The gut-wrenching terror of having kids in America

Pan's Labyrinth, Ghostbusters, and the art of parenting while depressed on a dying planet.

Oct 29, 2024

The night Donald Trump was elected in 2016, at around 3 in the morning, drunk and in shock and lying in a hotel room bed in New Orleans, I turned to my wife and said, “We can’t have kids now. We can’t bring anyone into this world.” I meant it — given what I knew about the climate crisis and what Donald Trump would do to make it worse, I just couldn’t see a livable future for my then-hypothetical children.

In the coming days, I convinced myself that I’d misspoken, that I was being too rash and too hopeless, and that I shouldn’t let the course of my life be dictated by as pathetic an excuse for a human as Donald Trump. I’d always wanted kids, and I definitely wanted them with my wife. Our plan had been to start trying for kids after the vacation we took on our one year anniversary, the vacation where Trump was elected President. So I pushed my nagging thoughts about the future into the back of my brain, and we went forward with my plan. By spring of 2017, my wife was pregnant. The die was cast, we’d made our decisions. We would have to live with them. My children, through no choice of their own, would have to live.

We’re nearly 8 years on from that fateful night, and I know a few things to be true, even though those things are contradictory:

I do not regret having kids.
My concerns about having them were real, and I shouldn’t have pushed those concerns aside so lightly.

I spend a lot of time grappling with hard topics like the apocalypse, anti-natalism (the philosophical view that it is unethical to procreate), nihilism, and despair, and on an almost daily basis, I think about how much fucking easier it would be to handle all of this if we didn’t have kids. If I thought that the world was ending in five years and it was just me and my wife, I would, more or less, be able to shrug off my impending doom. I would just get weirder. I’d go to more concerts, I’d get lots of tattoos, I’d read every last book I could get my hands on, I’d go on fun little trips with my wife. It would all feel low-stakes. I’d be able to live in the now with much more ease and comfort.

Depression and parental joy

Even better, if I didn’t have kids, my depression could cease to be a burden upon myself and my family, it would instead become an asset. In the brilliant movie Melancholia, Kirsten Dunst’s character Justine, who struggles with severe, chronic depression, is the only one who is able to take the news about the world’s impending collision with a rogue planet with anything resembling grace. As all the other adults fall to pieces, Justine, who has long since given up on life, comforts the children and plays with them right to the end.

But having kids makes it a lot harder. Even if I struggle to value my own life, I intensely value the lives of my children. We showed my kids Ghostbusters for the first time this year, and the other day, my 4-year-old son — who decided to be a Ghostbuster for Halloween and has not taken off the costume we got for him in days — kicked open our front door, walked straight towards me, and said:

Parenting is peppered with this sort of delightful shit, and kids manage to enjoy their lives so effortlessly that it’s impossible to not have fun with them. This, of course, wreaks havoc on my depression, which likes to chime in with stuff like:

How can you be so unhappy with such wonderful little people in your life?
You’re inflicting yourself upon them, you fucking pig.
Think of how much happier they’d be with a non-depressed parent!
You’ve condemned a beautiful little being full of joy and light to an excruciating death on a dying planet.

I’ve tried discussing this with other parents, but it seems like most of the non-depressed parents around me cope with our bleak political and ecological reality by simply not thinking about it all that much. I’ve heard parents say stuff like, “I don’t like climate change, but I draw the line at paper straws.” Which I — a man who is admittedly prone to hyperbole — have trouble hearing as anything but “I would rather my children die on fire at a young age than place my lips upon the rim of a cup.”

The cognitive dissonance between what I (and, it’s worth noting, the global scientific community + the UN) see coming down the pike in our near future and the glib, see-no-evil, business-as-usual response most of our leaders and adults have towards that future, is infuriating. I’m trying to be depressed over here and instead I feel like I need to run around screaming that the house is on fire and we need to actually make moves to save our children. Can’t all of the people without major depressive disorder and anxiety fix the world? Can’t the adults work “saving the world” into all of their adulting?

