As a parent, you ask so many pressing, concrete questions—Does this movie give you nightmares? Is there enough sunscreen? Where are the Cheez-Its?—that the abstract questions often slip beneath the surface, only to resurface unbidden later. When you look up from your breakfast waffle batter one morning, see your kids, and think, “Wait a minute, did I make those people?” When you’re on lifeguard duty, you suddenly feel like an imaginary adult version of the kid in the pool is watching you, and you wonder, “How much of that adult is there already, and how much is still to come?” Parents know their children with astonishing, intimate accuracy, and yet each child is also an unknown—a whole and separate individual living an independent life in your home. This duality adds to both the challenge and the thrill of raising children.
The fact that children are their own people can surprise parents. That’s partly because young children are so hopelessly dependent, but it also reflects how we think about parenting. Before we have children, we often wonder whether we want them; we ponder whether they will make us happier or more mature, add meaning to our lives, or in some way fulfill our destiny. We talk as if having children is mainly “a matter of inclination, of personal desire, of appetite,” writes philosopher Mara van der Lugt in Begetting: What Does It Mean to Create a Child? She thinks that’s totally backwards. Like Dr. Frankenstein, we neglect the monster’s point of view. What will our potential children think of their existence? Will they be glad to have been born, or curse us for bringing them into being? Having children, argues van der Lugt, might best be viewed as “cosmic intervention, something great and wonderful—and terrible.” We decide on behalf of someone who cannot be consulted whether life is worth living, and we must be prepared at all times to be held accountable for its creation.
From a historical perspective, these are perhaps new concerns. Before contraception, writes van der Lugt, people simply had children throughout their lives, whether they wanted to or not. Back then, it was God who bore the moral burden of being “the creator”; we turned to him in bewilderment, asking him why he had bothered to create us when “man is born to sorrow, as sparks fly upward.” Today, however, we are all creators, and so the theological has become personal.
Begetting responds, accordingly, to a larger movement to rethink the ethics of reproduction. Against the pronatalists—including Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidate JD Vance—who urge us to have more children for practical, moral, and existential reasons, the antinatalists argue that having children might be morally wrong, perhaps because it increases the overall amount of suffering in the universe (life is hard!) or because it brings the planet closer to ecological collapse. Van der Lugt is not a pronatalist, but she is not an antinatalist either. She is simply arguing that we should face these questions more directly. Usually, she notes, people who don’t want children are asked to explain themselves. Maybe it should work the other way around, so that when someone says they want children, people ask, “Why?”
The problem is that it’s hard to say. Van der Lugt lists the reasons people have children, ranking them from immature (conformity, boredom, pleasing parents) to admirable (purpose, companionship, happiness, love). Yet she notes that even the best, most sincere reasons aren’t enough: Life can be full of struggles and potentially meaningless, death is inevitable and sometimes painful, and “love alone cannot justify all things.” (Philosophers aren’t usually easy to please.) Van der Lugt concludes that having children is such a big deal—especially for the children—that nothing we can say will really equal it. And so we might proceed with a sense of anxious, vague gratitude, admitting to ourselves that our future children might decide that what we’re doing is monstrous. Van der Lugt gives the example of a Flemish couple who took “parental vows” in the town hall. “In the presence of witnesses and a local judge, they promised their child things like safety, a proper education, no violence, and that they would look out for the child’s best interests in case of conflict,” she says. Many parents, probably most, hope to give their children such things. But the meaning of these hopes is different when expressed publicly, perhaps to someone who is not yet born. It is like humbling yourself before the judgment of the independent person your child will one day become.
And what happens when we have children? In the 2014 book Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships, philosopher Harry Brighouse and political scientist Adam Swift ask how we might relate to our children if we conceive of them as independent individuals from the beginning of their lives. There is a tension between the ideals of a liberal society and the widespread “ownership” of children, they write: “The idea that children belong in some way to their parents continues to influence many who reject the once widely held view that women belong to their husbands,” they note. But what is the alternative? What would a family look like if children’s basic autonomy was taken for granted, even in the years when they are most dependent on us?
