POLITICS AND POETICS

IS THERE A POINT IN EVER HAVING CHILDREN?

DOMINIQUE VERDEN

September 26, 2025

What was once an inevitability has become a wager. Philosophy, literature, and song circle the question, seeing in children both miracle and burden, cruelty and hope, so that every refusal becomes a gesture of dignity, every affirmation an act of revolt, and the question itself lingers unresolved, like life asking whether it ought to continue.

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Some questions sound absurd until you realize they are not. Is there a point in ever having children? At first, it feels rhetorical, a provocation meant to be brushed aside. But it has been asked in philosophy, whispered in private doubts, and even sung in pop music. Morrissey once sang it in “Stretch Out and Wait,” featured on the album The World Won’t Listen (1987). Half sneer, half lament, it is delivered with melodrama such that it sounds profound until it collapses under its own weight. Morrissey is neither here nor there, but his imprudence is instructive. He spits out the question as if it were disposable, and in doing so reveals something sharper than he could know: how easy it is to trivialize a question that has haunted humanity for millennia.

For most of human history, the point was never in question. Children arrived because they did, because nature and custom made them inevitable. They were the hands that would till the soil, guard the livestock, tend the elders, carry the family name. In agrarian societies, a child was less a philosophical problem than an economic calculation: more mouths, yes, but also more labor, more continuity, more survival. To ask “Is there a point?” would have sounded like asking whether there was a point to breathing. Life was structured around reproduction. The household, the village, the lineage—all assumed renewal as their basic premise.

The Smiths, a family of sorts: Morrissey already sang the question, long before this essay asked it (Manchester, 1980s)

Now the premise has shifted. We live in an age where reproduction is no longer fate but choice, and choice demands justification. The pill, the clinic, the apartment lease, the career path—all of these give us tools or criteria to defer, to decide, to opt out entirely. The burden of the question has migrated from culture to individual, from inevitability to deliberation. And it is here, in this space of choice, that Morrissey’s throwaway line becomes sharper than he intended. We have inherited the possibility of saying no, and with it the obligation of asking why yes.

The question feels heavier today because the world into which children arrive no longer offers the same assurances. The ancient justifications—continuity, labor, lineage—carry less weight in a society where survival is guaranteed not by offspring but by institutions, markets, technologies. If children once symbolized security, they now often symbolize precarity: a financial burden in cities where rent outpaces wages, a moral quandary in an era of climate breakdown, a private joy overshadowed by practical instability. To bring a child into the world is to gamble on a future that looks, at best, uncertain.

The Carter Family: where family obligation and music rehearsal became the same thing (ca. 1930s promotional photo)

And yet people continue. Because desire resists logic. Because biology presses its case through longing, through love, through hormones. Because even in collapse, the sight of a child laughing, babbling, learning language, makes existence feel like it deserves extension. Here the question finds its paradox: Rationally, the reasons may falter; emotionally, they overwhelm. The “point” of children, if there is one, is not found in a ledger but in the inarticulate swell of attachment. This is where Morrissey’s cheap irony rings hollow—because the real answer, if it exists, can never be sung as sarcasm.

Still, the doubt is not dissolved. To refuse children is also a coherent stance, one that grows stronger each decade. It can be an act of restraint, of ecological modesty, of freedom. The childless life is no longer framed as failure but increasingly as liberation, as clarity, as a refusal to burden another generation with the anxieties of our own. What once seemed selfish now often reads as ethical. The refusal is not always despair—it is sometimes dignity.

Bloodlines and blood feuds: the Corleones prove that every cradle can be a throne (Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather Part II, 1974)

The ethical case against children is often framed in the starkest terms. Why create another consumer in a world already strained? Why increase the carbon footprint when glaciers recede and forests burn? Why populate the future with mouths that may know famine, wars, or heat? There is even a philosophical school—antinatalism—that argues that life itself is a harm, that to be born is to suffer, and that the only mercy is nonexistence. It is a position at once radical and oddly logical: If pain outweighs joy, why manufacture new witnesses to it? In this light, to abstain from reproduction appears not selfish but an act of mercy.

