Authors:
Anastasia Berg & Rachel Wiseman
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Sign up todayWhat Are Children For?
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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 womenโs 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 lifeโnot only in the present but, in choosing to have children, in the future.
A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martinโs 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
Narrators:
Jennifer Pickens, Kirsten Potter & Zura Johnson
ISBN:
9781250350541
Length:
9 hours 26 minutes
Language:
English
Publisher:
Macmillan Audio
Publication date:
June 11, 2024
Edition:
Unabridged
Libro.fm rank:
#19,428 Overall
Genre rank:
#179 in Philosophy
Reviews
โResisting easy answers โฆ [Berg and Wiseman] ... offer scrupulous analysis enriched by vivid personal meditations ...It's an incisive look at a monumental life choiceโโPublishers Weekly
โThis is a brave, lucid book, and Berg and Wiseman deserve great credit for their readiness to ask tough questions.โโKirkus Reviews
โIn 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.โโMerve Emre, The New Yorker
โBy far the most honest, unsentimental, unpredictable, and rigorously thoughtful exploration of parenting that I have ever read. Berg and Wisemanโs debut is a much-needed and impressively original inquiry into a topic that is almost always treated in deadeningly stale terms.โโBecca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
โA 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 thatโs undisturbed by the warping effects of the culture wars, the book ably addresses contemporary challenges to parenthoodโboth practical and politicalโwhile developing its own optimistic case for human life.โโElizabeth Bruenig, The Atlantic