\u2014\u00adwhich are sometimes described in detail\u2014\u00adthe speakers are for the most part remarkably disembodied,\u201d Berg and Wiseman write. The literature analyzed in the book assumes that \u201cthe question of motherhood can only be truly worked out if one divorces oneself from one\u2019s so-\u00adcalled externals and captures the elusive being that is one\u2019s innermost personal desire.\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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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.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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What<\/em> Are Children For? <\/em>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 \u201cspiritual maladies\u201d by offering \u201can abundance of opportunities\u201d and \u201cseemingly limitless freedom.\u201d 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 \u201cunintelligible practice of questionable worth.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>

Berg and Wiseman are not the only ones to recognize the \u201cspiritual maladies\u201d associated with unfettered choice. Writing in The Atlantic<\/em>, journalist Gal Beckerman decries<\/a> what he terms \u201cchoice idolatry,\u201d the belief that freedom is reducible to maximum options. Choice, he writes, \u201cis revealing itself as a hollow source of identity and a distraction from what really matters.\u201d 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 \u201csolitary physical act\u201d (much like freezing one\u2019s eggs) that became \u201cthe most fundamental of rights in a democracy.\u201d What choice idolatry fails to provide is any kind of telos <\/em>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<\/em>? necessary and explains why its subjects end up paralyzed by ambivalence. Berg and Wiseman quote a philosopher who describes \u201cindividualistic hedonism\u201d as a hallmark of our culture. \u201cFor those under its sway,\u201d they write, \u201call choices are primarily beholden to the same standard: Does it make me happy?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>

And of course, as it turns out, the choices we make and our \u201cinnermost personal desires\u201d do not arise spontaneously from within or exist solely in relation to our individual selves. They are constantly and irrevocably shaped by others\u2014our 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.\u00a0<\/p>

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\u2014values that caring for a child demands\u2014may 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. \u201cI have found a tremendous satisfaction in duty,\u201d she says. \u201cYou 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\u2019s 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.\u201d 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.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Anna Heetderks<\/strong>\u00a0lives 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\u00a0Fare Forward<\/em>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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What Are Children For?<\/strong> was published by St. Martin\u2019s Press on June 11, 2024. Fare<\/em>\u00a0Forward\u00a0<\/em>appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent book explores our modern ambivalence towards childbearing. 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