In the summer my son turns two, we go on holiday to Italy. We leave one sultry morning, during a seemingly endless heat wave. It’s still dark out, and in the half-light all the sounds—closing doors, clicking seat belts—seem louder and more intense than usual. All four of us talk more quietly in compensation.
The children are sitting in the back seat, a bag of provisions between them, each with a thumb in their mouth. On our way, my son points out windmills, cranes, and electricity pylons. He only recently discovered the difference: previously, all large structures were windmills to him, and he would greet them enthusiastically, like a sort of inverse Don Quixote. Now his vocabulary has expanded, and I imagine that this means he has a more granular view of things as well.
When they sleep, I take photos—my son’s full lips, my daughter’s wonderful poses. I take photos because I suspect that this, turning around in a passenger seat to find two sleeping children, is an experience I’ll otherwise forget.
Thirty years ago, my parents must have looked around in the same way, at me and my sister, on a highway traveling south, while it gradually became light outside. And as is often the case of late, I’m overcome with the sensation that I’m following a script from my childhood. Except that now I’m playing a different role—not that of the child but that of the mother, not in the back seat but in front.
That week we sleep in a big tent on a small campsite, where three other families, all Italian, are on holiday as well. Each of the three families has one child: a boy of eight, a boy of six, and a girl of two, with big, anime-style eyes, onto whom my daughter immediately latches. Compared with those modest, nimble Italian units, our pack feels large, lively, and loud.
At the next campsite, it’s a different story. We’ve driven to the foot of the Alps and now find ourselves among other Dutch families, who without exception have two or three children each.
We’re instantly back to average. Parents with three children, I once heard my mother say, “they’re the real pros.”
Two is the norm. My partner and I have joined the crowd—because we could, because we wanted our daughter to have a sibling, and because we, or in any case I, wanted to experience the spectacle one more time.
It’s also possible that we longed to reproduce the family dynamics we knew from our own childhoods: a family with two children in my case, three in my partner’s, in both cases more than one.
I assumed that these were personal motivations, complemented by fluke, good luck: we were fertile and our children were healthy. Not once did it occur to me that there might be other reasons why we wanted and in fact were able to become a standard family.
But the idea that our preferences came into being autonomously was largely an illusion—as the idea of autonomy probably always is. Whether we have children, and if so, how many, has everything to do with what happens outside the walls of our potential family homes.
Just before we left for Italy, I’d immersed myself in demographic developments in Europe. I already knew, therefore, that Italy’s fertility rate is at a historic low: 1.4 children per woman on average.
This is not so much because a relatively large number of Italian women remain childless, or because large families are less common. No, the most important reason is that Italian mothers, compared with mothers from countries with higher birth rates, more often stop at one.
“Missing children of birth order two,” wrote three economists in 2017, contribute the most to the difference in birth rates between countries with “low fertility,” such as Italy, and countries with a relatively “high fertility,” such as the Netherlands, where the birth rate is around 1.7.
“Missing children of birth order two”—it sounds like a premise for a thriller or crime series. In actual fact, if I am to believe these authors, it’s a matter of policy. For those missing second children are not a reflection of changing ideals; in Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, most people favor a two-child family—which means that some Italian parents have fewer children than they would really like. According to the economists who wrote the paper, this has to do with, among other things, childcare being relatively expensive and inaccessible.1
Italy’s missing second children suggest that the choice for a second or even a third child is determined not only by individual desires, longings, and opportunities but also by external circumstances—institutional provision, the state of the economy, gender norms, and so on.
I had also read a paper about Icelandic fathers who took paternity leave after the birth of their first child—since the year 2000, Iceland has had a generous paternity leave program in place, with at least three months of paid leave. The researchers wanted to know to what extent this program influenced the decision to have no children, one child, or more. Their conclusion: compared with fathers who hadn’t taken their leave after their first child was born, those who did take leave were much more likely to have a second child. Or, as the authors of the paper formulated it, fathers who took leave faced a significantly higher “second-birth risk.”2
The explanation: fathers on paternity leave tend to take on a larger proportion of housework and caring tasks, and the more equal the division of labor at home, the easier it is for mothers to combine care and paid work. This “makes the decision to have another child easier,” the researchers claim.
The conclusion sounds plausible, but it was that one word—“risk”—that stuck with me. It put me in mind of our discussions back when we still had only one child, of how my partner hadn’t been particularly interested in having a second and how intolerable I became as a result. He primarily saw risk in what I wanted, and perhaps it was the contrast between his interpretation and mine of the same phenomenon that most enraged me, most made me weep. It was the fact that we were looking at the same thing but seeing something different: I found it maddening.
In another study, examining more than 7,500 British families, a researcher looked into the relationship between the characteristics of the first child and the parents’ decision to have a second. The article displayed graphs reflecting the likelihood of having a second child in what was apparently termed a “hazard function.” One such figure showed that the risk of a second child, the second-child hazard, increases along with the first child’s scores on cognitive and social-emotional skills.3 In other words, the second-child hazard increases when the first is an “easy” child.
I picture my son, all thirty pounds of him, thundering toward the sharp edge of a bookcase. In the world of parents, it’s the bookcase that forms a hazard. In the world of the Finnish social epidemiologist who conducted this study, it’s the arrival of the second child.
