Sometimes after a crazy day of snotty noses, playdates, and intense negotiations between Steve and myself about who is going to work, we go to that dark place. We wonder what would life be like if we never had kids.
We imagine ourselves in a posh restaurant, like the Atlantic Grill next to the Museum of History. In their yellow room eating herbed salmon and drinking a cabernet. With great outfits and slick hair. We’re surrounded by other beautiful people feeling oh-so fabuloso. And no one is worrying that they are going to be tired the next day when the two year old clutching his blankie crawls into bed at 6:00.
We would have two incomes without the lion share going to childcare and Babys R Us. We would travel. We would cook spicy food. We would climb a corporate ladder.
Why have kids? Well, it is really nice when the two year old crawls into bed at 6:00. He knows how to curl up just right. It is really fun when we put shirts on our heads and sing a silly hat song. The kids are always up for a spontaneous trip to Wendy’s because mommy has a craving for fries. They ask the most important questions like: Fig Neutons? What about little Neutons? They think I sing just fine, thank you. They get me to lie in the dirt with them to watch the ants crawl into a crack in the sidewalk. They keep the house from getting too quiet.
Many of the commenters, singles and parents, crave more time with family, more time away from work, more time to enjoy life. I believe that if trade offs must be made between work and life, life should win.
Apt. 11d 
Why have kids? Here’s a more abstract answer than yours, which is nevertheless consistent with it. Raising a child is simply a different kind of challenge than any other. You have the ultimate responsibility for providing both for the welfare needs of another person, ensuring that their life-as-a-child goes well, and overseeing their moral and emotional development into a healthy adulthood. You have no training for this, and the world is not necessarily set up to make it go well. You share your life with the child, and she shares hers with you, and so you enjoy unearned and spontaneous affection and intimacy; but also bear the responsibility for witholding certain aspects of your (adult) life from her. Speaking for myself, if I hadn’t had this challenge in my life, I would judge my life a sort of second-rate one, even if I had had a successful career, marriage, etc.
I’m not saying that people who don’t have children lead second-rate lives. I’m saying that for many people, a life without this particular kind of relationship and experience would be second-rate. Forgive me if the following analogy seems to trivialise it, but some people can live entirely and fully flourishing lives without sexual relationships, because they are constituted that way. But most can’t. Similarly with having — or, more precisely, rearing — children.
Sorry to talk more like a philosopher than a parent. I’ve emphasized the contribution to the flourishing of the parent, because I think this helps answer the ‘well, it’s a choice’ conundrum. Yes, it is a choice. But it is not a choice like any other; it is one that is vital to many people’s ability to live a flourishing life, and the government has an obligation to enable people to live flourishing lives; this justifies intervening with, eg, transfers or regulation of the economy, ina way that supports effective and enjoyable child-rearing.
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yes, harry, I’ve made the same argument elsewhere. I think that, for most people, having children is not a choice. At times, I do envy those who seem to be quite content without such needy beings in their lives. They do seem to have much more glamorous lives than I. But, for most of us, having kids was as natural and important as food or sex. It’s also a good thing that the little ones are just so much fun. It makes it all worth it.
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“Yes, it is a choice. But it is not a choice like any other; it is one that is vital to many people’s ability to live a flourishing life, and the government has an obligation to enable people to live flourishing lives; this justifies intervening with, eg, transfers or regulation of the economy, ina way that supports effective and enjoyable child-rearing.”
A superb answer Harry. I would only want to add that, insofar as we are framing the matter of raising children in terms of “the flourishing of the parent,” that there is also an affective, aesthetic, and moral quality to parenting which is not, in my view, especially reducible to a question of challenges, training, experiences, etc. Were it so, then the matter of whether anyone has a right to the experience of raising their own children, as opposed to just being given responsibility for children in general–an issue that I know you’ve written about before–would be a genuinely difficult one. But it isn’t, I think, a difficult one, because “flourishing” is more than going through a certain set of challenging educational experiences; it is just as much a matter of being bound to specific others, experiencing unique (because, kind of in the way Laura has just put it, unchosen) ties make you part of a project authentically one’s own and yet also larger than the self.
