I don’t want children. I want children. What should I do?

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column that gives you a new framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas and philosophical questions. This unconventional column is based on value pluralism – the idea that we each have multiple values ​​that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Here’s a Vox reader question, edited for brevity and clarity.

I’m at an age where I feel like I need to decide if I want to have kids, but I’m very hesitant about it and don’t know how to know if I want them. I don’t dream of parenthood or filling my days caring for a young child. But, what does anyone?! That doesn’t seem like a good way to decide if I really want to be a parent. But then what? The main place in my mind is that I fear my life will be miserable and depressing when my partner and I are 70 and childless. I love the thought of having well-adjusted adult children to spend time with when I’m old. It seems a misguided and selfish reason to have children.

A good reason might be that I think my partner and I have good values ​​and I will I want to bring more people into the world with these values, but this also seems selfish because there is no guarantee that a child will embrace your values, and your duty as a parent is to let them grow up to be whoever they want to be. I worry that I will be a parent who struggles to support my child if they rebel against everything I believe. But I think you don’t really understand how you’re going to be in that situation until you’re in it. How do you decide whether such a life-changing decision is right for you, let alone its moral implications for someone who doesn’t yet exist?

Dear Fencer,

Ah, the parenting dilemma. We are so many can relate. And, like you, many of us try to answer the question “Do I want to have children?” Looking inward for answers. We introspect, we ruminate, we dig through childhood trauma. We consider what makes us happy now in hopes of predicting whether children will make us happier or sadder later. We guess the answer lies within us, a buried treasure waiting to be uncovered.

It’s understandable: most advice to people considering parenthood encourages us to do just that. Countless articles, books, and yes, Advice column Based on the assumption that the answer exists within us as a stable fact. So does parenting dilemma coach Anne Davidman Online classes“Motherhood Clarity™ Course” which opens with a mantra: “The answers will come because they never left…all within me.”

But there are some problems with that method. For one, you can spend your entire adult life auditing your soul for answers and still look like the shrug emoji. Because introspection is an endless search process: there’s no way to know when you’ve searched enough.

Another problem is that this method focuses too much on you and your desires. As you mentioned, bringing a child into the world can’t just be about its costs and benefits to you.

After all, you are in no position to predict whether children will make you happier or sadder! As philosopher LA Paul notesYou won’t know exactly what it’s going to be like until you have a baby, and also, “you” can transform in the process, so that the things that make you happy now aren’t the same things that will make you happy as a parent.

So, what I suggest is a radically different approach: if you want to reach conclusions, you have to go beyond your own inner self. You need to turn your gaze outward and ask yourself: What do you find wonderful, exciting, and intrinsically valuable about being on earth?

I’m not asking because I think it’s up to you to decide what values ​​you want to pass on to your child. Like you said, there’s no guarantee your kid will embrace your values. Instead, I ask because it is a basis on which you can make a choice — not “find the answer” but make a choice — whether to have children.

So far, you’ve been thinking of the children’s question as an epistemological question — you say you “don’t know how to know” — but I’d rather think of it as an existential one. Existentialist philosophers argued Life does not come with predetermined meanings or definitive answers. Instead, each person must choose how to create their own meaning. As the Spanish existentialist José Ortega y Gasset put it, the central act of being human is “self-formation,” which literally means self-making. You come up with your own answers, and in doing so you create yourself.

A decade ago, just for fun, my friend Emily sat me down in a park and asked me to do an exercise that could be highly influential: it was an online quiz, believe it or not. It listed dozens and dozens of different values ​​— friendship, creativity, growth, and more — and instructed me to select my top 10. Then that brings me down to my top five I found it brutally difficult, but it was revealing. My number one value on that quiz was called, somewhat stupidly, “The joy of being, the joy.”

I come back to that again and again (my mind saves punctuation, so I regularly find myself talking to people about the “joy-of-being-come-joy”) when I have to make tough decisions. It captures a key fact about me: I love being alive in this world! Whenever I snorkel with impossibly colorful fish, or feel a deep connection with another human being, or gaze upon all the galaxies we’ve barely begun to understand, I feel so grateful that I get to participate in the great mystery of being.

