“What Are Children For?” Why Millennials and Gen-Zers Aren’t Having Kids

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, ANCHOR: Well, next, as reproductive rights play a central role in the upcoming election, former President Trump failed to offer specifics on how he would make childcare more affordable. When asked at an Economic Forum in New York, this comes at a time when people around the world are increasingly considering whether to have children at all. Rachel Wiseman and Anastasia Berg explore the reasons for this global trend in their new book, “What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice.” They join Michel Martin to discuss.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Bianna. Anastasia Berg, Rachel Wiseman, thank you so much for joining us.

ANASTASIA BERG, CO-AUTHOR, “WHAT ARE CHILDREN FOR?”: Thanks for having us.

RACHEL WISEMAN, CO-AUTHOR, “WHAT ARE CHILDREN FOR?”: It’s great to be here.

MARTIN: One of the things that intrigued me about your book is that it seems that, you know, in this country for lots of reasons, some of those sort of political, declining birth rate, people having fewer kids, has become a big thing, a political issue. But you’re telling us that this is actually a worldwide phenomenon. Anastasia, how do we know this and why do we think that is?

BERG: For Rachel and myself, we wanted to take our starting point of our investigation into why people aren’t having kids the real living deliberations, concerns, and experiences that they’re having. And what we found was that, especially for liberals and progressives around the world, we have forces that are encouraging them to delay thinking about the question of children and, in fact, that are alienating them from the prospect of having children. And these include narratives of personal, romantic, and professional success that all demand that we reach certain kinds of levels of readiness. So, stability in our careers, certainty in our romantic relationships before we even ask the question of children. And at the same time, we have ethical pressures, especially those that are coming out of climate change debates that are making us question whether or not we can so much as justify having children given the present realities.

MARTIN: I think that a lot of people, particularly in the United States, we sort of have a common conception that if there was more social support, perhaps through the government, through perhaps more subsidized childcare, perhaps more extensive and more supportive maternity leave or family leave, that people would have kids. So, basically, the idea that it’s basically an economic issue at the heart of it. But, Rachel, your research indicates that even in countries that have those things, birth rates are declining, can you dig into that a little bit more?

WISEMAN: Absolutely. In countries like the Nordic states, where they have extensive support for families, maternity leave and paternity leave, that is over a year and even child tax credits as there is in places like South Korea, people are still not having children at the rates that one might expect, which does put pressure on the narrative in the U.S. that it is just economics that is to blame for people not having kids today.

MARTIN: So, can I just ask a little bit about your, you know, methods, like how did you figure out the why, especially in countries that are so different?

BERG: There’s more and more empirical research into the kind of reasons that people will give for why they didn’t have kids or why they’re thinking about not having children. What we have found is that many people don’t necessarily know why they’re not having kids. The question is so fraught and so difficult to determine, even for oneself. So, it was very important for us to conduct both qualitative, which means open-ended question surveys that we’ve done with hundreds of millennials and Gen Z-ers years, and then we followed up with several dozen interviews where we engaged in conversations where we could explore the narratives, the explanations and the stories that people were giving that are related to this question.

MARTIN: You know, as we are speaking now, we are in the middle of a presidential election in the United States. You know, Vice Presidential Nominee J. D. Vance has been on the record of saying that people who have kids should have more of a stake in the future and that they should probably have more say over the policies, you know, of the country. Well, he used this phrase, childless cat ladies to say that, you know, the Democratic Party is run by childless cat ladies. The implication being that they’re selfish and weird, right? Can you engage with that? I mean, is there any kernel of truth to that?

WISEMAN: I think there is a very pervasive narrative that young people today are not having children because they’re selfish or because they’re immature. But what we found is actually the standards for readiness, for having a family are so high and so indeterminate today that actually it’s almost that the bar for maturity is set too high. People feel like they have to check off a very long list of to-dos before they will feel ready to settle down and have a family. They feel like they need to have very extensive savings, that they need to be very established in their career, that they need to have found a maximally compatible partner, and that they have achieved a certain level of self-discovery and self-fulfillment before they can even contemplate the question of whether or not they would like to have children.