A colleague kindly pointed out to me that terms such as “risk” and “hazard” are very common in economic and demographic circles, that they’re no less neutral than, say, “chance” or “tendency.” I shouldn’t read too much into it, she said.
But the words we use shape our view of things. (Or maybe our view of things shapes how certain words make us feel.) And I can’t help but hear something accusatory in this relationship between parental leave and the “risk” of a second birth. As if the parents have been set up, as if they could have escaped—if only they hadn’t fallen into the trap of paternity leave. And that easy first child who increases the hazard of a second—it reads as if the first child manipulated her parents with her good behavior.
(Of course, no amount of good behavior can outdo the pressure of major outside forces. Four years after the publication of that study on paternity leave and second-birth “hazard,” the world would be in the throes of a pandemic, parents and children would suddenly be spending a lot more time together, and the experience of parenthood would change profoundly for many of us. “If there’s a baby boom in 9 months,” reads a tweet going viral during this time, “it’ll consist entirely of first-born children.”)4
In Italy, among the Dutch holidaymakers, my daughter asks if there’ll be another baby, a third. We’re sitting in the tent, and I’m rubbing sunscreen onto my children, as I do every morning. The eldest endures the process with resignation; the youngest protests.
“Another baby?” I ask. “You mean another little brother or sister?”
My daughter nods.
I ask her why she would want that. “I’d want to help you,” she says, “and care for that baby.”
I say she’s already helping us now, isn’t she?
But she’d like to do “more difficult things,” she says.
She wants to change diapers, prepare bottles, and carry out other tasks for which her brother is now too big, wants to help with things he no longer needs.
I can’t come up with an answer right away. The answer to the question of why you might want children in the first place is complicated enough. The answer to the question of how you actually get around to having them is many times more complex.
Many of the reasons for having a second child are less idiosyncratic than I once thought. The desire for a baby, curiosity about parenthood, the wish to give a first child a sibling, and genetic luck all play a role. But so do the state of the economy, job security, provisions such as paternity leave and subsidized childcare. Not to mention cultural stereotypes about only children, and whether your first baby is an easy one.
They’re factors that, consciously or subconsciously, enter into the way we reproduce. Those factors make choices possible or rule them out, suggest options, conceal others.
Then of course there’s another factor, one I haven’t come across in studies involving Icelandic fathers or Italian mothers, but which parents around me talk about with increasing frequency. It’s a factor that may well be the most fundamental of all, but that’s also the hardest to take into account when considering having a first, second, or third child.
In the weeks leading up to our holiday, the newspapers published daily stories about how extremely hot summers like this one stood to become the new normal. The cause of this global warming is us, humans. If we continue on our current path, generations to come will have to deal with extreme weather conditions and a lack of resources—and, in the cautionary words of the philosopher Sarah Conly, they will be left with “lives vastly inferior to our own, if they are able to eke out a living at all.”5
And while fertility rates in wealthy industrialized countries have gone down in recent decades, the world population continues to grow larger. In many countries, mothers still have more than two children: the summer we were in Italy, the world population was up to 7.6 billion, with 2.4 children born for every woman.6
That’s less than the 4.7 of half a century ago, but more than the 2.1 needed to keep the population steady. Conly argues that, at least in the prosperous, industrialized parts of the world, people ought to get a grip. That they should have no children, or if parenthood is a precondition for a fulfilled life, they should have no more than one.
Conly belongs to a growing group of philosophers, journalists, and activists who are in favor of birth restriction for the sake of the planet. In the year my son was born, an international group of researchers published a book in which they calculated the potential impact of different climate solutions. High on their list was better family planning, in combination with more education for girls. The decreasing birth rate that would result from this would bring about a greater drop in CO2 emissions than all the windmills imaginable put together.7
Just before my son’s first birthday, a report came out in which climate scientists predicted that if a US family chose to put one fewer child into the world than was initially the plan, it would save as much in carbon dioxide emissions as 684 teenagers deciding to recycle everything that could be recycled for the rest of their lives.8
“Want to Fight Climate Change? Have Fewer Children” was the headline in The Guardian. Other newspapers and magazines hurled out headlines in a similar spirit:
“Should We Be Having Children in the Age of Climate Change?”
“How Do You Decide to Have a Baby When Climate Change Is Remaking Life on Earth?”
“One Child Less Than I Want”
And yet. And yet my partner and I had children. Sometimes we tell each other there’s still a chance that things will genuinely be better in the future, more pleasant, cleaner, and more sustainable. That those who have children have faith.
“Having children,” as a friend who is also a mother once put it, “is an act of hope.”
In the tent I try to grab hold of my son so I can put sunscreen on him too. All holiday he’s refused to wear a T-shirt, running around bare-chested instead. His skin is brown, smooth—he’s still “really dark”—but his hair is turning increasingly blond.
He runs from me giggling, looking over his shoulder to see if I’ve understood the game and am coming after him.
He bangs into the table leg and bursts into tears.
It occurs to me that we don’t so much have children because we’re hopeful as the other way around: if you have children, you have to look to the future. Once our children are with us, we have no choice other than to hope for a leap in progress: for policy and mentality changes big enough to call a halt to further warming, and to learn to live with the consequences of the damage we’ve already wrought.
“I don’t think so,” I say to my daughter, who’s still looking at me questioningly.
Then I go to my son, lift him up, and start comforting.