Should You Have Kids ... in Grad School?

The role of children and family in private and public life has become a flashpoint in the public discourse. The musician Charli XCX mused about whether she should have a baby on her summer-defining album Brat. JD Vance’s comments on “childless cat ladies” dominated several news cycles and caused an unexpected public-relations crisis for the Trump campaign. The question has become so heated, and so unavoidable, that some have begun to wonder aloud: “Why is 2024 suddenly about kids?” Not content to leave such questions to the pundits, public intellectuals including Becca Rothfeld, Melinda Cooper, Mary Gaitskill, Ross Douthat, and Tyler Harper Austin have entered the fray.

The topic has hit a nerve — perhaps above all among those in the progressive and liberal chattering classes, for whom the question of whether to have kids has always been fraught: How could people, especially women, reconcile children with intellectual and creative ambition? With feminist commitments? With the grueling professional demands of academe?

In our recent book, What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice, we discuss the forces animating this public anxiety. Recently we sat down to talk about how scholarly environments can exacerbate these tensions and whether academics can move beyond ambivalence when it comes to children.

Rachel Wiseman: There’s a very prevalent attitude today: When it comes to kids, one ought to hold off for as long as possible (and certainly until one has achieved a high level of security and personal fulfillment on all fronts: creatively, romantically, and professionally). You yourself didn’t have kids until after you finished your Ph.D. and your postdoc. Why? Do you wish you had approached things differently?

Anastasia Berg: It was completely obvious to me that dating in my twenties and even early thirties was not something that we did with a view to starting a family. It wasn’t the thing to want for yourself, and it wasn’t the thing to expect from a relationship. It wasn’t that we all aimed at dating casually; I wanted to have a “serious relationship,” but if I were asked, “Do you hope to one day start a family with the man you’re dating?” I probably wouldn’t have known how to answer. I might have laughed. And this attitude is even more acute among men, since in addition to that general normative expectation to wait for as long as possible — which for them means a lot more time — they are also sensitive to pressures to “stay the hell out of it” when it comes to children and family.

And so in practice whether the men I was involved with had any desire to have kids one day or would have made good fathers was not a factor in dating. It was only in my thirties that I very suddenly looked at my boyfriend and told him, partly to his dismay, no doubt: “Now you listen, I want kids, and you’ll be ruining my life if you end up not wanting them, so you better figure things out fast.

As for wishing to have done things differently: I find the exercise a little nonsensical — I like my husband and I like the kids I have and imagining things going differently is to imagine them away — but I have come to think that it’s silly that we equate being young(ish) with the idea that family should not be on your horizon. I was lucky that, when it dawned on me that if I wanted kids it was time to start doing something about it, I was in a relationship with someone who got over the shock of my announcements pretty quickly and went for it with me. But what if that wasn’t the case?

Is there anything about having kids that feels particularly incompatible with academic life?

I think one very big obstacle to having kids in grad school is the fact that there’s no sense of that being a real possibility — not for secular liberal and progressive students, anyway. The grad-school colleagues of mine who had kids were religious, and it struck the rest of us as an outré life choice — one more insane thing religious people did — not something that might make sense for us. One nonreligious acquaintance married an older woman and had a child with her (she had already had two). And people were deeply worried for him. Fast forward a few years: He’s where he wants to be professionally and has a full-grown boy, while I’m trying to make tenure while changing diapers.

Which is to say, I’ve come to think there might even be something particularly compatible about having kids and grad school. In many cases, especially in the humanities, the timeline to graduation is, while not infinite, nevertheless flexible, and so is your day-to-day schedule. For all the challenges and uncertainties of grad school, in some respects it offers ideal conditions for raising babies. That said, if I try to imagine what it would have been like to try to tell one of my grad-school boyfriends I was actually into the idea of having kids soon … well, again, the appropriate response seems to be laughter.

As many in academe know, going to grad school (for a long time) is no guarantee of a stable job or career. What advice would you have to someone worried about the job market and their family timelines?

First, I’d like to make clear I’m not in the business of recommending having children. What I recommend, though, is that people start thinking and talking about it — whether they’d want kids, what it means to have them, personally and ethically — and not take for granted that the later you start doing so, the better.

I know this can sound very daunting. My own discipline, philosophy, is in a dark, dark place as far as the job market is concerned, and I have seen very talented and very hard-working friends fail to find the placement they would have liked, or any for that matter. My husband and I have only just solved a bad so-called “two-body problem,” and we’ve been on the market for the entirety of our relationship. (We’re not only both philosophers but our interests overlap — a disastrous pairing!) So I do know that when things feel so precarious, taking on yet another big responsibility, and giving up on certain aspects of the grad-school experience — like boozy Friday-afternoon “coffee hour” that lasts till midnight — may not appeal.

But this doesn’t change the fact that postponement—whether you’re an academic or not—may be a form of counterproductive procrastination, and not a solution. There’s only so much “we’ll see…” and “maybe one day…” a person — a woman — can offer before that decision ends up being made for them. And if family happens to be what you want for yourself and you end up not being able to have it, fond but hazy memories of those coffee hours will provide little solace.

Children used to be an essential part of what it meant to lead a flourishing human life — which itself was understood as essentially intergenerational — and therefore something you built the rest of your life around. (Of course there have always been childless people, but this was, most often, understood as a great sacrifice or a misfortune.) Today children are one possible pursuit or project among others and something to get to once we’ve ticked off a lot of other boxes: personal fulfillment, professional stability, romantic certainty. On top of that we have the fear that having kids is the end of life as you know it, since it can’t be continuous with one’s present lifestyle and pursuits. But the truth is that, at least in some fields, it might make as much or even more sense to have kids earlier rather than later. (For example, in academe, as your star rises and you’re getting more invitations to speak, having older kids is much easier, especially for women.)

