What Are Children For?:
On Ambivalence and Choice
by anastasia berg and rachel wiseman
st martin’s, 336 pages, $27
What are children for? For my grandmother, this would have seemed a strange question. For her, having children was not a matter of choice but simply, as she once put it to me, “what one did.” Today, though, children have become decisions we make: an opt-in variation on our default state of atomization.
As a consequence, the choice to procreate has come, for many, to need rationalization—or even, against the backdrop of political instability and climate change, embarrassed justification. In this bewildering new moral landscape, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman have taken up the challenge of giving reasons. The result, What Are Children For?, outlines a gentle procreative “ought” in a culture that has almost entirely lost the “is” of children.
Berg and Wiseman both work as editors for The Point, a magazine that is not overtly partisan in its politics. But three profoundly liberal assumptions nonetheless recur in its pages, as they do in this book. The first is that every moral claim is open to critical discussion, with (secondly) one exception: the claim that no one has the right to tell anyone else how to live. The third assumption is that religious precepts are unlikely to feature heavily in readers’ deliberations over how to live. To point out these assumptions is not to criticize either the book or its authors. It’s more to frame the difficulty with which the authors grapple, namely: How is a liberal in good standing to square the sacred value of individual freedom with an existential collective imperative to perpetuate our species?
Until relatively recently, this circle could be squared by a broadly shared acceptance that some aspects of our nature were simply given. These included the average human lifespan, the existence of two sexes, and our usual organismic arc from dependent infancy through agentic adulthood to dependent old age and death, plus some common observations about our dispositions, capacities, weaknesses, and so on. For many, it was further understood that these givens, and their givenness, originated in our relation to the divine—in most cases, to the God of Christian theology.
From this perspective, humans were seen as possessing a capacity for freedom within the confines of a created nature that preceded us, and for which we are not responsible. But as time passed, this framework evolved—in no small part thanks to the new obligations modernity placed upon parents themselves. For we arrived at the ambivalence Wiseman and Berg express concerning the relation between freedom and reproductivity as such by means of an ambivalent relation between children and freedom that dates back to the beginning of the modern age.
From Plato onward, political philosophers keen to envisage an ideal polity have come up against the same obstacle: human nature. The flawed quality of humans ourselves presents the main hurdle to realizing their vision. Every argument over the proper way to raise children is hence a political argument writ small. It is no coincidence that two of the first theorists of modern liberalism, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wrote seminal books on modern parenting. Locke’s Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693) and Rousseau’s Emile (1762) were key texts in the long, slow transformation of “parent” from something one is to something one does.
But the privileging of individual autonomy and conscience in these treatises introduced a new paradox into the work they described: that of forming children. How do you “parent” children for adult life in a polity ordered to individual freedom, without impinging on the children’s freedom in the process? To form children according to your values—in this case, autonomy—entails the exercise of adult authority over those children. It also implies a vision of the good, to which such formation is ordered. But liberalism recoils from precisely such coercions and such moral visions. Instead it seeks to create and hold a neutral political space within which individuals and groups holding divergent moral frameworks may act in freedom according to their own consciences, and coexist peacefully as they do so. Strictly speaking, then, forming children for liberalism is a contradiction in terms.
Most people are pragmatists rather than moral or political philosophers. Thus, most parents remain content to ignore or fudge the contradiction, or simply to gesture at the reality (obvious to everyone except the most dogmatic liberals) that infants do not emerge as fully formed agentic individuals, but require formation to that end. In other words, children have a nature, and adults must help them realize it. With successive generations, though, the more educated and intellectually rigorous parents in particular have come to find this hierarchical relation incongruent with the rest of the liberal worldview—a predicament that has intensified as broad acceptance of a given “human nature” grows more contested. Thus, over time, a new consensus has emerged whereby autonomy is so sacrosanct—even among very young children—that child-rearing must take place without coercion of any kind. Those most committed to this outlook sometimes call it “gentle parenting,” implying the presence of ungentleness, even violence, in any imposition of parental authority upon a child, however loving the intent or benign the outcome.
The privileging of any vision of the good whatsoever in children’s upbringing has come to be seen as a dereliction of the central parental duty, which is to enable children’s maximal self-actualization in perfect freedom. The resulting approach is less extreme than it sounds. In most educated circles, its core practice is reflexive, and contained in the sentiment, “I don’t mind what you do, I just want you to be happy.” This is the most common expression of the fudge that increasingly replaces the Christian legacy of imago Dei, as a means of resolving the contradiction between parental authority and individual autonomy. In her introduction to the book, Wiseman characterizes her own childhood and upbringing along broadly these lines, in terms borrowed from the philosopher Agnes Callard: “acceptance parenting.”
Acceptance parents hold that it is maximally ethical to allow one’s children to define for themselves what a good life looks like. In this rubric, parents do not tell their children what to do. Rather, they are enablers, supporting and facilitating the organic self-actualization of their offspring. The parents’ role is to provide resources, to act as a force multiplier, or else to get out of the way. As Callard puts it, in Wiseman’s quotation: “What’s radically new is not, at heart, how concerned or permissive we’ve become, but how fully we have given over to our children the job of defining ‘happiness.’”
The most affecting aspect of What Are Children For? is its powerful evocation of the moral confusion acceptance parenting inculcates in the adults who were raised by it—even, or perhaps especially, among the intelligent, sensitive, articulate, and well read, such as Rachel Wiseman and Anastasia Berg. Wiseman describes having been raised in this way, by parents who “did not wish to impose a vision of happiness on us; we were meant to discover it for ourselves”:
All my life, my parents have wanted my sister and me to be happy. I was offered every individual freedom possible—freedom to choose my career, to find love, to attain creative satisfaction. But what pleasures and pursuits to seek out and which to avoid, what aspirations and projects merit sacrifice, what challenges are worth the trouble—all of these judgments were to be worked out on our own, more or less played by ear.
Wiseman describes asking her mother whether any hypothetical life choice of Wiseman’s could have disappointed her parents. Dropping out of college? Converting to fundamentalist Christianity? Nothing could induce her mother to deviate from the ethically approved stance of moral neutrality. “Her purported indifference was sweet, but also baffling.”
Growing up under this regime means, as Wiseman describes it, an overtly formless formation, without moral structures either to embrace or oppose, in which children are left to guess at the moral preferences their parents refuse to articulate and perhaps refuse even to acknowledge to themselves. Kids “are left to deduce the deeper, unarticulated expectations of the adults through shrouded patterns or signs.” And this ambiguity produces adults radically devoid of both positive guidance and negative examples: “Without a model to reproduce or rebel against, growing up with acceptance parents can feel tractionless, like a wheel spinning in a void.”
Though her own childhood sounds at least ordinarily happy, Wiseman describes being unable to picture a “happy family” in the archetypal sense. For a person raised without an explicit model of the good, it is only logical that “family” should scarcely register as an is, let alone an ought. And it is also logical that the prospect of motherhood would present itself not as a normative step on an expected journey, but as a series of anxious questions posed in a void. When reproduction no longer codes as is, because nothing does, and a liberal upbringing grants blanket permission to challenge every ought, what ground remains upon which to base a decision as consequential and irreversible as childbearing? Every exhaustive, sometimes exhausting, literate, literary, and lucidly argued rumination in What Are Children For? arises in the context of this emptiness.
The reflex response, for conservatives whose anthropology affords readier responses to such questions, is an exasperated eye-roll. But this would be both uncharitable and shortsighted. The void within which Wiseman, Berg, and their peers are struggling to discern how to live is, today, the default setting. And as Wiseman points out, older forms cannot simply be pasted back into the gap: “Once lost, traditional ways of life cannot easily be recovered.” In this, as in much else, the only way out is through.
The generation now at family-forming age has been given little aid in understanding why they should do their bit to ensure that humans continue to exist at all. At the risk of stating the obvious, the upshot of their ruminations will be of long-term consequence for all of us. And there is reason for optimism in Wiseman and Berg’s conclusion: that it is less the thinking that counts than the doing. It may seem, Wiseman and Berg argue, that we are faced with a question about “how to affirm life in the face of pain, sacrifice, and failure.” Really, though, we are faced with an invitation, an opportunity to act. “To affirm life is to live, and to do so in a certain way . . . committing to projects of value and relationships defined by love, accepting the burden of responsibility, allowing things to matter to you.”
To live is to act, then. And to act is to move beyond abstraction. It is to make a leap of faith, in accepting whatever constraints arise from the consequences of your action. We might quibble over how many of these constraints are given, and how many really are choices; it is a good start simply to acknowledge that living means the inverse of mere narrow autonomy. And this inverse is discovered only when infinite possibilities are allowed to collapse into the specifics of responsibility, love, and commitment.
Though Wiseman and Berg do not exactly spell this out, affirming life thus means accepting that what gives a particular life its shape are those aspects that are not wholly optional. As Berg puts it in her conclusion, to have children is to accept a bond that is fundamentally not transactional: “To have children is to allow yourself to stand in a relationship whose essence is not determined by the benefits it confers or the prices it exacts.” But a relation that is not transactional is not contractual; one may opt in, but opting out is more difficult. Accepting the irreversibility of important choices, and the permanence of important relations, is at the heart of affirming life.
In other words, the cure for a moral void grown so all-encompassing that it has thrown our species’ continuity into question is accepting that it isn’t all up to us. To have children is to allow the is back in—to make space not just for what one chooses, but also for “just what one does.” Wiseman and Berg demonstrate that at least some members of their generation remain willing to do so, despite everything, and hence to liberate themselves from the tyranny of absolute liberation. And inevitably, too, in the wake of this willingness, the ought returns: that is, the question of formation. This is a daunting responsibility for a person raised in the void.
But perhaps, having liberated themselves from empty autonomy, this generation will be willing to take the next step. Perhaps they will liberate their children from the terrible obligation of forming themselves.
Mary Harrington is a columnist at UnHerd.
Image by Jakob Becker von Worms, public domain. Image cropped.
