About 15 years ago, a good friend asked me how she could tell if she was ready to have children. She was worried at the time that she wasn’t the kind of woman who doted on young children. She didn’t experience any of the “baby lust” that her peers seemed to display. I assured her that you don’t have to love all the children to love your own.
I was recently reminded of this advice when I read a story in The Atlantic titled “To Save the World, My Mother Abandoned Me.” Xochitl Gonzalez recounts how her mother left her with her grandparents to pursue a career as a union leader and political activist. It’s the heartbreaking story of a child whose mother seemed to love other people’s children, but not her own.
While researching this story, Gonzalez found a decades-old article about her mother running for the Washington school board. “The Washington Post reported that ‘before arriving in Washington, she was involved in a program to increase parent involvement in the New York City school system’ and was lobbying for the Washington school board to ‘involve parents more actively in policy decisions.’ That was in 1981. Back then in Brooklyn, I would have been in kindergarten now,” she wrote.
Much has been written about our declining fertility, and more and more young people are wondering if they ever want to have children. A February 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 30% of 18- to 34-year-olds without children aren’t sure if they want any, and 18% say they definitely don’t want any.
Should we reassure people that they will eventually feel love when they have children? It seems like the most natural thing in the world, but for some people it’s a struggle. A recent article in the New York Times by Miguel Macias explains how the author decided to have children even though he didn’t want them.
“Since the birth of my daughter Olivia, I have experienced a wide range of emotions. Many of them will be familiar to every parent: joy, exhaustion, deep love, confusion, amazement, despair, happiness, sadness. But there is another, quieter feeling that comes up now and again: … regret.”
Macias says that when he was younger he wanted to be a famous filmmaker and thought having children would get in the way of that dream. But now he’s in his late 40s, his career has developed and his partner wanted a child, so why not? He clearly loves his daughter but isn’t particularly enjoying those early years.
One wonders how wise a man is who cannot imagine what it would be like for his child to come across an article in a few years saying that she may have made a mistake.
But perhaps this observation is helpful: “Allowing myself to accept that perhaps having a child was not ‘right’ was humbling and comforting. It forced me to admit to myself that I will never know if this or any decision was the right one.”
And maybe that’s true. It seems unlikely that Macias will turn out like Gonzalez’s mother, who travels the country and the world and seems to do everything she can to make sure she’s not in the same town as her daughter, let alone at home. He seems aware of his obligation to his daughter. And whether or not he finds her a bit boring or annoying at 18 months old, he seems willing to put in the effort to care for her.
Can you know in advance that you are the wrong parent to abandon your child to serve a higher cause? What kind of self-reflection does one need to do before deciding whether or not to have children? In the past, having children was the obvious choice for most people. And a combination of natural instinct and societal pressure led to the creation of parents who stood by their children.
Yet today, every aspect of raising children is a choice. Do we want children? Do we want them with a partner or alone? Do we want to wait until we are older? Do we want boys or girls? Do we want to play an active role in their lives or let someone else take charge? The loss of the script of growing up and starting a family of our own has meant that some people who probably shouldn’t have children don’t. But it also means that many who should have don’t, or decide too late, or don’t know how to act when they do have them.
Gonzalez underscores this point by noting that her mother clearly viewed raising children like any other decision an adult might make, especially among those committed to a particular political cause: “All around me, people were being told to give up one life here and start a new one there. And they did so without asking questions. She must have seen me as just another comrade relocated for the movement.” My friend now has three children, and I don’t think she’s looked back. But that kind of clarity is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Deseret News staff writer, and author of “This is not how you treat a child: How the foster care system, family courts and racism activists are destroying young lives”, among other books.
