Why do we have children?
Having a child means to have ‘the responsibility to love’. That is what my partner said and I think he put it beautifully. Having a child is an existential experience, one of the very special ones in life. Since I had it, I am intrigued about the question: to have or not to have children.
There are so many things to be said about motherhood, about parenthood. Why and why not. I have not really thought about it before becoming a mother, because it happened by lucky accident.
So why do we have children and why not?
First of all, having children is natural, it is the cycle of life and death. If we want to continue living as a species, he have to reproduce ourselves. On the other hand, there are good reasons today to not have children because the pressing issues of our planet demand rather less than more of us. It is a very abstract and external reasons to not have children, but a valid one. If we are too numerous on this planet, it is good if some resign from increasing the numbers further.
Why do we want to have children? — They are our life insurance? We keep young through them, we get to live a second life or even more? We want to get to “meet them” (Kawakami)? We want to care for someone as much as or more than for ourselves? We want to get to know a different kind of love — reslovability? We want to see what our genes can mix together? We want to play god and create & form a human being to our ideal? We do not want to be alone when old? We want to undo the mistakes our parents made with us? We want to live life through our children, let them live the life we wanted and did not have? You want to grow as a person?
So many reasons. When I read Kawakami and the expression wanting to meet your child, I did not understand what she meant, but I think I know now. Your child will obviously learn a lot from you and at the same time they come with and develop their own personality. And they are just like any other person — even if very special! — that you “meet” in life. You discover them, you get to know them. First, they do not speak, they move, they make signs, they cry and then step by step they reveal more and more while discovering the world and getting to know you as well. I would say this is a big part of my why of having children now. I did not think this through before, it is how I see things now. I am an adventurer, moving through unchartered territory, discovering new things like my child every day. We are on this adventure together all three of us.
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I know there are also a lot of women out there who do not want children. I know some in my inner friends circle. I think there are very different types of mothers and non-mothers and I feel like that especially with this topic generalisations fly through the air. Some generalisations uttered by some non-mothers even. My friends who do not want children for example tell me that they are much too egoistic to have a child. What a generalisation — and quite horrible I feel. Horrible as in a judgement about themselves and horribly simplistic of what it means to have a child. Having a child does not mean that you are out of a sudden no longer thinking about yourself. That is perhaps a kind of — particularly — motherhood more than parenthood that is still portrayed by society, a residue of patriarchy: the perfect mother who selflessly forgets herself, does everything for her children and when they turn 18 she collapses and does no longer know who she is. I am not that mother and I will never be and it is probably a societal myth. But what they are saying is maybe something else — being too egoistic is maybe a shorthand for a different reason. What if they feel like that the responsibility of having a child is too big? You carry your emotional baggage, you may know how do deal with it yourself (or not), but you do not wish to transmit it to your child and do not feel able to spare your child from your bruises and hurt that you have accumulated in your life up until the point of the question of having a child. This seems to be a very caring reason, not at all egoistic. You care for the unborn being that you would help bring into this world. They might also feel like that their childhood did not equip them to become a good parent, because their parents have not been good to them and they do not have a role model. This might even be intricately linked to the other reason, because especially our family can inflict those wounds on us. One friend actually when pressed a bit more on why they do not want to have children said exactly that: they would not feel confident to be a good parent due to the experiences made in their childhood and how these are still influencing their life. These reasons are comprehensible, commendable even — they are thinking about the well-being of the child they would bring into this world and their responsibility towards them. At the same time, should the past decide our future? Should our inner child that has been hurt, continue to be hurt and stand in the way of something that we otherwise would want? Can we not heal our inner child by being the parent to our child that we always longed for?
Statistics seem to indicate the more women are emancipated (or at least able to), enjoy “equal treatment” (we are still far from it and child bearing and all the questions around it are one of the major areas!), the more women are actually given the choice, the freedom to decide, the less they want children. Women also have children much later in life now. In the UK, the average woman is 31 years when she has her first child. 18% of women born in 1975 have no children. In all of the richer, industrialised countries, birth rates are around 1.4, sometimes 2 at best. One factor surely is contraception — for some women in certain countries this is not available and abortions are illegal or too costly. They do not have a choice in many cases. But it comes back to the argument that when women do have the choice, they choose to have less children. But this does not show that women do not want children anymore at all, it might just reflect the fact that bearing children is a lot. And to this I can speak as well. It is magical and beautiful to have a living thing, a tiny human being in your tummy and what we start to learn about the symbiosis of mother and child during and even after pregnancy with breastfeeding is mind-blowing. At the same time, it is “work” and it takes a lot from your body. It changes your body, not everyone can spring back from it, some better than others, but you can feel and see the marks. Having two children is probably manageable for your body, also depending on when you have the first child. As women tend to have children later and later, they also have less opportunity to have many children. It just gets more difficult, even frustratingly and despairingly difficult. The older you are, the less you can expect your body to spring back from the pregnancy. The older you get, less well can you cope with sleep deprivation.