And yet such ethical clarity falters when pressed against the stubborn mess of human longing. For to ask “Is there a point?” is also to ask “Is there a meaning?” Children have long been one of the ways we answer the terror of mortality. They carry our names, our gestures, sometimes even our eyes. They make our lives appear less like accidents and more like links in a chain. If death is the abyss, children are the bridge we construct toward it—not a way around it, but a way to pretend the self will ripple forward after the body ends. To live without children, then, can feel like an embrace of finitude, a willingness to let the line stop with us. It is a form of honesty, but one that requires strength.

Every dynasty is dysfunctional; some just dress better for the family photo (Wes Anderson, The Royal Tenenbaums, 2001)

Between ethics and existence, the question oscillates. On one hand, the responsibility to the unborn: to not thrust them into a world of scarcity and fire. On the other, the responsibility to the self: to not deny the possibility of joy, of meaning, of continuity. Neither cancels the other. Both exist in tension, unresolved. Perhaps this is why Morrissey’s line lingers, stupid as it is—it crystallizes the irresolvable. To ask if there is a point is already to expose that no single answer can suffice, that the “point” shifts depending on whether you measure by morality, by biology, by history, or by love.

To speak of children is also to speak of time. They make time visible, almost cruelly so. A child is a clock embodied: first steps, first words, the marking of birthdays, the sudden realization that they have grown taller than you. They measure not only their own lives but yours, reminding you of the narrowing corridor of your own years. For some, this is unbearable; for others, it is precisely the point. To watch time embodied in another is to accept the terms of one’s own mortality. It makes the abstract concrete, the calendar incarnate. Children are not only the future; they are proof that the future will go on without you.

Egon Schiele painted what most portraits avoid: the fragile, naked fact of being bound together as a family

(Egon Schiele, The Family, 1918)

Here the question acquires a metaphysical weight. If to have children is to project oneself into the future, then to refuse them is to practice a form of self-erasure. But perhaps erasure is not always tragic. To accept that the line ends here, with me, is to claim a strange kind of freedom—the freedom to step off the conveyor belt of generations, to say that not all stories must continue. In some cultures, this refusal is seen as selfish or sterile; in others, it resonates with ascetic traditions, where renunciation itself becomes a form of meaning.

And yet, even as renunciation is honored in the abstract, the presence of children remains stubbornly magnetic. They disrupt solemnity with laughter, they pull attention away from abstraction and back into the ordinary. A child with an ice cream cone, a child falling asleep on a train, a child asking why the sky is blue—these images exert a quiet force stronger than ethical calculus. They do not resolve the dilemma, but they remind us how life often resists being reduced to dilemmas. The “point” of children, if there is one, may not lie in their ability to solve the problem of mortality or ethics, but in their sheer irreducibility—their refusal to be instrumentalized at all.

Albert Camus insisted that the only true philosophical question was whether life is worth living. He meant suicide, not children, but the two inquiries rhyme. To ask if there is a point in ever having children is to extend Camus’s challenge outward: If life is absurd, why multiply it? Camus himself resisted despair not with transcendence but with defiance. The absurd could not be resolved, but it could be confronted, even embraced. To bring a child into such a world, then, might be read as an act of revolt: to insist that existence, however senseless, is still to be affirmed.

Arthur Schopenhauer would have none of this. For him, life was suffering, desire was bondage, and procreation was the cruelest trap of all—nature’s trick to perpetuate a cycle of frustration. Children, in this view, are not gifts but victims, condemned to chase fulfillment they will never reach. Antinatalism finds its deepest roots here: the refusal to have children as the only truly compassionate choice. To stand with Schopenhauer is to see abstention not as failure, but as the clearest form of wisdom.

Pop stardom as family business: togetherness rehearsed, harmonies masking discord (the Jackson Family, Los Angeles, 1970s)

Between Camus’s revolt and Schopenhauer’s refusal, modernity has oscillated. Some, like Hannah Arendt, looked to natality—the fact of birth itself—as the foundation of politics, the guarantee that something new can appear in the world. For Arendt, every child is a small miracle, proof that beginnings are possible. Others, like contemporary antinatalists, argue that the miracle is precisely the problem—that to begin is to be exposed, to suffer, to perish.