This is, of course, what Greta Thunberg is so fucking pissed about. She gets on stages and says shit like, “How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” and all of the progressive adults around her go “Yaaasss! Get it girlboss! Children are our future!” and then go about their lives without starting a revolution. The gap between what is said and what is done is a canyon at this point, and anyone who tries to point this fact out is flirting with madness.

Is life worth living? (Even in America?)

I should have given more thought to the way being a parent would affect me, but having been a parent for the better part of a decade, I now know that the old cliche is true — you have no idea what’s hitting you when you choose to have kids. And while I feel intense sympathy for couples who have made the hard choice to not have kids because of the state of this world, I do not hold the anti-natalist view that it is unethical to have children.

I hold the view that it is unethical to have children in America.

I hold this view for a few reasons. First, I do not agree with the anti-natalist viewpoint that life’s suffering outweighs life’s joys. I say this even as a person with depression and anxiety, because having kids has shown me what I knew when I was a kid: our days are filled with both happiness and suffering, and much of the way we perceive these days hinges on which moments we choose to let our thoughts linger upon. If someone is rude to you on the internet, if you read a news article about the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelf, and then you spend the rest of the day thinking about those things and nothing else, then sure! Life is mostly suffering.

If, on the other hand, you choose to think about the small nice stuff that’s happened to you during your day — “haha man, how fucking good is peanut butter?” — then your day can actually be mostly good. Your energy follows your attention, so if you pay attention to small nice stuff — peanut butter, showers, 4-year-olds impersonating Peter Venkman — then your day will actually be pretty pleasant. The majority of humans in history have lived in politically chaotic — and often catastrophic — times, and plenty of humans in those eras have managed to live happy, fulfilling lives in spite of it.

I’ve only gotten to this point where I can think this way thanks to a mindfulness practice (and, full disclosure, by switching from booze to cannabis), but after 10 years with depression, I’ve learned not to confuse my depressive state of mind with the state of the world. And I do, somewhere deep down at the bottom of my soul, if you dive down past all the depression, believe that life actually is worth living, that it is better to exist than not exist. Life, for all its terrors, has never stopped being fascinating to me and, even amidst the depression, frequently pleasant. This belief is ultimately as close as my atheistic brain gets to leap of faith, and faith of this sort is incompatible with the anti-natalist viewpoint.

But America, on the other hand, for all its wealth and prosperity, is a bleak, shitty place to live as a child and as a parent. Childcare costs are stupidly high: at times, my wife and I have paid up to a fifth of our monthly income on daycare and babysitters. Healthcare is criminally expensive: our dentist once charged us $200 because he spent approximately 30 seconds “examining” our daughter’s baby teeth, before saying “they look good,” and giving her a toothbrush. Social supports that were available when we were kids in the 80s and 90s are gone. And both of my kids before the age of five expressed fears to me about their school’s active shooter drills: my son, while hiding in a drill, asked his teacher, “how will my dad find me?”

I don’t know how to feel anything but rage when I hear stuff like this from my little Ghostbuster, because I know that nothing will ever be done about it — too many people in America shrug off their children’s fear, and often their deaths, as the cost of doing business.

In fact, is hard to be a parent in the U.S. and come to any conclusion except that our leaders hold the lives of our children in utter contempt. Back in August, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on the nation’s parental mental health crisis1, which has been worsening for years because of late capitalism, but which was turbocharged during the pandemic. It’s nice that the Surgeon General would speak up for us, but the fixes to these problems would have to be systemic and, truth be told, revolutionary. And we know that no one in a position of real power in the United States right now is interested in being a revolutionary.

Which means that parents are alone in America. Kids are alone in America. Our leaders knowing that there’s a problem and then doing nothing about it is almost worse than it would be if they were simply ignorant. If I had taken the time after the Trump election to really think about what was right, I’d still decide to have kids, but I’d have moved abroad. I’d take them to a country where the mass murder of children in their places of learning wasn’t accepted as an inevitable part of life.

But they’re here now, and absent a really great job opportunity coming up, they are here to stay. I failed them in that regard. I believe that life is worth living, but I am not sure I believe that life is worth living in America. I certainly hope it is, but as acts of faith go, that’s a leap further than I’m willing to make.

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Innocence and disobedience in bleak times

Every year around Halloween, I rewatch Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece, Pan’s Labyrinth. The movie, though a stunningly beautiful work of art, is incredibly hard to watch as the parent of a young girl. I force myself to watch it anyway, because it reminds me of things that I need to be regularly reminded of. Spoilers follow, and if you haven’t watched it, given that this is among the best movies ever made, I suggest you end your reading of this article here.

The main character is a young girl, Ofelia, whose mother has just married a fascist Captain at the end of the Spanish Civil War. While the Captain roots out and brutalizes the remaining resistance fighters in the hills, Ofelia copes with her pregnant mother’s ailing health and the ruthlessness around her by engaging in a series of trials given to her by a mythical Faun who lives in a nearby labyrinth. The Faun claims that Ofelia is actually the princess of the Underworld, lost for centuries, and that she must prove herself worthy of her immortal blood by doing as he says.

When her disobedience results in the death of several of the fairies who the Faun charged with helping her, she is given one last chance: sacrifice her newborn brother to the Labyrinth and achieve immortal life. She refuses, and when the Faun abandons her, she is shot and left to die by her stepfather. As Ofelia lies bleeding to death, the Faun reappears and tells her that by refusing to shed the blood of an innocent, she has actually proven her worth, and will now live forever as the Queen of the Underworld. As her caretaker weeps over her body, she smiles and is reunited with her lost parents.

I have adored this movie sense I first saw it in 2006, and for years, the question that preoccupied me was whether or not the Faun and all the fantastical elements of the story were imagined or real. Was Ofelia coping with a hopeless situation with a fantastical delusion, or was she actually saved in the end? Was del Toro trying to say something about the comforting power of stories, or did he believe that there was deeper magic in the world that fairy tales help us get at?

This year, though, something else struck me: while the movie has always been overtly, openly antifascist, this was the first time I’d recognized the movie as an ode to the courage of disobedience.

Disobedience is a hard thing to grapple with as a parent, even when your own political views veer towards the anarchistic. Much of what drives my worst parenting moments is my fear that if I don’t help my kids become better or more resilient, I am leaving them without the tools they need in a brutal, uncaring world. My anxiety about their imagined future in an ecologically devastated tyrannical Christian theocracy can, paradoxically, turn me into a tyrant. There are times when they disobey me, I get furious, and then a voice deep in the back of my brain whispers: “Good for them.” I know, in the calmer, wiser parts of my soul, that elements of their personality that are hard for me as a parent are good for them as people.

In one of the movie’s many powerful moments, the local Doctor is brought in by the fascist captain to revive a resistance fighter he’s been torturing so that the captain can torture him some more. Instead, the Doctor puts the fighter out of his misery by giving him an overdose of pain medication. The Captain is baffled at the choice, telling the Doctor that “ it would have been much better for you if you’d obeyed.” The Doctor’s responds:

But Captain, to obey — just like that — for obedience’s sake, without questioning... That's something only people like you can do.

The Doctor knows, of course, that his choice is going to result in his own death — those lines are, in fact, his last words — but for him, living well is more important than avoiding death. Ofelia makes the same choice herself at the end of the movie: she chooses what’s right even thought it means sacrificing immortality. She is rewarded — as we have every right to expect in a fairy tale such as this — but she had no reason to think she would be. She just did the right thing in spite of the consequences.

And it’s this scraggly, poorly-rooted vine that I cling to as I hang over the edge of the cliff of our uncertain future: it may be out of my control to guarantee my children a long or even a pleasant life in this hideous country of ours, but I may yet be able to teach them how to live a good life. I hope, as more of the roots tear from the ground and I slide deeper towards the abyss, that I can find the Ofelian courage to believe that living a life well is enough, even without the promise of eternal reward or a happy ending.

Fun fact: my entire income as a freelance writer last year went towards therapy bills. And that’s WITH decent health insurance. I am lucky that my wife makes enough for us to live off of while I do most of the stay-at-home parenting, but what she makes — which would have seemed astronomically high in the 90’s — keeps us just about even.