Wipe out

Many of you have written to suggest I consider an essay the New York Times ran last week.  (I’m so grateful for your emails and comments, both on posts and in my personal inbox; thank you and please keep ‘em coming.)  The essay, Should This Be the Last Generation?, was written by Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton.  Singer posits a thought experiment, suggesting that we should consider if the best ethical choice for the planet–and thus for humankind–is to halt our reproduction, forcing human beings to die out, thus ending both human suffering and the violence we inflict upon the planet.  The occasion for this thought experiment is the publication of South African philosopher David Benatar’s book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. (Funny enough, Pat Benatar’s memoir Between a Heart and a Rock Place hit bookstores today.)

“To bring into existence someone who will suffer is to harm that person,” Benatar argues a la Singer, “yet everyone will suffer to some extent, and if our species continues to reproduce, we can be sure that some future children will suffer severely.”  Singer applies this thinking to the issue of climate change in an unusually human-centric equation, pointing out that the people who will be most severely harmed by climate change have not yet been conceived. Thus, “If there were to be no future generations, there would be much less for us to feel to guilty about.”  Interesting that the week we’re all dumfounded and helpless staring at circulating photos of oil-soaked dead birds, the guilt is about our unborn children.  But I get his point.  And I admit, I feel emotionally wrecked by it.  As I wrote to reader Kurt Morris, it makes me want to smoke a pack of cigarettes (and I don’t smoke) and take to my bed for a week.

Yet, when I pull back from the gutting aggressions of what we humans do to the earth and to each other, I take issue with the fact that we tend to only debate such bioethics in terms of thought experiments like Singer’s, or Benatar’s, or even in Alan Weisman’s majestic best-seller, The World Without Us. This conversation exists in the culture as an occasional philosophical endgame, and one which is always inherently absurd: we are not going to willfully end the human race.  We will not choose our own apocalypse.  That is certain.  And so the point Singer makes is simply a profoundly charged straw dog. It’s easy to shrug off his points as the stuff of mere science fiction–albeit a narrative that leaves us with not a single possible protagonist.

Why can’t we have this conversation in pragmatic terms?  Instead of discussing wiping out the human race, why can’t we consider what it would mean to have fewer kids?  It’s a topic that Weisman has told me is “the third rail of environmentalism,” historically loaded with the eradication the most primal of human rights: to decide to have a child. From Hitler’s early speeches on eliminating the “useless eaters,” to India’s massive forced sterilization campaigns, to even Margaret Sanger’s own advocacy of eugenics (yes, a bitter irony, this from the founder of Planned Parenthood), the subject has never freed itself from the hyper-draconian.

Which I for one, consider to be a travesty.  Common wisdom continues to preach that bigger families are better for us–as long as they’re not Octomom big; then we condemn the too-big–and so parents who might have just one kid are scared into having more, for the sake of their child.  If we can’t figure how how to mainline the valid points for Singer’s essay into a conversation that supports parents of only children–or parents who are ambivalent about having a second, or third–we’ve missed the point.  It’s not science fiction we’re talking about; there is no experiment here.  We don’t need to choose apocalypse or eternal suffering.  We just need to talk honestly about what it means to want to have more kids, what it means not to, and how to support people who make different choices.  It would give us a far more ethical landscape than the one we inhabit now, and, as Singer would tell you, the one our kids are sure to inherit if we don’t start a different discussion.

But at least they play together

Photograph by Teresa Ollila

Recently, I kicked Dahlia and Justin out of the house for the weekend so I could buckle down and work without being drawn away from my desk by the promise of whatever discovery my kid was making in the living room.  Justin was a willing participant, excited for an overnight in Massachusetts with our friends Jake and Janine and their kids.

The next morning, I answered the phone from our empty bed, where I’d been luxuriating in silence for two hours, indulging a rare spell in my inner life.  It was Justin.

“How’s Jake doing?” I asked, after a full Dahlia update.

“He’s good.  I mean, the kids are great.”  I heard the “but” in his tone.  “He says he doesn’t get a second to himself, though.”

“What did he say about it?”

“Well, he wakes up at six.  He gets the kids dressed and fed.  He leaves for work by eight.  His days at work are crazy, but then again, he says it’s the only time he can find that’s his.  Then he gets home at six.  He gives the kids dinner, gives them each a bath, and puts them both to bed.  By that time he’s too beat for anything.  Saturdays he has the kids all day, so that’s out.  He just seems run really ragged.  He says all he wants is to go to a café for an hour and read the paper, but he can’t imagine that happening in the next few years.  Plus, he and Janine argue about who has it tougher—her with them for the parts of the day that they don’t have childcare, or him, bookending the days.”