And that made me decide that I wanted to be a mother one day. Choosing to have a child feels like one of the biggest ways I’ve made it in my life, at a time when many doubt the worthiness of perpetuating human life on this planet. It’s a way of affirming that being alive on this earth is a gift, which I want to pass on to others.

So allow me to be your Emily. Let me introduce you A list of values (one of many similar inventories available online) and prompts you to select your top five. Then ask yourself: Would having a child be a good way to enact my values—or is there another way to enact my values ​​that I find more compelling? Which path is best for you personally, given your specific talents and your physical and mental needs?

It depends a lot on the person. Imagine three women who all rank “personal growth” as their top value. They may still reach completely different conclusions about the children. For a woman, this value may seem like a great reason to have a child, because she believes that raising children will help her grow as a person and she will guide a new person in their development. The second woman says her primary means of growth is making art, so she wants to focus on that while being an active aunt to her friends’ kids on the side. A third woman may feel that the most promising path for her is to become a monk. All three are completely valid!

Many people struggling with parenthood ambivalence say they fear that if they don’t have children, they’ll miss out on something sui generis — a completely unique experience, a kind of love that nothing else compares to. Sounds like this FOMO is playing a role for you too; You mention that you fear your life will be miserable and depressing when you and your partner are 70 and childless.

But there are many parents who will tell you that, while they caress their children, Child-parent relationships don’t magically make more sense than anything else in their lives. Excellent new book What is for children? By Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, the former writes:

While the relationship between parent and child is undoubtedly unique, what if I told you that, incidentally, it’s really awesome and awesome? Isn’t that even particularly remarkable? … Loving your child is not something you will ever know. It is not inconceivable. If you know love, you also know this, or something like it … What is special about this love is not how exotic, mysterious or wonderful it is but how simple and familiar it is.

So, if you like the idea of ​​having children only because you want to spend time with beautiful people at your age, try to first explore other ways to satisfy those same needs. You may find that this is not something that only a child can provide. As author (and friend of mine) Raina Cohen has documented beautifully Other significant othersSome people find that deep friendships satisfy their connection needs perfectly well, leaving no child-shaped holes or partner-shaped holes.

But even if you believe that having a child is a sui generis experience, the point I would make is: other things too! An artist can tell you that nothing compares to the creative thrill of painting. Anyone involved in political work can tell you there is nothing like the feeling of fighting for justice and winning. Many things in the world are unique and incomparably good.

So don’t be swayed by social narratives about what the ultimate good looks like. Let your choice flow from your own sense of what is most valuable about human life. Although what makes you feel happy or sad can change a lot over time, Core values ​​are relatively stableThey therefore form a more permanent basis for making key decisions. Yes, it’s conceivable that even those values ​​may change a bit over the decades, but making a choice that flows from your values ​​means you’ll at least be confident that you had a very solid reason for doing what you did — no matter how you end up. Feel up about it in the future.

And for the future? You can’t really control it. So, your goal is not to control every possible outcome. Your goal is to live a life consistent with your values.

Bonus: What I’m Reading

• The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, often called the “Father of Existentialism”, proposed this idea. Life can only be understood backwardsBut it must be ahead. This week’s question prompted me to revisit that idea.

• As I wrote this column, I went back and did a great re-read New Yorker article by Joshua Rothman How we make big decisions. It discusses philosopher Agnes Collard’s idea that “we ‘aspire’ to self-transformation by striving for the values ​​we hope to one day possess.” In other words, you don’t decide you want to be a parent – you decide you want to be the person you want to be a parent and lean into it. I found the concept interesting but half too complicated: why should I base this decision on values?

• Many people cite climate change as a reason not to have children. I think it’s misleading. Having a baby is something that can force you to take heroic action on climate change – so I was intrigued This new piece in Noema MagazineWhich argues that we need to evoke heroism, not hope, about climate — and a prime example of this is found in … JRR Tolkien.

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