Behind the fertility crisis, there is an army of worried mothers

Human females did not necessarily evolve to want many children. They evolved to worry about the children they have.

Last week I wrote about a remarkable book - Warriors and Worriers by Joyce Benenson. That book is of the kind that awakens new ideas. One of those ideas is a very simple explanation to the fertility crisis.

Joyce Benenson suggests that what makes women good mothers is indeed love and an attraction to vulnerable creatures. But even more it is anxiety and fear. She writes:

“Of course, boys and men can love babies too. In fact, many times their physiological and behavioral responses to babies are similar to those of girls and women [90]. However, love does not provide enough glue to ensure that they stick by the baby’s side continuously. 

 Fear does more. I suggest that along with an attraction to vulnerability, what ultimately binds a woman most strongly to a vulnerable baby or child is sheer terror. Women live in fear for the lives of their vulnerable children. Men do not. Men have a lot of other ideas in their heads. The result is that most girls and mothers never break their ties to their children.”¹

Benenson also writes:

“Fear is a stronger insurance policy than love because feelings of love are complicated and depend on both partners being in the right state at the same moment. Fear is simpler. A continual underlying fear for a child’s safety depends less on the immediate circumstances.”²

Joyce Benenson describes how women are driven by fear of bad outcomes. Of children who get sick and die, of accidents, of husbands who run off with a younger and prettier neighbor so there is no help with feeding the children anymore. Worried mothers kept their children safe enough to become our ancestors. 

If Joyce Benenson's theory is right, I think it in itself is enough to explain the mystery of why humans are the animal that seemingly lacks an instinct to reproduce. The explanation is simple: Because having children actually feels bad. 

Having children causes a woman to be in an endless state of anxiety. Men are not that anxious over their children. They don't need to be, since women are, Joyce Benenson writes. Generation after generation, women have been in an unpleasant state of alertness over everything bad that can happen to their children. That has kept the children alive. 

How can women ease this heavy burden of anxiety? Easy: Avoid having children. Or more commonly: Be mothers, because that is what life is about, but to as few children as possible, to limit anxiety as much as possible without getting a completely empty life. 

“But wait”, someone will say. “Men are, if anything, even less willing than women to have children today”. 

True. But isn't that because women have used their power in society to form standards of childcare to fit their own feelings of anxiety? In traditional African societies, men tend to want more children than women.³ Men love children. When no one forces them to adapt to someone else's standards of worrying, they often want many of them.

Agony aunts

Women are programmed to worry, and to worry especially much about their children. Worrying feels bad. For that reason, they have as few children as they can, as soon as it feels like they have a family. They want a family to as low cost as possible in terms of negative feelings. 

It sounds too simple. But it fits well with my experience. There are three people in this world who have said explicitly that I should not have so many children: My mother, my mother-in-law and my paternal grandmother (who only lived to see my fourth child). They all said, or say, that Anders and I should worry more and thereby make the conclusion that we definitely have enough children. 

No man has ever expressed disapproval this way. Male acquaintances have rather expressed amusement or astonishment at our choice to take on such a workload. No man has cared enough to express genuine concern. 

Transformed into law

I don't think that female worrying instincts always, invariably, lead to small families wherever women have the power to choose. Power relations are genuinely difficult to decipher from the outside. But I do believe that female power differs quite a bit between different traditional cultures. There are cultures where women are so oppressed and isolated that they can't realistically have a say over how many children they have. But there are also traditional cultures where women probably could, and do sneakily limit their number of children and still end up with five children on average. Amish and Hutterite married women have fewer children now than fifty years ago, which points to some use of contraception. 

I think that worrier instincts are not enough to limit fertility in themselves. Rather, they do so in interplay with culture at large. Our culture has come to lift up high levels of worrying as a norm. I wouldn't be surprised if this development has a connection to female emancipation. The more of a say females have come to have in the public sphere, the more typical female feelings have been formulated into norms and philosophical positions.

Apple Pie has a theory that there is a male and female kind of morality. The typical male kind of morality celebrates life more than it mourns death. Too bad that there is death and suffering in the world, it says, but the good moments are what counts, for those strong enough to have them. 

The typical female kind of morality instead focuses on avoiding suffering. Drawn to its extreme, it says that human life is a net negative because the existence of life means the existence of suffering, like for example in Every Cradle is a Grave (2014) by Sarah Perry. 

This extreme view looks like an intellectualization of worrying. Joyce Benenson writes about mothers constantly worried that something bad can, and, inevitably will happen, in some cases. I think Sarah Perry's philosophy is the intellectual version of that mindset.

Ironically, it seems like females have a tendency to get anti-life after they acquired the privilege to think. After many millions of years as the primary guardians of life, mammal females of planet Earth finally got the opportunity to express themselves intellectually and form half of a society. And then it turned out that this long-term guardianship of life in fact was heavily based not on celebration of life, but on fear of death. 

Most women aren't as expressly anti-life (or as intellectual) as Sarah Perry. Ordinary women are more anti-life light: Not-too-much-life, please. Care before expansion. This attitude can be strongly suspected of affecting public policy. Official standards for childrearing get increasingly strict for every generation. Psychologists (for example in the Jonathan Haidt corner) have started to sound the alarm that it has become so strict that it in fact hurts children: Demands on parental surveillance make children and especially teenagers anxious, depressed and dependent.

What to do about the worrying? 

The bad news is that maternal worrying is a vicious spiral: It makes maternal worrying a societal norm, which makes mothers worried not only about their children but also about breaking the norm of worrying. Finally it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: Bad things actually happen when children's lives are too focused on avoiding bad outcomes. 

The good news is that vicious spirals can be reversed. All societies that want to increase fertility should work at countering the worrying spiral. Mothers worry because nature has made them to. But also because they themselves created a society that encourages parents to worry, more and more for every generation. Ease up one of the components and human life might return to the expansion path again.

Mama polar bear watching her cubs. Wikimedia Commons

1. Joyce Benenson, Warriors and Worriers - The Survival of the Sexes, 84 percent of e-book

2. Joyce Benenson, Warriors and Worriers - The Survival of the Sexes, 84 percent of e-book

3. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature, 1999, page 373