Coming back to the why’s for not having children. One can be just the simple feeling. I guess that some women just do not feel that it is right for them. They cannot imagine it, cannot see themselves as mothers. [Although I could not really either] We cannot really know why we feel that way and I think, becoming a mother, a parent is an experience that we cannot “train for”/cannot grasp in advance. We cannot return a child, so it is absolutely understandable to not go for such a risky business. We cannot know what the experience will do to us.
Another reason to not have children is also that you find it selfish or egoistic [turning the egoism argument on its head], creating your biological mascot that you can form after your image. This testifies however to a rather dark view on parenting. Yes, you will transmit your values, habits, culture, attitudes to your child, at the same time you hopefully leave room for the child to experiment and develop their own personality.
One very classic reason — and I guess this might also be part of what those have in mind when they say they are too egoistic to have a child: Having children is tedious. You have to wake up at night, you do not get much sleep, much rest; you cannot really focus; you cannot go out, do whatever you want. Yes, it is true and I think that I can be quite confident in saying that EVERY parent feels that way sometimes. The thing about becoming a parent is that you cannot get this very special experience without some “discomfort” or “work” [work — but no-one will pay you for it]. When we are really honest with ourselves then nothing in life comes with only upsides — actually it is the definition of life to be a thread of experiences of all different shades and colours. Our life is exciting and is worth living, because we can feel joy. But we can only feel joy, when we also know the absence of it and also all the other different emotions which can roughly be categorised as positive and negative. Those who decide to have children despite this massive downside are optimistic that the upsides are worth it.
I am not the altruistic, 100% mum. I have needs and one of them was to get back to work as quickly as reasonable. I try to balance my needs and the needs of my child. My child was the youngest in nursery. I can be a better mum when I have my work. I keep seeing my (childless) friends and I do not feel the urge to talk about my baby all the time — that is boring. The interesting part is living it, not talking about it. You can talk about it with the initiated (other parents), but also that will get boring quite quickly. And in comes the very important ingredient aside working: my partner. He is in it and committed like me. I would never have wanted a child without him. Why do I say all this? Because I feel there are so many generalisations about mothers — I heard them first hand. Only mothers wake up at night and hear the baby cry, only mothers can sleep next to the baby, the dad would roll over and kill the baby. [Honestly, the very first nights after leaving the hospital, it was only my partner who heard the baby — I was too exhausted.] So there is a societal expectation to be a different mother than I feel I am. And then there is obviously the biological difference between men and women and the difference the political system (still) makes, especially in the UK where I live. We are the ones that have the hormones after giving birth, we are breastfeeding. But the big thing is the system: Our political system everywhere, except in a few exceptional places like the Scandinavian countries, does not value mother- or parenthood. In the UK the father gets two statutory weeks — it is a disgrace, the mother cannot even properly recover from birth in that time. There is shared parental leave but it is paid peanuts, so as the woman has to breastfeed (if she actually does), she stays home the whole time and the man works to make money. Nursery places are only mostly for children from 1 year onwards, sometimes 6 months. So why would women that are interested in having a career want to have children? It only undermines their advancement, it is not paid, it is not valued by society + all the downsides mentioned about parenthood in general. There are all kinds of stereotypes as well, about latte drinking mums <> career hungry women with no motherly bone in their body. I wonder how many women rationally decide to not have children because of the system. Having been through it myself and I was lucky (finding a nursery, finding a fitting job etc), I feel and felt uneasiness all the way. It is a constant wrestling between I-can-do-it-despite-all-the-obstacles and I-wished-someone-would-help/it-would-be-different-and-someone-could-see-what-my-situation-is-like.
And still: The love for your children is very special — and I can say this and it is not meant as a cliché, I was not sure if I wanted children. Definitely worth it. I changed and not just the fact that my life changed. I changed. I am different now. I am stronger, more confident, more generous to myself, more relaxed. I am very happy as well. Me and my partner are stronger than ever and our child really is the fruit of our love. Having a child is one of those few experiences in life that really mean something — it is an existential and essential experience and there are not so many of that kind. I definitely did not want to have missed it.
That said. You cannot train for it and once you have done it, you cannot really go back on it. Now that I have done it, I don’t want to miss it, but does it mean that I could not have been happy in my life without it? I am thinking of those who want children but cannot have them or they just miss the window because they cannot find the right partner in time. I am a firm believer that life often gives us the things that we need — not necessarily the things that we want. Not being able to have children must be very hard and at the same time, the good thing is that you cannot really know on what you are missing out on. Loving your nieces and nephews or friend’s children is not the same. It might be however very fulfilling! If I had not been able to have a child, I think I would have been happy nonetheless — there would have been other children in my life if I wanted them to be — through family, friends or perhaps adoption or foster care. I now feel love for so many children that I encounter in public spaces, playgrounds, sports practice or nursery that I have absolutely no doubt that I could love an adopted child and they would not need to be a baby when they came to me.
