Should You Have Children?

Concern is reasonable. Despair is not.

Last week, Ezra Klein published a column in the New York Times under the arresting headline, “Your Kids Are Not Doomed.”

Over the past few years, I’ve been asked one question more than any other. It comes up at speeches, at dinners, in conversation. It’s the most popular query when I open my podcast to suggestions, time and again. It comes in two forms. The first: Should I have kids, given the climate crisis they will face? The second: Should I have kids, knowing they will contribute to the climate crisis the world faces?

And it’s not just me. A 2020 Morning Consult poll found that a quarter of adults without children say climate change is part of the reason they didn’t have children. A Morgan Stanley analysis found that the decision “to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline.”

Klein speaks to climate scientists and activists who have children and are appalled at the defeatism that underlies the decision to not have children for this reason.

“I unequivocally reject, scientifically and personally, the notion that children are somehow doomed to an unhappy life,” Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at Columbia, told me.

Klein offers solid reason for hope. And he rightly emphasizes that the future isn’t inflicted on us. We create it, at least in part. Despair is counterproductive. Prophecies of doom may increase the probability of the doom they predict.

I don’t just prefer a world of net-zero emissions to a world of net-zero children. I think those worlds are in conflict. We face a political problem, not a physics problem. The green future has to be a welcoming one, even a thrilling one. If people cannot see themselves in it, they will fight to stop it. If the cost of caring about climate is to forgo having a family, that cost will be too high. A climate movement that embraces sacrifice as its answer or even as its temperament might do more harm than good. It may accidentally sacrifice the political appeal needed to make the net-zero emissions world real.

Worse, it sees young people as passive consumers rather than agents of change. But over the past decade, rising generations have transformed climate politics. Much of the progress we’ve seen comes from their relentless advocacy and energy. The world they will inhabit is changing because they are changing the world.

It’s a good and necessary piece of writing. But it’s missing something fundamental.

There is no history.

A reader could easily think this concern about bringing a new generation into the world is some new phenomenon, and thus demonstrates that the threat we face is so much worse than any that came before.

In reality, exactly this concern bubbles up onto news pages every few years. And has for decades. The perceived threat changes over time but the responses — both the despair for children and the cheering response from the likes of Klein — are remarkably similar. And both are blind to the past.

In the Dubya era, fears of climate change were spiced up with peak oil and the coming “age of scarcity,” but the collapse of the global financial system and the coming dark age soon eclipsed that. In the early- to mid-1990s, some hipsters were already despairing about climate change but social breakdown and “the coming anarchy” were the main fuels of a deep pessimism which disappeared and was forgotten with remarkable speed.

The early 1980s? I still have vivid memories of the recurring nightmares I suffered as a child and young teen thanks to the imminent threat of thermonuclear annihilation. The made-for-TV movie “The Day After,” which had a monster audience when it aired in 1983, is on YouTube. Watch it if you want a taste of the time. Or insomnia.

The 1970s? The world was running out of oil and we would soon shiver in the dark. And starve, thanks to overpopulation. If the Soviets didn’t nuke us first.

The 1960s? Like the 1970s but with assassinations and imminent race wars.

And no, this didn’t begin with the invention of nuclear weapons. A big reason why there was a Baby Boom after the Second World War ended in 1945 is that during the Great Depression in the 1930s so many people put off having children that fertility rates plunged. In that era, experts and pundits fretted about a coming era of population decline.

The 1920s? Millions turned to fascism and communism, which is not a small indication of concern with the existing order — concern prompted by an inconceivably destructive war that spread despair and made The Decline of the West one of the strangest bestsellers of all time.

Now, try this challenge: Over this entire timespan, pick a single year, in a single place, when people were prosperous and happy.

There’s a good chance your mind settled on something in the Kennedy years. Maybe the golden summer of 1962. Before the Cuban missile crisis. Before Vietnam, assassinations, race riots.

It was the era of Jackie and Camelot. Skinny ties. The first astronauts. Everyone loved America, or at least they loved Elvis Presley and blue jeans. No existential despair then, right?

Following is an Associated Press feature story that ran in newspapers across America in July, 1962, the most golden moment of that golden era.

[The Cold War] is a crisis without parallel in history because the stakes have never been so high. It involves man’s survival, and the fact that that statement has the ring of cliche reflects the extent of its presence. What does living on the edge of crisis, on the edge of nuclear oblivion, do to us?

…We are richer and more powerful than ever before but “the old American confidence,” as a national symptom, is gone.

…Here and there, uncertainty actually changes lives. A mother says, “why should I have more children to bring into this crazy world?”

It’s not hard finding times when people despaired and thought maybe it would be best not to bring another child into this horrible world. It’s hard finding times when they didn’t.

Now, go back to the young people Ezra Klein is talking to. Why should they know this history?

It does not mean their concerns are unwarranted. The fear of nuclear war was all too reasonable. The fact that the worst didn’t come to pass doesn’t change that. Similarly, they are right to worry about climate change. I could (and have and will) argue that most people don’t worry enough.

But to let that concern stop you from having children you would otherwise want? Go back over the last century. Look at all those reasonable people, with their reasonable concerns, asking themselves if they, too, should forgo children. If they did, they deprived themselves of the joy of having children — and deprived the world of more minds and hearts that could contribute to solving problems and writing the next chapter of our history. And they accomplished nothing.

In the 1970s, worry about the fate of civilization was widespread enough to create what we now call the “prepper” subculture — people who spend a great deal of time, energy, and money thinking about how everything could go to hell in a handbasket and what variety of canned goods and ammunition they’ll need in the bunker when it does. There are now people in their seventies and eighties who have lived most of their lives this way, watching for mushroom clouds, planning defences against the starving hordes, imagining horror in its countless guises. And not having children because, well, who would bring children into such a nightmare?

That’s inexpressibly sad.

Merely by existing, at any time, in any place, we are blessed. But these are people born into the developed world at a time when people are healthier, wealthier, and longer-lived than ever before. They have access to all the arts and sciences of millennia. They have technology of godlike power. They are some of the luckiest people who ever existed in the whole history of our species — and they spent their lives in constant fear, foregoing even the joy of holding a child. How utterly tragic.

Over and over, for a century, it’s the same story: Those who worried and decided not to have children lost out. Those who worried and had children were the better for it.

In Future Babble, I closed the book with a 1975 episode of All In The Family.

Gloria learns she is pregnant. She tells Mike, her husband.

At first, they're thrilled. But then Mike starts worrying about “world problems.” The air and water are “poisoned,” the planet is overcrowded, and there's “not enough food to go around.” What would they be bringing a child into. He couldn't really answer that question but he wanted to desperately. So he did. The future will be awful. He was sure of it. And his moment of joy was lost.

Mike despairs. Later in the episode a friend gives him a newspaper clipping.

Chastened, he hands it to Gloria, who reads it aloud. It's something Alistair Cooke wrote, she says.

“Who"?” her father Archie whispers to his wife. “Alice the cook,” says the confused Edith.

“In the best of times our days are numbered anyway" it begins. "And so it would be a crime against nature for any generation to take the world crisis so solemnly that it put off enjoying those things for which we were designed in the first place. The opportunity to do good work, to fall in love, to enjoy friends, to hit a ball, and to bounce a baby."

A wise person, that Alice.