What’s the case for having children, in the face of all the world’s crises, calumnies and conflicts? David Hill considers the pros and cons.
Father’s Day. Ah, the warm glow of parenthood, paternal or maternal. And the chill terror.
Terror? The 40-something son of friends died last month. He just failed to wake up one morning. When we heard, my wife Beth and I felt sorrow for those friends. We also felt fear.
Illogical fear that the same could happen to our own 55-year-old or 50-year-old. That parental feeling of your kids and therefore you being hostages to fortune never goes away, no matter how healthy, safe and (mostly) sensible they may be.
We have other friends who are childless, by choice or by circumstance. I don’t see their lives as being poorer than ours. Or richer, except fiscally. But they’re different. They’ve experienced dimensions we haven’t. And vice-versa.
I sympathise with their choice, if it was a choice. The responsibilities of parenthood can feel overwhelming, especially in the complexities and fraying communities of the 21st century. (If it takes a village to raise a child, then it gets harder when those literal or metaphorical villages are dissolving and diminishing, as they now seem to be.)
Just as overwhelming is an awareness of the damage you can do as parents. “We’re their fates,” one contemporary said of his kids when they were small. It’s true – we can make them and we can break them. Every year in Aotearoa, you read about the ones who’ve been fatally broken.
I think of A and J, a couple of generations junior to us, and among the most admirable young couples we know. They planned not to have children; felt it would be irresponsible to bring any into a world which they saw as approaching so many tipping points, one where natural resources were already strained by the sheer mass of humans.
They changed their minds and had Theo. When they discovered what life with him was like (“Never realised you could feel joy and fear and fury at the same time,” J confided in me, yawning over a coffee), they had Ella. When they discovered what dealing with two under-threes was like, J had a vasectomy.
How do others in Aotearoa New Zealand feel about parenting? Online comments, and especially a OneChoice Kiwi Parenting Report from 2024, reinforce the feeling that it’s getting harder. In the OneChoice survey, over half of respondents felt the role is more difficult than it was a decade ago; only 10% reckoned it had got easier.
People worry about the accelerating inequality, potentially inimical technology – especially social media – plus the political populism and climate issues their kids may face. They seem to have a point; our suicide and self-harm hospitalisation rates are highest in the 15-35 and 15-25 age bands respectively.
Potential parents here also feel concern about the impact on their own lives. Financial anxieties are rife. The OneChoice Report cites student loans as a worry, even before kids are born. Over half of those surveyed had paused or reduced their career hours to look after children. Many were also apprehensive over whether they had the skills and stamina to make a decent mother or father.
Having kids can indeed be a spectacularly thankless role. You’ve raised a teenager? I need say no more. A member of our pub quiz team put it perfectly: “It’s just as well I love her; I don’t always like her!”
Philip Larkin provided what’s probably the most (in)famous encapsulation of parental job dissatisfaction: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.” I’ve always preferred Adrian Mitchell’s riposte: “They tuck you up, your mum and dad. / They read you Peter Rabbit, too.”
So what’s the case for having children, in the face of all these possible crises, calumnies, conflicts?
Well, someone has to, if you want the species to continue. Another poet, World War 1’s Herbert Read, offered a more idiosyncratic reason, especially for writers and artists: “There are certain depths of experience which can only come from parentage.” You may wish to reflect on his word “depths”.
An unscientific poll of those in our own orbits brought a range of responses to the question. The words “delight…wonder” featured, surprisingly often from males, though that gender did tend to shuffle awkwardly while voicing them.
“Passion!” instantly replied excellent young librarian Rangi. I asked further. He talked about the bliss he felt when his 10-month-old son slept in his arms. He also talked of the despair and helplessness when the same son wouldn’t sleep at all. “Used to think a late-night feed meant a midnight pizza,” he added, which is a line I had to share with you.
Fulfilment? The jury is out. Some answers from my poll drew near the F-word: “All your inhibitions go… You find feelings you never knew you had.” One respondent suggested that the emotions of completeness, of transformation almost, that motherhood or fatherhood may bring, are made more powerful by an accompanying sense of precariousness, of vulnerability.
Indeed, one drunk or drugged driver, one malfunctioning chromosome or heart valve, one playground fall can bring horror crashing into your life. See my opening paragraphs. And it never ends. “Careful, dear,” Beth warned our son as we strolled a clifftop walk a few months back. “Don’t go too near the edge.” He’s in his 50s, remember.
The “inhibitions… feelings” bit above makes me think of the story / urban myth of the mother whose toddler somehow leaned too far over the lion enclosure fence at a zoo, and tumbled in. A resident big cat advanced to check out the unexpected arrival, only to be met by a screaming, kicking, punching, hand-bag flailing (love the handbag) woman, who’d instantly vaulted the fence after her child. The lion retired to its den and wouldn’t come out for two days.
The story is usually told as a comedy, yet it penetrates to that wonderful, terrifying paring-down, that fanatical focus that’s one of the potential raptures and responsibilities of parenthood. Our daughter is in the top 1% of humanity when it comes to gentleness, yet she told me once, when I praised her for giving up her own pleasures to care for her two then-small sons, “Oh, I’d kill for them”. She said it mildly, almost off-handedly. I’ve looked at her with wonder ever since.
Other reasons for adding another generation to the world? “They’re so funny.” It sounds trivial; it’s utterly true. They’re also a consolation, a compensation of sorts. As you start to age and dwindle, someone is rising to fill your space.
“Compensation” has other interpretations. A different urban myth mentions the father who, when each of his children reached adulthood, presented them with an invoice, itemising all the costs of raising them. There were times when Beth and I felt tempted…
For us, parenthood didn’t come till we’d been married for five years – and what an old-fashioned sequence of events that now seems. It was another half-decade till our second arrived.
Both times, our lives were wrenched sideways. Our bodies dragged and ached; our brains dulled; our emotions sharpened; our perspectives slewed. Since the past is another country, and we did indeed do things differently there and then, it’s hard to recall the intensity of those two occasions when our horizons shrank to an exhausted daily endurance, even as they expanded to a new infinity. But moments such as the death of our friends’ son bring them back like a gut punch.
For various reasons, our surname hasn’t reached our grandkids’ generation. It doesn’t worry us; we don’t see them or their parents as any sort of memorial to us.
Are we glad we had our two? Hell, yes. On this Father’s Day, I could offer scores of reasons, but I’ll select just one. I believe parenthood can – if you’re lucky – bring you that awareness I mentioned earlier, of the simultaneous durability and fragility of each human life. Depending on fortune and circumstances again, that awareness can help you live a bit more intensely, every day that follows.
That includes making sure they don’t go too near the edge.
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