MARTIN: Anastasia, why do people think that?

BERG: I think that as a response to both the reality and the representations of the millennial generation as particularly economically precarious, we have a kind of bunkering mentality where it’s precisely that generation that is, as we’re saying, holding itself up to an almost too high standard of maturity as opposed to, as Rachel was saying, this narrative of them as carefree, immature, and simply selfish. And it’s also worth adding that when people survey today are asked, what are the kind of conditions for a fulfilling life? They name many things as high priorities that are not consistent with what we think of as selfishness. People rate political activism and, quote/unquote, making the world a better place as one of the things that are necessary to lead a fulfilling life. It’s children in particular that we’re finding now squarely at the bottom of that list.

MARTIN: So, what is really the dominant reason? And you say, is it really the money? It’s not really that it’s expensive and exhausting, said a person with two kids in college. But is the real reason that, like you said, people feel that the bar for being a parent is really high and also that it interferes with your personal development? Is that really the core of it?

WISEMAN: I think both of those things point to something really fundamental, which is that whether or not you become a parent is something that you have to choose and justify in a way that you didn’t necessarily before. For my mother’s generation, it was almost considered a given that, you know, she would want to become a parent. It was kind of an opt out situation versus an opt in situation. Whereas for young people today, they really feel like they need to be able to give a reason for why they want to have children, to have all of that figured out. And that, you know, only gets exacerbated by these scripts and narratives that are so pervasive today that encourage people to delay and postpone the decision.

MARTIN: Is this a function of people who are educated liberal elites?

WISEMAN: In fact, this is something that’s becoming more pervasive across sectors of society. So, we see in lower socioeconomic status groups people are delaying having children longer than before. I think there is a tendency to assume that this is just a problem of the elite. But in fact, it’s a global phenomenon, and it’s seen across sectors of society.

MARTIN: But among religiously conservative people, is that also the case?

BERG: This is definitely a phenomenon of secular society. And what’s interesting is that specifically in the U.S. context, not only has this become issue that’s divided across secular and religious lives, but we see it also becoming increasingly politicized. So, if there was a point in the not-so-distant past where Republicans and Democrats argued about who is the party of family values, today, no such argument exists. And in fact, we see that people feel think increasingly that to be on the left means eschewing a kind of distance and even antipathy to the question of children. And that’s — and we see that because for every kind of policy failure, we see a willingness to put a — threaten the absence of reproduction in its phase. So, whether it’s climate change, the repeal of Roe v. Wade, or the lack of social welfare provisions in the U.S. And because we also see an increased willingness to be quite negative on children, say, in our public spaces. So, I was recently asked, because we are engaged in this topic, to comment on the fact that in public spaces, we see more and more people asking for child free zones, whether in restaurants or when they’re celebrating their weddings.

MARTIN: This is a question which is mostly relevant to the United States, but obviously, there was a seismic, you know, event when the Supreme Court, you know, overturned nationwide access to abortion by overturning Roe v. Wade. Do you think that has had an effect on the way people think about having children?

WISEMAN: Yes. I think that the Dobbs decision has had a couple of different effects. One important one is that it seeded a kind of wariness, especially among liberals and progressives, even about discussing the question of whether or not to have children. It has made this conversation overall conservatively coded, such that it has made it even harder for liberals and progressives to embrace the choice to have children. But we think that’s actually quite a negative development because it only allows the right to set the agenda for women’s reproductive rights and their choices in yet another way.

MARTIN: You know, one of the other interesting political developments in the United States is that the Republican nominee for president, the former president, Donald Trump, he has bragged previously about appointing the justices — nominating the justices who then overturned Roe v. Wade. But in recent days, he has come out strongly in favor of sort of a maximalist view of in vitro fertilization, which has also been in legal jeopardy in some places because of the Dobbs decision. He said that the government’s going to pay for it. He’s going to make private insurers pay for it and he’s kind of waffle on his previous stance about abortion restrictions. What do you make of that?

