Should People Have Children?

What Would the Children Say?

*Edvard Munch, The Sick Child (1885–86). Gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle.*

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Having children may or may not be good for us—but what about for the children?

Whether or not to have children is, perhaps, the most important question of all.

Despite not having any himself, Pope Francis has said, in no uncertain terms, that people ought to have children:

A society with a greedy generation, that doesn’t want to surround itself with children, that considers them above all worrisome, a weight, a risk, is a depressed society … The choice not to have children is selfish. Life rejuvenates and acquires energy when it multiplies: it is enriched, not impoverished.

Pope Francis may not have watched the news, or the weather, but he has at least looked into the Bible. Psalm 127 tells us that ‘children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is His reward’. And in Genesis, the very first thing that God says to Adam is, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth…’

For most of human history, children were a religious duty, as well as a biological destiny, a social expectation, an economic asset, and an insurance policy. The question of whether to have them barely arose—and contraception was in any case more hit than miss.

The Rise of Childlessness

In most times and places, the only truly significant thing that a woman could do was to bring forth children. Women were married off at a young age and, for the most part, did not have much choice or control over their reproductive lives.

Things changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century with the advent of women’s rights and reliable forms of contraception. Owing to the state pension and social support, people no longer had to rely on having children to underwrite their old age. And childlessness today is much less stigmatised than it used to be—and, in fact, increasingly lauded.

The more educated a woman is, the less likely she is to have children. For many women, children conflict with work; whereas, for men, children may mean working harder than they would otherwise have needed to. Educated women may also struggle to find a suitable partner, or look upon having a partner as more of a hindrance than a help. Interestingly, in the long run, people with children and people without (both men and women) report being similarly satisfied, or dissatisfied, with their lives. And both groups have a similar life expectancy.

Another factor in the rise of childlessness is the decline of marriage. Many people equate marriage with children, and being unmarried is one of the strongest predictors of childlessness—even though more than half of children in England and Wales are now born outside marriage or civil partnership.

Why We Want Children

Before running through some of the arguments for and against having children, it is worth reminding ourselves that, beneath it all, we are animals, and that the purpose of all animal life, and all life, is survival and reproduction.

For many people, the drive to reproduce is an irreducible given that is impervious to reason and argument. The philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe (d. 1990) argued that the human capacities for reason and self-awareness break with nature, giving us more than we, as a part of nature, are able to carry. So as not to go mad, ‘most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.’

The novelist George Eliot made a similar point in her novel, Middlemarch (1871):

That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

Had our parents been clear-thinking, it may be that none of us would have been born—and be worrying about whether to have children.

There remains a lot of social pressure on both women and men, but especially women, to have children. This pressure may be experienced first and foremost as parental expectation, even if it remains largely unspoken. But even without any pressure, many people would still choose to have children. If anything, it is a romantic idea. A friend once told me that he loved his partner so much that he wanted to mingle his genetic material with hers and live alongside what that would look like. He was a zoologist.

Beyond the romance, children can fill our lives with meaning, purpose, and activity. They can remove us from our adult preoccupations into the simpler, more immediate, and more innocent dimension of our own childhood, which we can re-live through them. The creation of another human being is almost God-like, and their need for us, at least in the early years, can give us a God-like sense of power and importance. We hope, or imagine, that they will grow up to be successful and dutiful, that they will become our pride and solace, and that they will imitate and flatter us by having children of their own.

When we die, they will say some fine words at our funeral and garden our grave. They will carry forth our name, our history, even our traits and habits, our manners and ways. They will inherit our accumulated estate, protecting it from dispersion and dilapidation. They will prolong our work and advocate for our memory.

In short, we give life so that life might give back to us.

A Gift to the World?

Perhaps, having a child is not just about us. It is also, we tell ourselves, an act of generosity, a gift to the world—and a new reader for me, thank you.

