What Are Children For?
On Ambivalence and Choice
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A modern argument, grounded in philosophy and cultural criticism, about childbearing ambivalence and how to overcome it
Becoming a parent, once the expected outcome of adulthood, is increasingly viewed as a potential threat to the most basic goals and aspirations of modern life. We seek self-fulfillment; we want to liberate women to find meaning and self-worth outside the home; and we wish to protect the planet from the ravages of climate change. Weighing the pros and cons of having children, Millennials and Zoomers are finding it increasingly difficult to judge in its favor.
With lucid argument and passionate prose, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman offer the guidance necessary to move beyond uncertainty. The decision whether or not to have children, they argue, is not just a women’s issue but a basic human one. And at a time when climate change worries threaten the very legitimacy of human reproduction, Berg and Wiseman conclude that neither our personal nor collective failures ought to prevent us from embracing the fundamental goodness of human life—not only in the present but, in choosing to have children, in the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
