Name: Should I have children? - CrowdScience, BBC World Service
Uploaded: 2022-01-05T12:21:12.000Z
Duration: 36 min 5 s
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I have a younger sister, she's 12. I was 12 when my mother gave birth to her, so I know

what it is like to raise a child because I was really engaging in that as well.

Welcome to crowdscience from the BBC World Service. I'm Geoff Marsh. And this week we're

trying to find an answer to one of life's most common quandaries.

My name is Philine, I live in Salzburg in Austria. My question for crowdscience is,

is it responsible for me to have children?

You want that for yourself. I really would like to have children. But when I look at

the news, I get quite pessimistic and unsure of the future.

The United Nations estimates that drought brought on by the effects of climate change

could displace as many as 700 million people by the end of the decade. Thousands of people

in the Western United States are spending the weekend in evacuation.

We start with these catastrophic floods in western German states.

Right now, I'm 24 years old, and I don't want to have to right now, but I might have someday,

and what will their future look like? And how will the world be when they are my age

or even 50, 60 years old? So I thought about that a bit. And I haven't come to a solution.

Because I don't think not having children is the solution. Yeah, so that's why I wrote

Presumably, then if you decided not to have children, that would be a really difficult

Yeah. And I'm not sure I could make the decision honestly. I might be in the position to think

about it right now. But maybe in a few years, I'll be like, yeah, doesn't matter anymore.

Because as far as biological impulses go, this is the big one, isn't it? Yeah, I know,

In some ways, the fact that you're young, and you have no immediate desire to have children,

makes you a really great person to ask this question, doesn't it? Because it, you can

Yeah, yeah, I can just lean back and think about that and think about all the possibilities

I have. That's, I think why I am having the courage to ask this question right now.

And obviously, the question, is it responsible for you to bring a child onto the planet?

It's a very personal question. And only really, you can answer that.

I'm not looking for a definitive answer. I'm looking for maybe an approach on the question

in an ethical way, and in the scientific way, as well, and maybe some hints how I can tackle

So you want a philosophical and scientific toolbox. that will be great. I will do my

best. Philine’s question really resonates with me. I am a decade older, but I'm still

struggling with the same predicament because, look, it's hard not to notice that the world's

becoming increasingly scary. I'm almost becoming desensitised to seeing huge tracts of forest

burning, ice sheets disappearing, livelihoods being swept away in floods. Unsurprisingly,

lots of young people are starting to ask whether having children is just wrong. And this isn't

just anecdotal. Researchers have started to document this worrying trend.

So my research through the University of Bath for the past 10 years has been talking primarily

with children and young people about how they feel and what they think about the climate

This is Caroline Hickman. She’s a lecturer at the University of Bath in the UK.

And I'm also a psychotherapist and a member of the climate psychology Alliance, who have

been working for 10 years to bring the psychological understanding of climate change into the frame.

Caroline and her colleagues decided recently that they wanted to measure the psychological

impacts from as many young people as possible and from across the globe. Just a few months

ago, they published the results of a massive study into how young people were thinking

We conducted this research with 10,000 children covering 10 different countries in Australia,

Brazil, Finland, France, India, Nigeria, Philippines, Portugal, the UK and the US. So we wanted

a range of countries, some of whom were in the Global South, and some of whom were facing

the immediate impacts of climate change. So the first thing we asked them was how they

felt about climate change. We knew that young people were afraid, sad, anxious and angry.

There's been previous research done into this over the last few years. What we didn't know

was how scared young people were. And two thirds of children were afraid. Four out of

10 young people told us they were hesitant to have children because of the threat of

climate change. And over half of our respondents told us they felt that humanity was doomed.

Eight out of 10 told us that they thought people were failing to take care of the planet.

48% of young people said they felt ignored and dismissed when they tried to talk about

Caroline gave me the full results in all their bleakness and we don't have time here. But

in essence, a huge proportion of young people from across the world are worried about climate

change, they felt ignored and failed by their leaders, and they thought they were being

lied to. And I feel for them, they saw how rapid action based on science was possible

during the pandemic. So why was so little seemingly being done to hold the destruction

of the climate and environment that they could see happening around them? But it was one

of those statistics you might have heard that alarmed me the most, four out of 10 young

people that's 40% said they felt reluctant to have children.

Yes, that's right. Wow. Yeah, I think that number is much bigger than we ever anticipated.

So although I wasn't hugely surprised about the emotions and the feelings and people were

telling us, I was really surprised, by the way that the feelings impacted on their thinking.

And did you notice any kind of patterns in where anxiety about having children was focused

Yes. And because climate change is not impacting equally across the globe, it's not surprising

that we can see variation by country. So for example, the Philippines 47%, were hesitant

to have children. Maybe unsurprising. Not surprising. Exactly. But it's very variable

by country, Nigeria, only 23% were hesitant to have children. If we look at India, it

is 41%. So it's not an exact correlation with the way that climate change is impacting on

So you're not surprised that we got a question from a young lady Philine asking whether it

was the right thing to do for her to have children that doesn't presumably surprise

It doesn't surprise me at all, because I've been hearing this from young people for many

years. So I've got young people coming to me for therapy, talking about this. I've got

adults, young adults coming for therapy and couples and singularly saying, We don't know

whether we should have children or not. Because we're concerned about the climate. We also

want children, and we don't know how to deal with this dilemma. So I think that's the most

important thing is to always recognise that this is a dilemma. And there isn't a perfect

Well, bleak as those figures are, I think there's at least some comfort in knowing that

you're not alone Philine, in feeling conflicted by this dilemma, as Caroline puts it, and

actually perhaps those numbers are somewhat reassuring, in the sense that that's a lot

of young people who obviously care about the planet. They are after all her future custodians.

But what about Philine’s question on the climate, the impact of having a child for

that we're going to need some numbers, and I know just a man for the job.

I'm Mike Berners-Lee, I'm a professor at Lancaster University. I'm the author of ‘How bad are

bananas? the carbon footprint of everything’ and ‘There is no planet B’. I think some

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Should I have children? - CrowdScience, BBC World Service

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