“But don’t they play with each other?”  I asked.  Justin had sent me a photo from the afternoon before of Dahlia and the two kids, stripped entirely naked, running through their yard, and another one of the three kids eating dinner together at a tiny table.  They looked like family photos—the three kids, engaged in some cooperative reverie, oblivious to whatever adult presence that was keeping them from killing themselves and each other.  Photos of Dahlia don’t resonate family pictures in the same way—they’re just pictures of our kid, gorgeous and alone.

“They do.  It’s amazing to watch.  They really take care of each other.  They’re real allies—you could really tell at the park that he was watching you for her.  She sticks right by him.  He was amazing with Dahlia, too.  She wandered off on her own to play independently, and he was always calling out to her, going to fetch her, wanting to keep her safe and close by.”

I was quiet. I didn’t want to turn our moment to catch up into discourse on do-we-or-don’t we, but I could visualize what he was describing, what she’s missing.  I could feel it in the pictures he sent.  But I tried to steer the conversation away from the question we spend so much time trying to answer these days.  “So, doesn’t Jake get time to himself when they’re playing?” I asked.

“I suppose he does.  But it’s not like he can just do his own thing.  He’s always supervising.  It’s not like it’s free time.”  He knew what I was digging at, despite my attempt to veer away from self-reflexiveness. “Honestly, most of the time I dedicate to Dahlia, I’m playing with her.  And I guess I’d rather play with Dahlia than watch her playing with another kid.”

I love playing with Dahlia.  I find pure pleasure in helping her solve a puzzle, joining her in a dance marathon she’s instigated, playing customer when where she pretends to toast, butter, and sell me bagels in a game she calls “Bagels and Money” (she’s a part-Jewish kid in Brooklyn, what can I say). But I don’t need to do it all the time.  I don’t have the endless energy, creativity, and patience for it that Justin does.  I’m guiltily aware of this fact every day.  And I must admit the ability to take a more passive, even voyeuristic role, in her play appeals to me.  Despite how exhausted Jake sounds, his kids’ cooperative play still seems to shift the balance.

And so I fixate on this notion, considering how my adult life could be restored if I didn’t need to be a toddler’s constant playmate, imagining all the hours I could spend reading a novel, replying to my endless unanswered voicemails, having actual adult conversations with Justin before 8 pm, after which we are too exhausted for banter or discourse.  Balancing what she needs with what I need feels like a constant aerobic activity, both in the micro version of managing every day and the macro one of deliberating how a sibling would be both complicating and liberating.

What we can–and can’t–afford

Just think what it will cost to tack his ears back.

Every couple of years, Mark Lino, a number-cruncher at the Department of Agriculture, adds up what it costs to raise a kid through high school.  And every year those numbers increase.  When I called him up recently to see if the recession had scaled back spending on children since his 2008 tabulations, he told me that the only area in which the numbers rolled back were in the cost of transportation.  Families may be travelling less, but what they’re spending on their kids has gone up, despite the fact that unemployment has spiked since he added up figures from two years ago.  Lino just released his his report : it now costs for middle income earners an average of $286,050 to get a kid to his or her eighteenth birthday.  In the higher income brackets, that number swells up to $475,680.

Meanwhile, this week, at a hearing on Capitol Hill on the State of the American Child, economist and child welfare experts testified that the situation is “abysmal” for our kids.  The U.S. currently has the highest poverty rate for children among the world’s industrialized nations: one in five lives below the poverty line (which many people agree is already drawn too high).  One in seven American children has an unemployed parent.  And Senator Chris Dodd projected that because of unemployment an additional five million children could be driven into poverty before the recession ends.  One in four children currently uses food stamps, he said, and half of all kids will use them at some point during their childhood.

And yet, common thinking persists that we need to have more kids for the welfare of our children, that they will be disadvantaged without siblings, despite any research substantiating that notion.  I certainly do not mean to suggest that rich people should have all the children they want, while the increasing number of poor people should curb their fertility.  I just think it’s time that we reassess why we’re having more kids.  If it’s for the good of the children we already have, and not simply because we want more of them, it’s time to apply a new calculus to our thinking.

Moving back into your teenage bedroom–with a kid of your own

It’s a nightmare for even those of us with healthy relationships with our parents: moving back into a childhood bedroom, with a child of one’s own.  Not to mention a partner.  Would you leave your “Dark Side of the Moon” poster blu-tacked to the wall? Would you hide your birth control pills or keep them in the bathroom you share with your father?