All of us continue to grow and change whether or not we have kids; and let’s be frank, nothing is as uncertain as romance. So the idea that there’s a right time, down the line, may prove to be somewhat of a fantasy.

One of the things that looks bleakest about academe from the outside looking in is the effect on romantic relationships. If you do end up meeting someone in grad school, and you’re both academics, finding a job together is incredibly tough (as you say), and for some this could mean years of living and working separately before landing a placement in the same place or within a reasonable commute. How do the realities of romantic life in one’s early academic career add extra distorting pressures, and is there any way out of this situation?

Yes, it can definitely mean all this. It has meant all of this for me! And of course if you’re in a committed relationship but far apart, starting a family together is nigh impossible. The solution, which many American universities implement, is institutionalized partner hires. One of the objections to the practice — and to other child-friendly benefits — runs along the following lines: Why should the university be allocating resources to support your having a relationship or your choice to have children, but not other choices (like the choice to vacation at expensive resorts or do cocaine). Should we privilege relationships and having and raising children among other choices and practices? Should we compromise our commitment to hiring strictly on the basis of merit?

To answer these questions in the affirmative we would need to recover a non-religious, non-conservative justification for the claim that partnerships and children are not on a par with other consumer choices, but are a good in itself, one that is grounded in the fact that most meaningful and genuinely valuable human pursuits — like the kinds of pursuits a university makes possible — presuppose a robust human future. That requires some people have children.

But there’s another academic-romantic intersection: People who go on the market single may end up in places where they feel it’s hard for them to date. It’s fun to complain about dating prospects in grad school, but the truth is that you’re surrounded by single, very like-minded people who understand intimately a lot of what you’re going through. Depending on where you end up after school, this may no longer be the case. Early- and mid-career academics, especially women, who didn’t think of their time in grad school as one for meeting a partner to start a family with, let alone have one, can find themselves facing both the stress of the tenure clock and a depressing dating pool. In such cases, the question of children may be decided for them, not by them.

And in case it sounds like I’m placing the burden of responsibility here strictly on the shoulders of women, I think men in academe need to step up, too. Academics often conceive of themselves as a moral vanguard in society, but in this case, for heterosexual male academics in particular, this would mean not just supporting women after they have made the choice but communicating a genuine willingness to think about and openly discuss the question of children on a timeline that is reasonably compatible with the biological limitations of the women they’re dating.

The suspicion that bringing more human life into existence is wrong has a much longer history than is often supposed. How does the question about the permissibility of having children feature into the philosophical discourse today? And can you tell us a little about how that philosophical discourse has filtered into the popular conversation?

Although contemporary so-called “analytic” philosophy acknowledges a variety of ethical approaches — in addition to the consequentialist and utilitarian ones, people work in Kantian/deontology theories, Aristotelian/virtue ethics, care ethics — questions about population increase and decline as well as about the legitimacy of human procreation take place almost entirely in a consequentialist framework. So whether or not an individual is justified in having or ought to have a child is understood to be a function, one way or another, of the level of well-being their child will have or is likely to have.

The question usually asked is how to conceive of this function: Can well-being be so low or high that it might be a duty to bring or to avoid bringing a person into the world? Do we have a duty to maximize the well-being of our offspring? This means that there’s a whole host of questions that are simply not raised, problems ranging from the right way to conceive of procreation metaphysically to the significance of the concern with a human future. Once you start broadening the perspective, you might find yourself considering, as I have, that what we’re responsible for in bringing another human being into the world is not their level of well-being — as if over and above all the actual causes of their actual misfortune there’s also I, their parent, who am somehow responsible for it all. Rather, our responsibility is for raising that person, which means preparing them to meet life’s challenges, disappointments, and pains as best we can.

Contrary to the idea that women are subjected to overwhelming social pressure to have children, there is evidence that academic women in fact feel pressure not to have kids from others in their professional and social circles, as if having children would be tantamount to abandoning their highest ambitions, not to mention feminist credentials. There’s also the famous (infamous?) quote from Doris Lessing that goes: “There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.” It often gets quoted in essays and memoirs about intellectually driven women having children. What do you say to this?

First of all, highly intelligent people, of all genders, find many things that do not engage their capacious intellects very boring. And as far as interacting with a highly fractious being that’s always at the cusp of vociferously expressing its displeasure, this can be very boring — and irritating, and frustrating — even for people of just-okay intelligence. But while mundane tasks that don’t stimulate your mind are sometimes no fun, this is the human lot. If humanity is to have a future, these tasks must be performed: Our children must be taken care of, and our elderly must be taken care of. Where a gender division is not necessary, nothing is preventing these tasks — boring, difficult, often annoying tasks — from being performed by men and women in equal measure.

So Lessing might be right, but if everyone took the fact that small children can be very boring to license leaving their kids, as she did, there would be no one to raise them. But notice that Lessing didn’t object to spending time with children, she objected to spending “endless amounts” of time with them. And here I confess that personally, I agree: If having kids meant I could do nothing but spend time with small children for the rest of my life, I don’t think I’d be into that. But having children doesn’t mean that, because we expect our partners to participate, because we hope to organize our collective lives in such a way that the responsibility of caring for children with others is shared, and because one’s offspring don’t remain “small children” forever. And children, unlike, say, cooking or laundry or taxes, do get significantly less boring as time goes on.