Note to readers: My Family and Other Globalizers is a weekly parenting column on bringing up global citizens.
When my older son, Ishaan, was about four and driving me insane with his hyperactivity, I remember groaning and clutching my hair. “It can be dreadful being your mother,” I’d complained. Ishaan had immediately stopped running about and looked at me with genuine curiosity. “Really?” he’d asked. “Would you rather have been a pirate?”
But once I developed motherhood - and let’s be honest, it is best described as a condition, much like insomnia or generalized anxiety - I misplaced the ability to write, save between the pauses of my children’s needs. I metaphorically lost what Virginia Woolf called “A room of one’s own.” My concentration fractured, and even as I tried to focus on the India-EU free trade agreement or some such newsworthy topic, I couldn’t shut down the multiple tabs that were stubbornly open in my brain at all times - had child #1 taken show and tell item to school - had child #2 finally had a bowel movement – and on, and on.
Had I not been a mother, I doubt I would have become a pirate, but I would have travelled more, been less distracted, a lot less guilty, earned more, and definitely slept better.
Is it any wonder then, that around the world women are choosing to have fewer children, or none at all? In China, for example, a one child policy had artificially constrained the country’s demography for some three decades. But even after it was lifted, in 2015, there was no sustained upsurge in births. The reasons that most Chinese give for not wanting more children are familiar around the world, particularly in developed countries. It is expensive to raise and educate kids.
But expense is not the only reason.
Consider this: two decades ago, Australia tried a “baby bonus” subsidy scheme that paid parents the equivalent of nearly 6,000 US dollars a child at its peak. When the campaign kicked off in 2004, the country’s fertility rate was around 1.8 children per woman, but by 2020, six years after the program had ended, it was at 1.6 – lower even, than when the payments were first introduced.
In the United States, the nation’s birth rate had been declining about 2 percent each year on average, since 2007. A recent article in CNN that explored the reasons for this trend included the fact that young people didn’t want the responsibility that came with kids; that they believed parenthood to be detrimental to mental health; that they feared a lack of support given that many lived far away from their parents and the fact that many simply enjoyed their childfree lives.
Another, even more extreme, example of demographic decline is Japan. The archipelago leads the world in childless middle-aged women. Twenty-seven percent of Japanese women born in 1970 have not had any children by the age of 50, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And it’s not just that raising children is expensive, but that women want to be able to pursue employment themselves. A lack of measures to help balance work and family force many to choose forgoing children in order to continue their careers.
How does all this apply to me? Certainly, bringing up my boys, both of whom have attended private international schools in the different parts of the world that they have grown up in, has been prohibitively expensive. But other than the material cost, it is the emotional investment that we, modern parents, make in our children that is truly draining.
We have gone from a society that had a pragmatic, somewhat utilitarian view of children, to one where children are worshiped. As sociologist Viviana Zelizer puts it, children have become “economically worthless but emotionally priceless,” morphing from useful to coddled.
So, has it been worth it? Would I have children again, now that I know the difficulties and sacrifice it entails? Would I have less? Would I have more?
Even with hindsight, it is difficult to answer these questions because so much of the joy of parenting in ineffable. It lives in intense puffs of cuddle-induced dopamine and the long-term arc - the narrative - of family life. In the togetherness of sifting photos while sitting around the dining table, and in the soiled stuffed toy that was so beloved it could never be thrown away.
These can feel insubstantial when stacked up against the solid facts of school fees, childcare costs and the demands of the workplace. Which is why, far be it for me to tell anyone who has chosen to be childless to second guess their decision.
Children are demanding and greedy. And any notion that they will turn into our caregivers in our old age should be taken with a bucketful of salt.
The truth is more akin to how the poet, Kahlil Gibran, puts it:
“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.”
Our children are only with us on borrowed time. This is undeniable. But, oh, that fleeting moment, ephemeral though it may be, it is also incandescent. That is until your teenager tells you, you are the worst mom in the world. Hmm. I did say it was ephemeral.
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