Just as van der Lugt explores the mysteries of procreation by attempting to justify them in terms of first principles, Brighouse and Swift ask, “Why parents?” They consider several nonparental modes of child-rearing: “state-regulated quasi-orphanages in which children are raised by trained and specialized staff”; kibbutz-like institutions in which parents work with “designated parenting specialists”; and communes in which “a large group of adults raise a group of children together,” with no one particularly responsible for the others. Although there are theoretical reasons to favor such arrangements—one can imagine, for example, a state-run quasi-orphanage treating its charges equally, even though some families are wealthier than others—they conclude, after a lengthy discussion, that “children have a right to be raised by parents.” This is because children have a more general right to a good upbringing, and such upbringing is “best provided by specific people who interact with them continuously throughout their development.” Consistent, attentive caregivers—whether biological or not—are best placed to impart “family relational goods.”
This is a strange, almost distressing way of thinking about something as familiar as the family. And yet it leads to interesting results. If the relationship between parents and children is based not on the parents’ right of ownership of the children but on the children’s right to a particular kind of upbringing, then it makes sense to ask what parents must do to fulfill that right—and conversely, what is irrelevant to fulfilling that right. Brighouse and Swift, after numerous attempts to illustrate their ideas, conclude that their version of the family is somewhat less dynastic than usual. Some people believe, for example, that parents have the right to do whatever they can to give their children advantages in life. But from the authors’ point of view, some ways of favoring one’s children—from inheritance to funding an elite school—are not part of the bundle of “goods of family relations” to which children are entitled; indeed, it would be a mistake to confuse these transactions with those goods—love, presence, moral guardianship, etc. This is not to say that parents cannot give their children huge inheritances or send them to private schools. But it does mean that if the government decides to increase inheritance tax, it is not an infringement on a sacred parental right.
Likewise, we often think that parents have the right to pass on their values to their children. Do they? Passing on one’s values is, to a large extent, a natural consequence of an authentic relationship with one’s children. But not always. Children have a right to become more autonomous as they grow older, Swift and Brighouse write; they have a right to a parent-child relationship that encourages them to develop ever greater intellectual and emotional autonomy. Good parents therefore ensure that their children have “the cognitive skills and information necessary for autonomy” while also being careful not to increase too much “the emotional costs that their children must bear when they choose to reject parents’ views.” It’s OK to raise your children to be progressive or conservative, religious or secular, athletic or well-read. But it’s wrong to make it too difficult for them to give up your lifestyle. “For parents to successfully raise their children, they must establish themselves as loving authorities,” the authors write. A loving authority is not an ultimate authority.
In the dedication letter of their book, Brighouse and Swift quote from “On Children,” a poem by Kahlil Gibran:
“The fundamental point is simple,” they write. “Children are independent people who lead their own lives and have the right to make their own decisions about and act on how they want to lead those lives. They are not the property of their parents.”
But what about the nightmares, the sunscreen, and the Cheez-Its? Someone has to have a handle on all of this—or at least try to. Books like Begetting and Family Values can sometimes seem like caricature—the philosophical equivalent of my son protesting, “You’re not the boss of me!” But they actually draw a subtle line and identify an impossible balancing act. There are obviously parents who actually feel their children are an extension of themselves; you can see them standing on the sidelines at soccer games, gnashing their teeth and pulling out their hair. Even the most balanced parents, however, contain an element of self-destruction. To be a good parent—or to be a parent at all—you must exercise your power. But that power is constantly slipping through your fingers, undermined by the unpredictability of life, the resistance and vivacity of your children, and the passage of time. Gibran’s poem can read like advice, but it doesn’t have to be. It could simply be the expression of something parents experience time and time again. No person’s life can ever be fully explained, justified or described – not your child’s and not your own. ♦