The prolific Susan Newman, author of Parenting an Only Child and the Singletons blog at Psychology Today, published a new book this week, on how the recession is forcing adults back into their parents’ homes.  It’s called Under One Roof Again: All Grown Up and (Re)learning to Live Together Happily.  As she pointed out to me over coffee recently, multi-generational cohabitation is another element in a changing culture which, for many of us, is reducing family size.  Moving one kid into a three-generation house feels like enough of a crunch.  Just imagine bringing another child into such quarters.

Plus, Newman told me, “when you’re a young guy or a woman who loved her job and you don’t have that job anymore, you don’t feel like making babies.  Your mind isn’t into expanding your family, but finding a paycheck.  Like, how can I bring another baby into the world when I can’t support the one I have?” Not to mention, who wants to get it on when their parents are on the other side of a thin slab of drywall? Newman says that only children have traditionally been “an elite group,” but it’s becoming quite the opposite.  When you combine the already rising numbers of single child-families together with the new flux of parents who feel they can’t afford a second kid, you’ve got what she says is emerging as “the new traditional family.”

Fertility Italian style: or better yet, in Dutch

If it were easier to be a parent in this country, I might be far less ambivalent about having a second child.  Maybe my parents would have too, if my mother hadn’t felt that a second one would ensure that they would be too harried by all the mundane juggling to devote themselves fully to me, or to work, or to living a pleasurable life—not to mention the financial constraints of a bigger home and a second education to fund.  Certainly, many of the advantages to having one would still hold.  But the entire equation would shift, because the variables of human and financial costs would be radically different.

As I often say, only half in dreamy, theoretical tones: maybe we should move to Europe.  On the continent, a variety of policies intended jumpstart fertility have done much for women’s careers and familial sanity–while some have really missed the mark.  Panic is rife there at the dwindling numbers of children born annually.  The mounting number of only childrenrings an economic—and nativist—alarm. In the early sixties, Europe represented 12.5 percent of the world’s population.  About a century later, those numbers are projected to drop to about 5 percent. In cities like Milan, most parents are choosing to stop at one to be able to afford their lifestyles and maintain their careers.

Which is why in Italy, officials are offering mothers cold cash rewards to deliver more native citizens (about $15,000 in one town).  Such policy is doing little to increase the sibling production.  In Italy, women have some of the highest rates of PhD per capita, and the most asymmetric gender relationships on the continent.  Italian fathers contribute the least to household labor and parenting, and policy does little to nudge them towards the kitchen, and their wives back to work.

Local governments are literally paying their female citizens to procreate because they are terrified of the economic fall-out of a population that had normalized singletons. Between now and 2030, demographers agree that the EU will lose 20.8 million—or almost 7 percent—of people ages 15 to 64, or working-age.  Meanwhile, the number of people over 65 will increase by more than 50 percent. Who will care for disproportionate numbers of elderly citizens?  Who will make up the workforce?  Hundreds of economists, policy wonks, and population experts have predicted the economic and social implosion of Europe due to such low fertility.  In other words, only children will be responsible for the fall of the continent.

In the countries of Northern Europe the government pays for day care, guarantees a year of paid maternity leave—and six weeks of paternity leave, which Norway is debating making mandatory.  More supportive policy has helped Dutch fathers to win the top spot worldwide in studies of shared parenting responsibilities. Meanwhile, in France—where 80 percent of the women work– fertility has leapt from 1.8 to 2.0 in just a few years, owing to government policies (only one-fourth of that rise is due to immigration).  There, government-based incentives for parents make life easier for mothers and fathers alike.  Mothers are given four months paid maternity and guaranteed job security whenever they choose to return to work.  The state subsidizes rent and transportation, offers tax deductions for childcare, and pays 1,000 a month for third children.

Don’t think those policies are just the product of feminism: they’re designed not just to adjust the unavoidable pre-modern familial pressures (nursing, sleeplessness, the pesky need to have someone caring for a child 24 hours a day) to a modern world in which women want more from their lives than motherhood, and families need more than one income.  Yes, they have that affect, and the policies that best marry parenting realities with contemporary desires and needs are the most effective ones.  But without a dwindling white and native-born population in the face of massive waves of immigration from darker–and more Muslim–climes, would the state and its populace care so much about funding child care?    Somehow, here in the States, we’ve gotten anti-immigration fever without any of the benefits.  Which makes me wonder–archly, reader, quite archly–in Europe, do they even do racism better?