But is that really so? More and more people are taking a contrary view. The world population stands at around 8 billion and is still rising at an annual rate of over one per cent. For every person alive in Britain or America, how many animals suffer or die, if only to feed that person? How much carbon dioxide is emitted? And how much plastic waste produced? Putting aside animal exploitation and extinction and other forms of environmental degradation, many experts are alarmed about global heating and its impact on future generations. We may go to great lengths to reduce our carbon footprint, but no amount of restraint and recycling on our part could ever make up for the carbon footprint of bringing yet another person into the world.

Whatever they might do, the childless are far more carbon-neutral.

We might hope that, instead of adding to the problem, our child will grow up to become a part of the solution. Perhaps we could offset their carbon footprint through environmental action, for example, by sponsoring the planting of trees.

But even if having a child does contribute to the greater good, we could make an even bigger contribution by adopting an already existing child, or by remaining childless so as to concentrate all our resources on making a difference.

Pregnant in Soul

In the Symposium, Plato says that animals enter into a state of heat because they seek to reproduce and thereby attain a species of immortality. Human beings also seek to become immortal, and are prepared to take great risks, even to die, to attain fame and honour. Most people are pregnant in body and beget children to preserve their memory, but a few are pregnant in soul and choose instead to beget wisdom and virtue. As their children are more beautiful and immortal, people who are pregnant in soul have more to share with one another and a stronger bond of friendship between them. Everyone, says Plato, would rather have their children than human ones:

Who when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them everlasting glory?

Plato thereby distinguishes between the lesser immortality of leaving behind children and grandchildren, which is relatively easy to achieve but only preserves our memory for at most three or four generations; and the greater immortality of leaving behind a significant artistic, intellectual, or social legacy, which is more enduring but also a lot harder to achieve. The childless Plato wrote the Symposium some 2,400 years ago, and here we are today still quoting from it.

Greater immortality may be insecure, but so too is lesser immortality. Our children may become people of a kind that we cannot imagine. They may write us off, or even murder us. Of course, no one imagines that. Lesser immortality is also morally problematic. The more we regard our children as extensions of ourselves, the less fully we regard them as ends in themselves.

The Costs of Having Children

Greater immortality may not be in our grasp, but there are other reasons for remaining childless. Some people do not feel that they will make good enough parents—if only because they have no affinity for children. Others, quite simply, have not found a suitable partner, or one that they are willing to put up with for the next however many years. Contrary to popular belief, relationships tend to suffer from the arrival of a child, and those who have found a partner may wish to protect their relationship by remaining childfree. In addition, many people fear that childbearing may be too traumatic or inconvenient, or that it might damage their health or physique. Some might already be in poor health, or carrying a genetic disorder that they worry about transmitting.

And then there are the costs involved. According to the Child Poverty Action Group, raising a child to the age of 18 now costs around £250,000 for a couple and £290,000 for a lone parent. In other words, roughly the price of a house—or two houses if you send them to a fee-paying school.

As well as financial costs, there are also opportunity costs. We swap friends, free time, restorative lie-ins, sleek interior décor, romantic evenings, and spontaneous travel for soiled nappies, temper tantrums, broken sleep, broken things, babysitting, and school runs—and all, perhaps, to end up with a miserable or obnoxious teen on our hands.

What if, deep down, we didn’t even love them?

Will Someone Think of the Children?

Having a child may well be good for us. It might even be good for the world. But is it actually good for the child itself?

For Immanuel Kant, people, by virtue of being people, ought never to be treated merely as means to an end, but always also as ends-in-themselves. If we are going to bring a child into the world, our first thought should be, not for our own good or even the greater good, but for the good of the child itself.

As we cannot ask a child that does not yet exist for its opinion or consent, we are left to make that decision on its behalf—and to live with that reckoning for the rest of our lives.

If we can see that the child would lead a miserable life, we may feel a moral obligation not to bring it into the world. But if we could be sure that it would lead a fulfilled life, we would not feel a moral obligation to bring it into the world. In other words, we intuitively place more value on the prevention of suffering than on the maximisation of happiness. It seems, then, that preventing a possible person’s suffering matters more than providing for their possible happiness.