WISEMAN: Yes. Well, I do think that he’s panicking a little bit about the — about having the Dobbs decision pinned on him and he understands that’s a real threat to his electoral prospects in November. But also, I think with IVF in particular he is trying to stake out a position that is pro family, but also, you know, progressive.

MARTIN: Which is a difficult needle to thread. So, is there some middle ground between this sort of maximalist pronatalist position and one that says kids are an expensive hobby? Is there some middle ground between those two?

BERG: Well, there certainly is. And the way I tend to hear that question is whether or not there’s a possibility for liberals and progressives, i.e., those who are staunchly in support of reproductive rights for women to embrace having children as an unconditional good or something that’s inherently good, not just one project among many that we should tolerate like we tolerate people’s hobbies. I think that is possible. And I think one key to that is to notice that all the kind of goals that are identified with the left, if it’s mitigating climate change, if it’s introducing lasting social change, if it’s healing our political system, if it’s creating welfare in the nation, all these projects and pursuits, which are the definition of the liberal and progressive robust human future, they presuppose a human future, i.e., they presuppose that people will do their share in bringing about future generations. Now, that means that some people will have biological children. It also means that other people will be contributing to that human future in other ways, they will be political activists, they will be teachers, they will be journalists, they’ll be mentors, they’ll be godparents. Rachel’s the godparent to my children, for example. So, there are many ways of doing that. But I think once we notice that having children is the bedrock of a robust human future, no matter how exactly we envision it, that is the key to that middle ground that you ask about. That’s the key to realizing that embracing — not just tolerating, but fully embracing the choice to have children and to raise them is not inconsistent with defending women’s rights to choose their own reproductive agendas and fates for themselves.

MARTIN: Is this a problem that you do have an increasingly large cohort of people who aren’t interested in having kids?

BERG: From our perspective, what is a problem is not the fact that birth rates are declining per se, but it is the fact that we think that people in our cohort are having difficulties navigating the choice whether to have children because of the dominance of kinds of narratives of what it means to be a successful adult, what it means to be ethically, morally, and politically responsible today, what they cause is a kind of procrastinating attitude with a view to children with the result that the decision whether or not to have children ends up being made for increasingly many people as opposed to being made by them. And that we think is a problem. We think that young women today who are not feeling comfortable discussing their fertility is a problem. We think that people assuming that you have to have all your — parts of your life lined up and secure before having children, that could be a problem. And we think that there is a preponderance of ethical arguments kind of up in the air that make us feel like perhaps having children is a kind of luxury consumer choice, but not something that as a morally responsible adult, that is somewhere left of center, you can happily and proudly embrace, we think that’s a problem. And that’s what we’re offering in our intervention.

WISEMAN: The fact that liberals and progressives are so hesitant to embrace a positive justification for family only makes establishing those kinds of social programs that they take so seriously and think are so important, it makes it even harder to implement them. If you cannot say, why having families is valuable, it’s then hard to defend, for instance, a child tax credit.

MARTIN: Do you have a solution?

BERG: I think we need two things. The first is to normalize having conversations about children. And by that, I mean, having conversations with oneself, in one’s peer group, and very importantly, within romantic relationships early and confidently so that that kind of thinking can actually make a difference and enable people to plan their lives. And the second thing I’d like to see is in our educational environment, giving us an opportunity to raise what we haven’t discussed so far, which is the question of the worth of human life in the present and in the future. We see increased doubt, novels, and film representations today give us an image of ourselves as listless, as selfish, as incredibly self- absorbed, a kind of image that really does raise the question of do we deserve a human future? And that I’d like to see young people today given the opportunity to think through these challenges.

MARTIN: Anastasia Berg, Rachel Wiseman, thank you both so much for speaking with us.

BERG: Thank you for having us.

WISEMAN: Thank you.