Why so many children?
Photo Credit: note thanun @notethanun
When newly-appointed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett speaks about her seven children, she refers to them as her “greatest joy.” This is not original language to use when speaking of one’s children. We have heard parents—mothers, in particular—refer to their children as their “greatest joy” for decades. But why? Why can’t adults derive great joy some other way? I love children, too—I was a classroom teacher, tutor, and nanny for more than two decades, and my favorite part hands-down of each of those jobs was working directly with my students, having the great privilege of witnessing them learn and understand and think for themselves. Nevertheless, I wonder: Why must some people with access to a multitude of birth control options have so many children?
As Stanford University’s Millenium Alliance for Humanity and Biosphere (MAHB) explains, one of the biggest problems plaguing our planet today is the ever-increasing human population. Human population growth has long been a concern of environmentalists and conservationists—indeed, it has troubled the most thoughtful of our species since before any of us alive today were born. However, as Charles Eisenstein points out, if we all lived like many villagers in India still do, our population growth might not be a problem at all. It is our consumption habits that are the problem. If all people purchased tumble dryers, lived in four-bedroom homes, and swaddled their infants in “disposable” diapers, for example, we would need more than seven planet Earths simply to maintain the consumption levels we have now.
When I line-dry my clothes, bed linens, and towels, some people tease me and ask why I waste so much time hanging everything when I can simply toss it all into the dryer. It is this convenience mindset that drives some of our consumption habits, and we have been brainwashed with that convenience mindset by those who wish to sell us more “convenience” products. Then, we do precisely what the people selling us that convenience mindset want us to do: we brainwash our children, too, turning them into mass consumers like ourselves. Simply because we can tumble dry our clothes does not mean we should. Simply because we can get a new phone every six months does not mean we should. Simple because we can live in homes bigger than we actually need does not mean we should. It would behoove us to question these ideas of “convenience” and think from the perspective of what damage it would do to the Earth and all who share this planet with us if every single human alive did the things we think are so convenient. Tumble drying, for instance.
Which brings us back to Coney Barrett’s seven children. The environment in which we live cannot sustain all people who reach puberty birthing seven children, and all those children growing up to be people who use tumble dryers and other “convenience” items the production of which—and whose very usage—negatively impacts our environment. And who also birth seven children. So why do we call children our “greatest joy”? Why do we automatically congratulate people on the birth of their children? Why do so many of us assume that if we love someone we must marry that person and then purchase a house with that person and then birth children with that person?
What if we as a society—because it is truly insufficient from a sustainability perspective to do this on an individual level—explored the possibility of deriving great joy from other experiences—experiences that have no negative impact whatsoever on the environment and the natural world—rather than having children? Or what if those of us with access to reproductive health services who feel an internal drive to be parents agreed to have one child—or maximum two children—and then use some sort of contraception to prevent additional pregnancies? Isn’t the need to have more and more children in order to derive great joy akin to drug addiction? Or to shopaholism? Why can we not derive great joy from parenting one or two children? And for those of us without that insatiable drive to be parents, what if we actually took the time to think about whether we truly want to have children before bringing them into the world simply as a matter of course?
Let’s challenge the idea that more kids = more joy. Let’s challenge the idea that anyone needs to be a parent. Let’s question all our ideas about everything—truly inspect and investigate them—before we bring additional consumers into the world. More and more and more children—more and more and more mass consumers—is definitely not the Earth’s greatest joy.
Perhaps the world will get lucky and Coney Barrett’s children—and the children of other exceedingly large families on the planet today—will all choose not to reproduce, or will choose to reproduce on a smaller scale. Perhaps they will derive their “greatest joy” in life some other way.
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