If philosophy sets the terms, literature makes them flesh. In Buddenbrooks (1901), Thomas Mann traces the decline of a family dynasty across generations, showing how children can be both bearers of promise and harbingers of decay. Each birth seems to ensure continuity, but the very weight of inheritance corrodes what it passes down. To have children, in Mann’s telling, is not to secure the future but to hasten decline in another form. His novel suggests that reproduction is about both renewal and exhaustion—each generation a little weaker than the last, each child a ledger entry in a slow-motion dissolution.

Franz Kafka, meanwhile, stripped continuity of any consolation. In his diaries he agonized over marriage, fearing that to bring a child into the world would be to surrender another innocent being to the same labyrinth that entrapped him. In stories like The Judgment (1912) or Letter to His Father (1919), reproduction is not a gift but the extension of a cycle of incomprehension: fathers who rule through opaque, crushing authority; sons who inherit their bewilderment as much as their blood. To imagine Kafka as a father is almost unbearable—he could only see in children the perpetuation of his own entanglements.

Domestic bliss: a picnic, a gun, and children posed as carefully as the peaches (Pablo Picasso, Family of the Painter, 1903)

If Kafka reveals inheritance as futility, Fyodor Dostoevsky makes it a site of almost unbearable moral weight. In The Brothers Karamazov (1880), the innocence of children becomes a touchstone for justice itself. No philosophy, he insists, can justify the suffering of even a single child. His novels are crowded with young figures whose pain or purity exposes the bankruptcy of the adult world. For Dostoevsky, children are both the greatest argument for hope and the most searing indictment of existence.

If Dostoevsky and Kafka haunt one side of the question, others give it different shadings. Simone de Beauvoir dismantled the mythology of motherhood, showing how women were pressed into reproduction less by desire than by social expectation. Philip Larkin distilled antinatalism into a cruel couplet—They fuck you up, your mum and dad—a joke sharp enough to wound. Sheila Heti circled the question with indecision, dramatizing its irresolution as a way of life in itself. Margaret Atwood showed how children can be seized by power, while Octavia Butler imagined them as fragile carriers of transformation. Each reveals another facet of the same dilemma: whether to see children as miracles, burdens, traps, or beginnings.

In the end, the question circles back to where it began, stripped of philosophy, literature, and even song: Is there a point in ever having children? The philosophers push and pull—Camus urging affirmation, Schopenhauer counseling refusal, Arendt seeing in every birth the chance for renewal. The novelists and poets sketch the range of outcomes—innocence and cruelty, hope and injury, adaptation and collapse. Morrissey throws the line away with a sneer, Beauvoir dissects it with precision, Butler wagers on the fragile possibility of transformation.

Sixteen children, two coats of arms, and one unfinished canvas: legacy was never subtle

(Marten van Valckenborch, The Artist Painting Surrounded by His Family, 1584)

But the question, when it returns to the level of life, is not asked in those terms. It appears instead in quiet, unadorned forms: in a couple deciding whether to try, in someone alone at night wondering whether they want to pass on their name, in a gaze at the playground where laughter and futility seem indistinguishable. The “point” is never abstract, never universal. It is always situated, always contingent, always bound to the life of the one asking.

Perhaps that is the only resolution possible: to see the question not as a riddle to be solved but as a mirror reflecting one’s own orientation toward existence. For some, children are revolt, miracle, and continuity. For others, they are burden, cruelty, and erasure. Both positions can be defended, both can be mocked, both can collapse into silence. The point is not in children themselves but in what they reveal about us—about how we face time, mortality, and the prospect of the future.

So is there a point? Morrissey may have been stupid to ask it as a line in a song, but stupidity sometimes grasps what wisdom cannot. To ask is to acknowledge the abyss beneath the automatic, to recognize that what once seemed inevitable is now open, precarious, and terrifyingly free. And in that freedom lies both the weight and the wonder. Every yes and every no to children is a wager on life itself—a gamble no one can win on behalf of another, but one that we continue to make, whether in refusal, in affirmation, or in silence.

Dominique Verden (b. 1972, Doute-sur-Saône, France) once enrolled in philosophy at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, but her dissertation is said to have vanished. She is known to publish only on questions that resist conclusion.

Cover image: The modern family portrait: smiling through the fault lines (Noah Baumbach, Marriage Story, 2019)