a few more thoughts about KIDS

i WILL be nice to your baby if I meet him/her, I promise

A quick addendum, in light of some thought-provoking responses I’ve received.

1. It is true that some select people are better able to concentrate on other projects when they have children. I would never deny this! Of course the rich variety of human life is good, on the whole, for literature and thought! But there are other sorts of people, and the historical record is chock full of them. I quote from an absolutely deranged email I wrote (with apologies to its recipient, whose very eloquent emails I would never quote without permission): “Of course not everyone needs to refrain from having children to write great books or undertake other ambitious and meaningful projects, and many people throughout history have written great books because of their experiences of children and childbirth (although not all of these books are flattering to the children....cf Life Among the Savages and The Fifth Child). Every significant human experience is a potential source of literary inspiration or enrichment, certainly, but it also seems obvious to me that there are simply different personalities with different capacities for wide-ranging devotions. Some people, apparently you among them, are capacious; others, like me, are monomaniacal. The letters of Flaubert or the diaries/letters of Kafka or the proto-autofictional Colette novel The Vagabond all paint portraits of artists who needed to sever themselves from all consuming human attachments in order to write--to a much greater degree than I, a married person with many close friends, feel I need to. (Not that I'm under the illusion that I'm Kafka or Colette or Flaubert, but if you're not at least trying to be these people, you're not writing correctly.) And in my estimation, in each case, the solitude was worth it. I don't think Kafka should've married Felice, or that Flaubert should've married Colet, or that Colette should've settled down, at the expense of The Trial or Madame Bovary or Cheri. Maybe it's a failing on Kafka's and Flaubert's and Colette's parts that they couldn't write as they did and lead normal, social lives, but it is what it is. If a person finds themselves saddled with a nature that demands solitude or detachment or morbid single-mindedness to do what it was put on earth to do, so be it.”

2. Several people have sent me this thoughtful, illuminating thread about how the birth rate “crisis” is overblown. For the most part, being off Twitter (I’m never going to call it X unless I’m under duress) is good for my “mental health,” but occasionally I miss good and not just infuriating contributions to The Discourse:

   https://twitter.com/zunguzungu/status/1822975801824022728. One of the claims here is that“the rate of childlessness has risen among women from 10 percent to 15-20 percent,” and that this is not as dramatic a decline as it is often made out to be. True—and I completely agree that a 15-20% decline is certainly not the most pressing issue in society by a long shot, and that people who panic about birth rates generally have an ulterior (and quite sexist and racist) agenda—but it is still a sort of dramatic decline, I think, or dramatic enough to be in want of explanation. For the dataheads: I’m skeptical of fetishizing survey answers for a lot of reasons, but I do think that the data that exist (data is plural, did you know? My husband reminds me of this often) support the idea that this 15-20% decrease is the product of the exercise of agency. Unsurprisingly, some of the big surveys I’ve been able to find don’t seem to provide interviewees with the option of responding “I have some other purpose/calling/life project I’m devoted to,” which is symptomatic of the bias towards the dichotomy I critiqued in my previous post. This NYT survey seems to assume that the options are “I want to have kids but I can’t for some reason” or “I want more leisure time!” Be that as it may, the most common reason young adults don’t want to have kids is that they want more “leisure time,” which is the option that most closely approximates, “I want to do other stuff that I care about.” In this Pew survey, where participants were given the option to say “they want/wanted to focus on other things,” that’s the second most common reason for forgoing having children (the most common is “they just don’t/didn’t want to,” so, yeah).

3. More compelling evidence for the idea that there really isn’t a birth rate crisis, sent to me by the brilliant Ryan Ruby: according to this Economist article (maybe I should start reading The Economist? I confess that I don’t do so regularly) “more than half the drop in America’s total fertility rate is explained by women under the age of 19 now having next to no children.” So it seems like a lot of the “crisis,” at least in America, is a function of the reduction of teen pregnancies, which is surely a good thing, even by conservative lights? (Although…perhaps this statistic explains why some of the reactionaries who are obsessed with birthrates are also such odious hardliners about allowing exceptions to abortion restrictions, even for teenagers or women who are even younger).

4. For a discussion of whether to have children that isn’t full of irritating moralizing or presumptuous assumptions about people’s motives and capacities—and that provides positive reasons for having children, without suggesting that everyone should find these reasons decisive—I once again recommend What Are Children For, a book written by my genius colleagues, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman.

5. This song rules and I wish I could play it for anyone who ever recommends I do anything “wellness”-related: