What Are Children For? Quotes

“The idea of "finding yourself" and discovering "what you really want" presupposes the presence of some stable fact waiting to be discovered by conscious effort, like an item in a scavenger hunt. But there is rarely such a static truth to be found. If having your life all figured out is the bar for being "ready" to have kids, no one will ever reach it. It is the choices you make—what to study, where to work, whom to love, and how—that will form you and shape your life, setting and delimiting the horizons of possibility, one day at a time. Raising the question of children, as personal as it inevitably is, requires more than soul searching. It takes a certain kind of courage, an open-minded willingness to probe into the meaning and value of having children, with the sober recognition that there is no past conception we can easily recover or resuscitate.”
― Anastasia Berg, What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice

“If having your life all figured out is the bar for being “ready” to have kids, no one will ever reach it. It is the choices you make—what to study, where to work, whom to love, and how—that will form you and shape your life, setting and delimiting the horizons of possibility, one day at a time.”
― Anastasia Berg, What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice