Decisions, Decisions: On Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman’s “What Are Children For?”
Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman | What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice | St. Martin’s Press | June 2024 | 336 pages
Recently, at a wedding, my boyfriend and I were asked rather abrasively about the prospect of children. The bride, a mother of two, first posed the question to me. I told her I did not want children. She asked me why. I said, because I do not want children. Unsatisfied, she swiveled to my boyfriend and posed the question again: And do you want children? It was clear from her tone that the bride hoped to entrap us—to expose that we naively had not even thought to confer on the subject, thereby hastening the inevitable conflict it would create between us. In fact, my boyfriend and I had discussed it, early and at length. And he too told her no. Dismayed by our united front, she asked why. Because, he said, I wouldn’t feel good about bringing a child into the world right now. She changed the subject. I knew his response was entirely true—he is uneasy with the ethics of contemporary procreation—yet not the entire truth. Like me, he also just doesn’t want to be a parent. But he rightly guessed that invoking a more concrete culprit—the dispiriting state of the world—than the absence of desire would diffuse the situation.
This interaction was much on my mind reading What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice by The Point editors Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, who address the titular question practically (should I become a mother?) as well as philosophically (what is the purpose of motherhood?). The book begins with an essay by Wiseman, who doesn’t see herself having children. Approaching 30, she has the nagging sense that parenthood is “inimical to [her] existence” yet finds some “comfort in ambivalence.” To probe that ambivalence, she enrolls in an online course called “Motherhood—Is it For Me?,” which aims to help participants locate their true feelings about childbearing, independent of what the course calls “externals” like age, finances, relationship status, or the future of the environment.
Berg and Wiseman find this approach dubious: after all, “no one lives in a vacuum.” But they also don’t think “externals” alone—increased economic precarity, narrowing romantic prospects, among other meta-narratives—account for what they see as increasing ambivalence toward motherhood among a certain milieu of millennial women. Instead, they’re interested in the interplay of personal desire and social circumstance, which they believe is fueling their generation’s chronic indecision around the question of parenthood.
Berg and Wiseman aren’t interested in invalidating the various externals that women cite as factors behind their uncertainty about having children—the authors repeatedly stress that the financial and romantic challenges women currently face are real, pressing concerns. But invoking externals can also help make ambivalence more justifiable, more legible, to others and to ourselves. My boyfriend seemed to implicitly grasp this when confronted by the bride: it’s more socially acceptable to forgo—or, as Berg and Wiseman argue, indefinitely delay—parenthood on the basis of environmental decline than our nebulous feelings.
Make no mistake: What Are Children For? is about a small swath of the American populace, namely highly-educated millennials. The authors do not attempt to hide this. Parts of the book draw from interviews they conducted with “dozens of Zoomers, Millennials, and Gen Xers” and “in-depth qualitative surveys” disseminated through their “social media platforms, friends, and acquaintances," which received 300 responses. Of the online survey respondents, 95% have a college degree (compared to just over half of Americans) and nearly 70% have a master’s or higher; most are middle to upper-middle class (more than one is a “diplomat”); and though race was not recorded, Berg and Wiseman guess that most are white. “Of course,” the pair writes, “given the demographic composition of our surveys and interviews, we cannot assume that any particular response or trend is representative of the American, let alone global, population.” Indeed, the vast majority of women—upwards of 80%, as of 2019—become mothers.
The book, then, is not trying to incite moral panic. It notes but raises no alarms about the declining national fertility—which, as Aaron Bady points out in his insightful essay on the subject, is largely the result of people having fewer children, rather than none at all. Moreover, the authors see little evidence of systemic anti- or pro-natalist pressures on women, though they do see more women weighing the possible professional and personal consequences of parenthood. Indeed, any pressure I’ve felt one way or the other has been anecdotal, not cultural, and consequently also contrary: I’ve been told many times by relatives and acquaintances that I will change my mind about motherhood; I’ve also been told by multiple women with children that if they had known earlier what parenthood entailed, they probably would have decided against it.
Decision-making, not the merits of motherhood, is the issue at the core of Berg and Wiseman’s project. What Are Children For? critiques the social scripts that encourage women to postpone seriously contemplating the question of motherhood, such as the mandate to find ourselves, establish ourselves, partner ourselves, before we can even think about whether we want to become parents. Women’s right to self-determination—which remains unevenly distributed and increasingly threatened—was hard won by generations of radical feminists, many of whom sought freedom from compulsory motherhood, and I would be lying if I said that my politics and my un-interest in becoming a mother are entirely unrelated. But there is nothing un-feminist about giving serious, rigorous thought to the question. At no point do the authors advocate for having children; Berg has children while Wiseman does not, and both write frankly about these experiences. What they do advocate for, however, is decisiveness: to not let indecision—well-founded as it may be—make the decision for you.
Berg and Wiseman also don’t want women to treat this decision as a cross they must bear alone. Looking at a recent spate of what they call “motherhood ambivalence novels”—Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors, and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation among them—Berg and Wiseman wonder if insular, stream-of-consciousness narration is necessarily the best way to approach the issue. They push back on the idea that the question of motherhood is one that can only be answered by burrowing inward, as if the answer will lie buried in the depths of one’s subconscious. (They also critique the tendency, perpetuated by many of these novels, to pit creativity and motherhood against one another.) Introspection is a natural recourse for those of us who have not been struck by some primal yen to be mothers. But it’s also lonely and, at a certain point, starts to yield diminishing returns. For ambivalence, the authors prescribe a talking cure—that is, honest and intentional conversations with friends, parents, and, above all, partners.
The topic of children is one that many well-meaning men approach with deference. Conducting their research in a political climate suffused with the right’s racist hand wringing over declining birth rates and constant attacks on women’s bodily autonomy (after Trump’s election, the phrase “your body, my choice” made the rounds on social media), Berg and Wiseman find in their interviews and surveys that left-leaning men want their female partners to answer the question of motherhood for themselves, free from male input. While this position is politically laudable, the authors feel this recusal does more harm than good on a personal level: “The remark ‘whatever you want—it’s up to you’ is annoying when trying to pick a film to watch or a restaurant to order takeout from,” they write; “it can feel unbearable as a response to the question ‘Do you want to have a child with me?’” They conclude that consigning the question of childbearing to the domain of “women’s issues” is counterproductive, and that “children ought to become an acceptable and welcome topic of discussion, among women and men, and not only those in serious, long-term relationships.” Ultimately, Berg and Wiseman want to take the fear out of having the conversation, reaching a conclusion, and embracing the fact that any path one takes, in any aspect of life, forecloses others.
I see nothing controversial in the authors’ core argument: that it’s not anti-feminist to wonder whether to have children, and that women who are ambivalent about the question should address it in a timely, direct, and collaborative manner, rather than let it stew and accumulate anxiety. Berg and Wiseman must gloss some uncomfortable truths in order to arrive at this point: that egg-freezing is no miracle technology for women, for instance, or that “slow love” can make the parenthood question taboo and run out one’s biological clock. They also note that freedom from socioeconomic constraint doesn’t necessarily translate into freedom from ambivalence. In Norway, with its remarkably robust social safety net and high gender parity—what look to be ideal conditions for raising a family—women remain ambivalent about, or altogether uninterested in, parenthood, though the authors stress that this hardly constitutes a crisis.
The book is not without its shortcomings. Narrow scope aside, the authors breeze past millennials’ economic concerns too quickly, and forgo constructing any kind of cultural history of maternal ambivalence, framing it instead as a contemporary phenomenon. And a chapter on the evolution of feminist theories of motherhood is rushed and a bit superficial; it came as a surprise that a book with the word “choice” in its subtitle fails to mention, let alone explore, Linda Hirshman’s critique of “choice feminism,” which “tells women that their choices, everyone's choices, the incredibly constrained ‘choices’ they made, are good choices.” Even Aaron Bady’s essay managed to limn Hirschman’s argument: “Fetishizing ‘choice,’” he writes, “leads to triumphalism about a present whose actual freedom is neither as novel nor as evenly distributed as many imagine.”
