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What Are Children For? by Anastasia Berg & Rachel Wiseman
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What Are Children For?

On Ambivalence and Choice

$28.34

Get for $14.99 with membership
Length 9 hours 26 minutes
Language English
Narrators Jennifer Pickens, Kirsten Potter & Zura Johnson

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This program features multicast narration.

A modern argument, grounded in philosophy and cultural criticism, about childbearing ambivalence and how to overcome it

Becoming a parent, once the expected outcome of adulthood, is increasingly viewed as a potential threat to the most basic goals and aspirations of modern life. We seek self-fulfillment; we want to liberate women to find meaning and self-worth outside the home; and we wish to protect the planet from the ravages of climate change. Weighing the pros and cons of having children, millennials and zoomers are finding it increasingly difficult to judge in its favor.

With lucid argument and passionate prose, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman offer the guidance necessary to move beyond uncertainty. The decision whether or not to have children, they argue, is not just a womenโ€™s issue but a basic human one. And at a time when climate change worries threaten the very legitimacy of human reproduction, Berg and Wiseman conclude that neither our personal nor collective failures ought to prevent us from embracing the fundamental goodness of human lifeโ€”not only in the present but, in choosing to have children, in the future.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martinโ€™s Press.

ANASTASIA BERG is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. She is an editor of The Point, and her writing has appeared in The New York Timesโ€‹, The Atlantic, The TLS, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

RACHEL WISEMAN is the managing editor of The Point. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Point, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Audiobook details

ISBN:
9781250350541

Length:
9 hours 26 minutes

Language:
English

Publisher:
Macmillan Audio

Publication date:

Edition:
Unabridged

Libro.fm rank:
#19,428 Overall

Genre rank:
#179 in Philosophy

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The perfect last-minute gift

Audiobook credit bundles can be delivered instantly, given worldwide, and support local bookstores!

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Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Nowโ€™s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weโ€™ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

Reviews

โ€œResisting easy answers โ€ฆ [Berg and Wiseman] ... offer scrupulous analysis enriched by vivid personal meditations ...It's an incisive look at a monumental life choiceโ€โ€”Publishers Weekly

โ€œThis is a brave, lucid book, and Berg and Wiseman deserve great credit for their readiness to ask tough questions.โ€โ€”Kirkus Reviews

โ€œIn their widely researched and patiently argued book, Berg and Wiseman show how competing ideas about freedom, happiness, love, dignity, and justice attach to the increasingly ambivalent acts of having and raising children. What Are Children For? models the curiosity and the skepticism we need to imagine a collective future in dark times.โ€โ€”Merve Emre, The New Yorker

โ€œBy far the most honest, unsentimental, unpredictable, and rigorously thoughtful exploration of parenting that I have ever read. Berg and Wisemanโ€™s debut is a much-needed and impressively original inquiry into a topic that is almost always treated in deadeningly stale terms.โ€โ€”Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

โ€œA lucid and sophisticated treatment of a question we all share a stake in: Ought there be future generations? Carving out a conversation about parenthood and the future thatโ€™s undisturbed by the warping effects of the culture wars, the book ably addresses contemporary challenges to parenthoodโ€”both practical and politicalโ€”while developing its own optimistic case for human life.โ€โ€”Elizabeth Bruenig, The Atlantic

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The perfect last-minute gift Shop credit bundles