Most people report being satisfied with their lives. Even so, do our lives contain more suffering than happiness? Does life in general contain more suffering than happiness? On some level, this boils down to asking whether life is preferable to death, or, at least, to non-existence.

Is Life Better Than Non-Existence?

In one of his Theban plays, Oedipus at Colonus (401 BCE), the tragedian Sophocles has the chorus sing:

Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best; but when a man has seen the light of day, this is next best by far, that with utmost speed he should go back from where he came.

One of the most famous of the lost writings of Plato’s long-time student Aristotle is Eudemus, or On the Soul. A fragment preserved in Plutarch contains the essence of what later philosophers came to call the Wisdom of Silenus (Silenus being the tutor of the wine god Dionysus):

You, most blessed and happiest among humans, may well consider those blessed and happiest who have departed this life before you… This thought is indeed so old that the one who first uttered it is no longer known; it has been passed down to us from eternity, and hence doubtless it is true. Moreover, you know what is so often said and passes for a trite expression. What is that, he asked? He answered: It is best not to be born at all; and next to that, it is better to die than to live, and this is confirmed even by divine testimony … Midas, after hunting, asked his captive Silenus somewhat urgently, what was the most desirable thing among humankind … At length, when Midas would not stop plaguing him, he erupted with these words, though very unwillingly: ‘you, seed of an evil genius and precarious offspring of hard fortune, whose life is but for a day, why do you compel me to tell you those things of which it is better you should remain ignorant? For he lives with the least worry who knows not his misfortune; but for humans, the best for them is not to be born at all, not to partake of nature’s excellence; not to be is best, for both sexes. This should be our choice, if choice we have; and next to this is, when we are born, to die as soon as we can.’ It is plain therefore, that he declared the condition of the dead to be better than that of the living.

We ordinarily assume that life is a gift. But Silenus, famed for his wisdom and compelled to speak, tells us that it is in fact a burden. The reversal is plausible enough to be transmitted by the likes of Sophocles and Aristotle.

The World as Will

Arthur Schopenhauer, who shared in this ancient ‘wisdom’, held that beneath our world of appearances lies the world of will, a blind process of striving and reproduction that courses through all of nature and carries us with it into a life of endless strife and servitude:

Awakened to life out of the night of unconsciousness, the will finds itself an individual, in an endless and boundless world, among innumerable individuals, all striving, suffering, erring; and as if through a troubled dream it hurries back to its old unconsciousness. Yet till then its desires are limitless, its claims inexhaustible, and every satisfied desire gives rise to a new one. No possible satisfaction in the world could suffice to still its longings, set a goal to its infinite cravings, and fill the bottomless abyss of its heart. Then let one consider what as a rule are the satisfactions of any kind that a man obtains. For the most part nothing more than the bare maintenance of this existence itself, extorted day by day with unceasing trouble and constant care in the conflict with want, and with death in prospect…

The will creates deficiency upon deficiency for us to satisfy, or try to satisfy. Satisfaction, or happiness, is not a positive state but merely a momentary reprieve from this ceaseless striving and suffering. Even if satisfaction can be sustained for a short time, boredom is bound to set in. All considered, it would have been better if we and the world had never existed.

The only lasting liberation is to arrive at the realisation, which is the height of Indian spirituality, that the world of appearances and we within it are but illusions, renounce these illusions, and await the release of death.

For my part, I think that Schopenhauer is being too pessimistic, and too binary. It is possible to relish striving, or, at least, some forms of striving—like striving to make a difference, or striving to become a better person. It is also possible to rise above suffering, to grow from it, to sublime it into something bigger than ourselves. Even if life is more suffering than satisfaction, it can still be worthwhile, and maybe more so than a hypothetical lifetime of continuous satisfaction.

Life is not merely the balance of our suffering and satisfaction, but a journey of turning suffering into satisfaction, which might be called art, and which is the greatest happiness of all.