Of course, most people do not think about parenting politically or philosophically. They have children because religion and custom teach them to, or simply because they quickly (and I think usually correctly) realize that children, as people, are much more lovable, much more real, than any other potentially lovable material thing. I come from a family of nine children; while there were religious reasons for my parents’ decision to have so many kids, my mother’s primary motivation was always, simply, “I just loved seeing how you’d all turn out.” In the end, that sounds to me like as good an explanation as any.
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I’m trying to decide whether to be irritated at the implication that I’m apparently running the risk of having a second-rate life. I did not have children–I wasn’t in a committed relationship for more than 15 years, and I was in graduate school during half of that time and broke the other half. Should I have gone ahead and gotten pregnant anyway, and then paid someone else to raise the kid? Or should I have tried to conceive when I was, say, 42 or 43, and hoped that things worked out? (Though I work for a start-up whose finances are really shaky right now.)
It’s true that I now have what often feels like the best of both worlds: My significant other has a kid, who’s 7, and the kid doesn’t remember life w/o me, so I do get many of the joys of a parent-like relationship, but only part of the time, leaving time for the dining out experiences as well. And I genuinely treasure the time I have with him (or most of it, anyway)–we get along great, and it’s fun teaching someone to cook or to play soccer (or to be emotionally mature, which I suspect is also going to be my job to teach).
But suppose I hadn’t met the man I did, and met someone without kids? What then? Should I just slit my wrists because my life is doomed to second-rate-hood? How about gay couples who live in a state where they can’t adopt? Are their lives second-rate, too, because they can’t easily be parents? I’m sorry this sounds so cranky–I don’t think you all meant to trash people whose experiences are like mine–but this is the kind of privileging of the experience of parenthood that can bring out the misanthrope in me.
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The element of choosing children in our society today strikes me as comically self-indulgent when compared to the entire history of mankind. The main concerns in the past, and even today in third world countries, have always been: Can we feed them? How soon can we put them to work?
I think we need a return to the basics.
Here, kids happened. We concentrate on feeding them, physically and intellectually, and look forward to the day, which will come all too soon, when they are out earning their keep. In the meantime, for the most part, we do really enjoy them.
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Carla — I knew I was running the risk of seeming to trash people, and you don’t sound cranky at all, just ready to be cranky, and nevertheless succeeding in being generous in your interpretation of what I said. Thanks.
Think about gays in states who can’t adopt. I think those states have pprofoundly unjust laws. Why? Because people should be able to do whatever they want? No, because depriving people who can only flourish fully by rearing children of that opportunity is a deep wrong (as long as they will do a reasonably good job of rearing the children, which, all the evidence suggests, gay couples do).
Again, though, I want to emphasize that it is not everyone whose lives can only be fully successful if they get to rear children. Some people — maybe many — can have equally sucessful — and even better –lives without rearing children. For any given person we don’t know. But, I’m saying, we do know that it is a widespread need, and as such one that government policy should facilitate. Maybe another analogy would be with religious parctice. I really think that some people could not have flourishing lives without soemthing like a religious community in their lives. But some can do fine without (me, for example). But because it is really a need for those who need it, the government must facilitate it. And because the government can’t tell who it is a need for, it should NOT impose it on anyone.
You say:
I wasn’t in a committed relationship for more than 15 years, and I was in graduate school during half of that time and broke the other half. Should I have gone ahead and gotten pregnant anyway, and then paid someone else to raise the kid? Or should I have tried to conceive when I was, say, 42 or 43, and hoped that things worked out? (Though I work for a start-up whose finances are really shaky right now.)
I can’t say much about not being in a committed relationship for that time. I met my spouse sort of by accident in my late twenties, at a point that I had pretty much despaired of meeting the right person, and things just worked out fast. But on the other side of it — being broke — I think, again, that the government has an obligation to ensure that we can carry out certain of our most fundamental plans. It should make it the case that being broke is not a barrier to having kids. In fact, in my view, it should ensure that no-one is broke, but then I’m a hard-line social-democrat. So the point of my argument is not to trash people who don’t/can’t have kids, but to point up the obligation we all have to ensure that everyone has a reasonable opportunity to have them and to manage the task of parenting in reasonable circumstances. There are other reasons for eradicating poverty, but this is a good enough one in itself.
Thanks Carla, for not jumping on the hostages I left to fortune. Does this supplement sound less offensive?
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Thanks, Harry; yes, it does, and I appreciate your willingness to spell things out more, in ways that I suspected you meant, and with which I agree in very large part. I would say that “some people need to raise kids to be happy” is not the best reason for supporting government facilitation of child-having/rearing–there are many better ones, most of which have been mentioned somewhere on this blog sometime this week. (I could argue that, in order for me to be fulfilled or happy, in order to truly live a full, rich, life, I should have an income of a million dollars a year, and the government should therefore make it easy for me to do so; of course, I keep thinking of Steve Martin’s old routine–“How to make a million dollars and not pay taxes!”) I am more in favor of the notion that the government should make sure that noone is broke–at least in terms of providing basic health care, housing, job training, education–but I’m not sure that it’s the job of government to make sure I can have kids, by myself if necessary. I think that it’s not too much to ask of people that they have to take some responsiblity for their own situations–but I think it is properly the job of government to provide people with the tools to do that.
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I was thinking about your earlier comment as I was walking the baby around the block to get him to fall asleep. I see that you and Harry have come to some sort of argeement. But I still want to add a couple of points.
I was unsure what exactly about Harry’s first post ticked you off. Was it because you wanted to have more kids, but circumstances prohibited that? Or was it because you didn’t want to have kids and were annoyed that he would call your preferences second-rate?
Like Harry, I would like to see more policies that hooked up parents and kids. Make it easier for gay couples and singles to adopt. Provide grants to adopt kids from China and Africa. And government policies to subsize health care and job training would benefit families and singles alike.
As Harry later pointed out, he didn’t say everybody needed kids.
However, if most (not some) people need to have kids, then government does has the responsibility to lessen the load on parents.
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I think my original not-quite-irritation was that Harry seemed to be laying out the component parts of A Life Worth Living and that raising kids was one of those parts; some few people might not have it among their components parts, just as some people might not include sex among the component parts, but it seemed he was assuming that the very definition of ALWL had to include kids for most people. I think that people can/do define and redefine ALWL along the way, taking into account their own circumstances, for example, and reevaluating the things they want in light of what seems possible or wise. I think my initial reaction was because I would have been open to having kids–it was never a huge goal of mine, but I thought that, with the right partner, etc., it would be something that I’d like and be good at–but the circumstances didn’t seem right. That is, I am not in the camp of people who absolutely don’t want kids, and having them was at least a potential part of what i would have liked to do–but the fact that I didn’t then do it doesn’t make my life somehow second-rate. (I did not think he was calling the preference for not having kids second-rate, just very unusual.)
I don’t think the government has the responsibility to lessen the load on parents, per se. I think that good child care, good schools, housing, medical care, etc., should be available to everyone, and that those things are likely to lessen the load on parents, but I’m not convinced that lessening loads on parents is or should be the goal. If government is raising kids, then presumably the government could dictate how children should be raised, which is not a path I’d care to travel, other than preventing abuse and neglect.
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Acknowledging my status as a stranger, and respecting and enjoying everyone’s opinions, I thought I’d offer mine:
My husband and I are in our early-mid 30’s and do not have children. At the time we do not plan to. At the time we do not feel the need to that many others do (which need I acknowledge is as real as the need for sex and food; I have only to look to my sister and my friends for proof).
Speaking as a nonparent, though, I want to squash the stereotype, should it have arisen, that all child-free couples live lives of glamour or are child-averse. Last night my husband watched baseball and I did some writing and blog reading. Yesterday morning was devoted to my nephew’s ball game, after which he spent the afternoon with us (I had to put him in time out twice). We don’t have slick hair and great outfits, but we do sleep late on weekends and we do travel more than our friends with young children are able to or want to.
With regard to a government role: speaking for myself, as another social-democrat, I feel the government has an obligation to children, parents, and aspiring parents (in the case of gays and singles wanting to adopt) and most especially single mothers. Though I may never directly benefit, I would be happy knowing my tax dollars pay for day care subsidies, Head Start programs, and better schools (among other things). This is because, hopefully, I will benefit indirectly by aging in a society populated by well-adjusted, well-educated people and also because it’s simply the right thing to do.