In the hands of some critics, this book has become a kind of Rorschach test, one that either confirms or offends their existing values. Indeed, talking about motherhood in any capacity is fraught. How to affirm or critique a practice without disparaging the people who have opted into or out of it, not to mention those who have not had a say in whether or not to participate? Particularly on social media, where intention is hard to parse, opining about the joys or value of motherhood can be interpreted as a form of pro-natalist propaganda or trad-wife ideology. At best, child-free women might be reminded of nagging relatives and supercilious peers with kids; at worst, they may hear the echoes of centuries of gender-essentialist rhetoric. Meanwhile, motherhood’s detractors are cast as “childless cat ladies” who hate kids and themselves, bitter spinsters who betray the tenets of feminism by condemning other women’s freely-made choices. Women who strongly identify as mothers—or who simply believe the experience of parenthood and its attendant sacrifices have enriched their lives and bettered them as people—might feel dismissed, if not disparaged. But these understandable sensitivities shouldn’t preclude conversation.
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To decide to have a child is to make an irrevocable and morally complex choice about one’s own future. Compounding this is the fact that people are in fact quite bad at what psychologists call “affective forecasting,” or assessing how happy they’ll be with their decisions. The things we think will make us happier typically don’t. We’re also not very good at predicting how our desires might change—I, for one, would never have thought I’d want to be in a committed relationship with a man. What people are good at is adapting to changes in our lives—whether they stem from our own decisions or the whims of fate—and maintaining a fairly stable baseline of (un)happiness no matter what happens to us, good or bad.
We see these macro-tendencies play out in the epilogue of What Are Children For?, in which Berg recounts her first few months of motherhood. The night she brings her baby back from the hospital, she asks her husband, weeping, “What have we done? Our life was good.” The portrait of parenthood she goes on to paint—pages and pages of “quotidian misery”—doesn’t exactly entice. She is ambivalent about motherhood even as it is actively happening to her. Yet she adapts—or simply becomes inured—to her situation.
At a certain point, I too grew numb to the litany of indignities that befall Berg. Through it all, she is exhausted, bored, and irritated. Alienated from herself. At one point, an old spinal injury flares up, since motherhood now prevents her from exercising while condemning her to give regular “piggyback rides to a baby the size of a pig.” The pain is “blinding,” but she can’t take any painkillers because, she casually mentions, she is “trying for a second baby.” Huh? I paused, unable to follow the logic. Wouldn’t another child just compound all that aforementioned suffering? But perhaps this is the takeaway from Berg’s dispatch: logic doesn’t govern the decision to procreate.
Nor does it necessarily govern the decision not to procreate. I’m not ambivalent about motherhood, and I could point to many logical reasons why: soaring child care costs, paltry paid parental leave, professional penalties for mothers, and persistent domestic inequity, to name only a few. Yet these very real socioeconomic factors tend to fall by the wayside when I ponder the question of parenthood, which seems mostly to happen when I’m at the airport. Maybe you’ve witnessed a similar scene: a frazzled woman wrangling her uncooperative children, juggling a car seat or folded stroller along with titanic luggage, exchanging curt words with her weary male partner, all sighs and commotion. It’s frightening to picture myself as that woman; no number of “externals”—good or bad—could rival the shadow she casts over my imagination.
Had I told all this to the inquiring bride, she surely would have rebutted, as if this were a debate. When women come too swiftly to motherhood’s defense, I suspect it’s themselves they’re trying to convince. What’s more, to defend something requires that it be imperiled, which motherhood isn’t. Despite the trend toward waiting longer to get pregnant and having fewer children in all, the vast majority of women become parents, either by choice or by circumstance. Even as material and political conditions make it less feasible and less appealing, motherhood remains a social norm. But it’s ultimately the prerogative of individuals, a profound and personal question that can’t always be answered by externals, or neatly mapped onto social economics, or hashed out in the public sphere. And once the question is decided—and it must be decided—there is no more explaining to do.