Julian Baggini sets out to commend not having children as one form of the good life. That seems fair enough; in the course of doing so, he allows that it isn't the only form of the good life and that having children is fine for those who want to, yielding its own rewards. But somehow, in making the case, Julian loses sight of his objective. To show what is good about not having children, all he need do is spell out its attractions, as he perceives these; but he can't resist the temptation of magnifying the attractions by comparing them with the disbenefits of having, and being, children. Thus he asks us to...
... think about what we know family life is typically like. In my experience, more people find it fraught than unambiguously positive. Most people have difficult relationships with at least one parent, and I don't think I know anyone who visits either or both as often as they could, if they really wanted to. Many parents are haunted by the fact that they are not as close to their children as they hoped or imagined they would be.
Well, OK, but if this reflects badly on the practice of having children, then so does it reflect badly on the practice of forming loving relationships - as with boyfriends, girlfriends, lovers, partners, wives and husbands. Oy, the difficulties, the fraughtness. And yet people find it worth doing. How about the practice of writing books? All joy and plain sailing? Not really. How, indeed, about just about everything worthwhile in life?
Julian also says:
[A] child-free life also has unique rewards that you miss when you start a family. For instance, the freedom to read a book or to have an adult conversation uninterrupted is not trivial, and any hands-on parent seriously compromises their ability to express this important capacity.
A parent who, simply because of his or her children, has no freedom to read a book or have an adult conversation uninterrupted is either badly organized or hasn't thought these matters out well, or both - save if there is some very special problem in the family. And as for compromise, this too arises in many spheres of human activity other than having children.
Julian is perfectly right to defend the option of not having children as a legitimate choice in life (though I haven't found that, within my own acquaintance, people who have chosen not to have children are looked at as being strange or foolish or immoral). But his negative presentation of having children betrays the same sort of prejudice towards this choice in life as he objects to with respect to his choice. He even gives us that the decision to have children is a decision to 'breed', and in case you think he doesn't mean anything derogatory by that, Julian ends by explaining that in reproducing we aren't 'superior to our fellow animals'; we rise above them in other ways. The same, of course, could be said about eating, sleeping, having sex and looking about. All very animalistic, but at the same time endearingly human.