What Are Children For?

On Ambivalence and Choice

By: Anastasia Berg, Rachel Wiseman

Narrated by: Jennifer Pickens, Kirsten Potter, Zura Johnson

This program features multicast narration.

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.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press.

©2024 Anastasia Berg (P)2024 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

“In their widely researched and patiently argued book, Berg and Wiseman show how competing ideas about freedom, happiness, love, dignity, and justice attach to the increasingly ambivalent acts of having and raising children. What Are Children For? models the curiosity and the skepticism we need to imagine a collective future in dark times.”—Merve Emre, author of The Personality Brokers

“By far the most honest, unsentimental, unpredictable, and rigorously thoughtful exploration of parenting that I have ever read. Berg and Wiseman’s debut is a much-needed and impressively original inquiry into a topic that is almost always treated in deadeningly stale terms.”—Becca Rothfeld, author of All Things Are Too Small

“A lucid and sophisticated treatment of a question we all share a stake in: Ought there be future generations? The result is a rich guide to thinking about the future as it will unfold for each of us, and as it will unfold for all of us together.”—Elizabeth Bruenig, The Atlantic

Review

The philosophical discussions are ok, but most of the discussions center on the choice of people in general having children to the benefit to humanity as a whole, and less on to the individuals, and there're not enough perspectives on whether being born is a good thing for the children, except near the end. And, that is also where the author commits the fallacy of slippery slope, and makes some claims about "affirming life" without explaining what it means and as if it is a good thing without need for justifications. In total, it is not satisfactory or convincing. The best part of the book is a beautiful personal account of being a mother in the last chapter, which elevates the reader's experience of logical thinking to a nuanced immersion of contradictions and ambiguities. It makes me wonder whether the complex feelings of having children and being a mother is hard to capture in logic and words, yet it is somehow conveyed poetically.