I have a very real problem with grandchildren. I don’t have any. I want some. Hell, I want one, but I have none. I joke that my kids have failed me by not providing me with the grandchildren I want, but it’s not a very funny joke, and my kids don’t find it funny at all. Apparently, I’m not alone.
Fertility rates have been dropping precipitously around the world for decades — in middle-income countries, in some low-income countries, but perhaps most markedly, in rich ones.
Fulfilling my desire to be a grandfather isn’t really much of a reason for my kids to have children, despite all I’ve done for them, but the list of reasons given for this decline in fertility rates in all demographics emits the unpleasant odor of excuses.
At its best, it reflects better educational and career opportunities for women, increasing acceptance of the choice to be child-free, and rising standards of living.
At its worst, though, it reflects a profound failure: of employers and governments to make parenting and work compatible; of our collective ability to solve the climate crisis so that children seem a rational prospect; of our increasingly unequal global economy. In these instances, having fewer children is less a choice than the poignant consequence of a set of unsavory circumstances.
Many young people latch on to these excuses with all their might, but the experience in Denmark suggests it’s just a rationalization to cover up the real problem.
DANES DON’T FACE the horrors of American student debt, our debilitating medical bills or our lack of paid family leave. College is free. Income inequality is low. In short, many of the factors that cause young Americans to delay having families simply aren’t present.
With their basic needs met and an abundance of opportunities at their fingertips, Danes instead must grapple with the promise and pressure of seemingly limitless freedom, which can combine to make children an afterthought, or an unwelcome intrusion on a life that offers rewards and satisfactions of a different kind — an engaging career, esoteric hobbies, exotic holidays.
The excuses all have one common thread; they’re external. They’re all problems outside of the person making them, not to mention problems for which neither they nor their generation are responsible, and so none of it is their fault. And as long as it’s not their fault, they have no responsibility to deal with it and can respond to any complaint by throwing blame elsewhere.
After all, if you’re starving and you can blame Bill Gates, you have no responsibility to figure out how to get food to eat and can just waste away secure in the righteousness of your blamelessness. Of course, you’re dead, but as long as you can blame society and boomers, you’re covered.
But there’s another theme percolating through the excuses, one that manages not to ever reach the surface as it isn’t anything child-bearing aged people want to hear, to think about, to acknowledge. The reason they don’t have children is that they are too immature and narcissistic to put anything ahead of their own self-interest.
Sure, kids are demanding, time-consuming and expensive. We managed. The entirety of humanity managed. We weren’t all rolling in dough from the dawn of time, but we managed. It’s not that it’s constant joy, but it’s more joy than not. More to the point, children bring a purpose to our lives that doesn’t exist when we were children ourselves. We all thought we were the centers of our respective universes when we were young, self-absorbed with our own feelings and dreams.
But then we grew up and realized that there was a bigger world than just us, and it wasn’t just some social imperative to perpetuate the species that drove us to reproduce, or that god, in his infinite wisdom, made the mechanism pleasurable, but that the results gave us a greater purpose than our own childish concerns.
If you trace back each of the excuses to its root, and do so honestly, each reflects the refusal to let go of self-interest for a good outside ourselves.
First, we are taught from puberty to avoid getting pregnant (or getting someone else pregnant), as if it were a disease. We are assured that we have the rest of our lives ahead of us, until suddenly we are 35 and are just starting to think about children and time is already short.
So you’re just too dumb, despite your Ph.D., to figure this out? You’re not 35 “suddenly,” but you couldn’t spend as much time as you obsessed over whether to get the new iPhone to figure out how your biological clock was doing?
Second, having children requires selflessness, a rarity today. It means setting aside the relentless self-absorption, self-promotion and personal-brand building that our society indulges. It requires us to put down our phone and laptop and even our work, and have a tea party with our 3-year-old.
Well no, it doesn’t require you to have a tea party, though it wouldn’t hurt, but it does require some small amount of selflessness. If only you were as good with selflessness as you were with making excuses. Heck, if only excuses could be monetized, in which case you would be fabulously wealthy and could afford to lavish money on those kids. But the truth is you still wouldn’t, because money is only an excuse.
At 34, I finally underwent the [egg freezing] procedure. Last year, I did another round. Ever since then, there’s a number I’ve been playing with as I’ve wondered about whether and when I will use those eggs. According to my back-of-the envelope calculations, I should have $200,000 saved before having a child.
The writer of the article, Anna Louie Sussman, explains in intimate detail her excuses, all of which come down to her caring more about herself than anything else. But that doesn’t stop her from reiterating socially acceptable excuses as if they’re real.
For decades, people with as much good fortune as I have were relatively immune to these anxieties. But many of the difficulties that have long faced working-class women, and especially women of color, are trickling up. These women have worked multiple jobs without stability or benefits, and raised children in communities with underfunded schools or poisoned water; today, middle-class parents, too, are time-starved, squeezed out of good school districts, and anxious about plastic and pollution.
So I asked my children, is this why you have failed in your duty to give me grandchildren? “Nah,” they replied, because I taught them not to lie to me. “We just haven’t met the right person on [name your dating app] yet.” Oh. Too bad one can’t just go to a bar, a party, a class, and, you know, meet someone anymore, but that’s just not done these days.