DEAR ZEN: To have or not to have
How should I decide whether or not to have kids?
Dear Zen,
Here, among life's many questions, I have been mulling one toughie: not the question of whether or not to have a child (for which any answer is fine), but that of how to *decide* whether to do so.
I imagine that answers to the latter may vary immensely, pending people's life circumstances, but as someone who avidly follows your thinking, I would greatly value hearing your own mind's reflections on it.
I ponder this as a single person in my late 40s who has always dreamed of partnering and building a small family. But I am also thinking to myself that I haven't found a partner to even build that solid two-person partnership.
Meanwhile, I have also seen that one can very fulfillingly help heal the world, and cultivate wisdom and good action in others (including younger people) without having kids of one's own. To boot, the world looks scarily dire in many ways and even modestly populating a growing and fairly resource-needy populace may not best help address this. I know this is partly first-world navel-gazing, but I'm also soul-searching.
Finally, this is all compounded by the lingering fear that untangling all the ways I am stuck in my own habits—including in ways yet unknown to me—to fully do right by a child's needs may not prove as easy or as fun as one might naively hope. Watching my sister, for example, I know how tough parenting is, if only from the anguish on her brow. And I would prefer not to endure so much anguish or foist it onto a partner without real good reasons.
- Pondering Parenthood
Dear PP,
I was so relieved to see that your question was not whether or not you should have children, but referred to the process of deciding. Not what, then, but how.
I have run my own personal gauntlet of not wanting, then wanting, and then wondering whether or not I'll have children of my own. I used to be a much more cynical person and when I was young, I often dismissed the desire to have children as selfish and self-centered. It is an indicator of the kind of circumstances I grew up in that many of the parents around me seemed to treat their children like accessories and social signifiers that they had "made it".
So, to my formerly cynical self, your questioning and self doubt seem appropriate. But it's also right for the former version of me that desperately wanted children and now for the version of me that feels a little less attached to it out of various practical considerations, like age. Your willingness to pause is right in all cases because it tackles first the question of how to be a responsible parent. In the sense of responsibility as response-ability, this means your ability to respond to the challenges of parenthood.
If you know or suspect, PP, that there are unresolved habits and baggage in his life that would hinder your ability to respond, to be the parent you want to be, there is one way that I know of to find out: training.
Training doesn't have to be Zen training, but it can be truly a priceless endeavor to put ourselves through rigorous and challenging routines that reveal what still lies beneath the surface.
How do we do, for example, on only an hour or two of sleep a night?
Can we tend to the needs of ourselves and others with lowly valued physical labor day in and day out without our college-educated egos getting stirred up?
How do we do, simply, in extremely stressful and unfamiliar situations?
How do we respond when someone we are responsible for is stuck in a spiral of wild emotions and lashing out, including at us, the person who's trying to help them?
These are all questions that can be answered. More importantly, psychophysical and spiritual training is also a laboratory in which we can not just to see how we respond once, but again and again, each time trying out new responses and experiencing growth.
In short, my Zen training suggests to me that being the responsible parents we want to be is something we can anticipate and control more than people seem to think. It doesn't have to be a crap shoot, waiting to see how things turn out once we've already brought a new human being into the world.
So, PP, your timing is perfect. Now—before the relationship and before the kids!—is the time to train yourself to be the person you want to be, whether you become a parent or not.
You also raise some questions that are harder to forecast and control, like what kind of world you'd be bringing children into and whether it's morally responsible to bring a child into such uncertainty.
The wonderful folks over at Conceivable Future, a movement facilitating conversations around having children in a global climate crisis, offer a great response here. Some environmentalists, it seems, worry that each additional human being is but a net burden to the earth, consuming more resources and emitting more carbon gas. This is especially so in the developed world, where our environmental impact is disproportionately large.
But the organizers of Conceivable Future helpfully point to the fact that the average person's carbon emissions and consumption of resources is fundamentally a systemic and political issue, not an individual or moral one. Moreover, foisting this moral burden onto the individual can distract from the real work of changing the policies, consumerist culture, and technologies that make living in the First World so deleterious to the planet in the first place.
So yes, stop navel gazing, PP, at least on this last point, and stay focused on what is within your control.
It is much more valuable and important to take actions within our reach, as you say, "to heal the world and cultivate more wisdom and good action". And this begins with developing ourselves so that we are able to respond with the decisiveness, compassion, and grace we'd hope for, even under the worst of conditions.