Now, as for that two year old screaming in the row behind us during “Fahrenheit 9/11″…
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I’m really interested in the whole “a life worth living” question. I alternate between thinking it’s actually dangerous to talk about kids this way (i.e., if you haven’t got them, your life really isn’t worth living), and that it’s totally true but mindblowingly depressing. People talk this way about partners too. As a non-partnered, childless woman with not a lot of prospects in sight as I head (sigh) into my 40s, I think this talk is bad, bad, bad. What I’d like to do is get rid of this idea, or at least to be a model of a good life without these things. (I know some members of religious orders who fit the bill, but that’s not me.)
At the end of acknowledgements in books, almost always the author will say, “And this is for my spouse and/or children, who made the whole project worthwhile.” I am tempted to put at the end of whatever acknowledgement I write, “This project was worthwhile even though I have no husband or child.” There are other important people in my life, including quite a few children, who, very happily for me, seem to get pretty attached to me, maybe partly because I don’t have my own kids to attend to. And another thing: people with kids will never know what it’s like to spend your life being a variety of things to a variety of people, and to have *that* be what makes your life worthwhile. That’s interesting in itself.
Sorry if this is kind of off track….
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af – I am not supposed to be on the computer right now. I promised myself a short break, but I really had to respond to your comment.
I am not sure that it’s kids themselves that makes life worth living, as much as just having lots of loved ones around you.
But Harry, Russell, and I were not really talking about who has good lives and who doesn’t. What the hell do we know about that?
What we’re really trying to do is come up with a way of responding to the very effective argument that we had chosen to have kids and thus mustly soley assume the burden for them. The best way to combat that argument is to say that it wasn’t a choice, but a necessity.
I was also thinking of the many people who are chosing not to have kids today, because they are not willing to make all the sacrifices. I was putting myself in their Jimmy Choo shoes for a moment.
Of course, there are the many people who have not chosen either way, because circumstances did not allow them to have children. Either they are fertility challenged or never found a suitable partner. A good number of my friends are in that boat. Some are more content than others about these circumstances, but all have first-rate lives.
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I was also thinking of the many people who are chosing not to have kids today, because they are not willing to make all the sacrifices. I was putting myself in their Jimmy Choo shoes for a moment.
Could we please let go of the presupposition that childless people naturally have more money to throw around than parents do? This was also a theme in your old blog entry about your husband’s childless coworkers who jet off to Europe all the time. The reason they have more money is primarily because they both work in investment banking, not because they don’t have kids. I am single and adjuncting and the life you described even in your old Apt 11D diary seems like one of extraordinary luxury and security to me. If I were to have kids, on my own or with a partner of similar means, it wouldn’t be a case of sacrificing luxuries, which are few in any case; I think it would be lunacy. Since I only have the resources (earning power, energy, support network) to do one thing, I am glad to have found something I love. Mind you, I would have liked to have the resources to have a family as well or at least to have a choice about it, so you and I are on the same page about social democracy and helping parents and all that. But childless people are not the enemy and are not all eating out in posh restaurants every night; in fact,some of us could use help too – health insurance would be at the top of my own wish list.
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Ah–now I see where i think the flaw in the ointment is. I think that the defense imposed by the “it’s your choice to have kids” is the problem–I think you have to resist the attempt to frame it as a choice, but not by saying that it’s a necessity RATHER than a choice. Allowing the choice language is like equating having children with buying a house or picking a restaurant for dinner or something. Raising kids is a different kind of enterprise entirely, and it’s one that it behooves our society, as a whole, to do well. Children are a collective good, in some important sense–in exactly the same sense as other adults are, I suppose, just requiring a little more care and attention. Schools are a perfect example: If I could change just one thing, I’d change/improve schooling for every last damned kid in the country. I don’t have kids (just the stepkid), and I should, in theory, object to my tax dollars being spent on school systems, but I believe just the opposite is true. I don’t see this as particular generosity on my part; I believe that any society that expects to endure in any meaningful, moral way has to educate its citizens.
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