Co-parenting may be the latest twist in today’s cult of the selfish
Across the globe, babies are a commodity in dwindling supply. In the US, UK, Japan, Europe and even parent-friendly Scandinavia, birth rates are falling. The spectre of an inverted pyramid of massed elders, precariously balanced atop a shrinking working population is one to give policymakers nightmares.
Yet it is easy to understand why my son’s generation of twenty- and thirtysomethings might retreat from the prospect of parenthood. For many millennials, the essential elements of a stable family life – a home of their own, a steady income – are elusive. Even those secure in love and work can feel unnerved by the brutally well-chronicled financial and personal cost of raising a child.
“I wish it didn’t have to be a decision,” says a friend in her late 30s. Professionally, she is accustomed to making evidence-based decisions in stressful situations; but the effect of having a child – or of not having one – on a life currently full of interest and achievement is impossible to calculate.
Amid all this uncertainty, a less emotionally driven model of child-rearing is emerging. Websites such as Coparents.com, Coparentmatch.com and the whimsically named Pollentree.com offer platforms for people interested in “elective co-parenting”, a crisply businesslike term for people who prefer to conceive and raise a child together without the element of romance that is such a chancy preamble to reproduction.
“We understand the need to borne a child and ensure that our members are able to find suitable matches as per their prerequisites,” promises one site, ambitious in scope, if approximate as to grammar. “To enable loving alternative families to be created by matching like-minded individuals in their pursuit to become a parent”, announces the infinitive-heavy mission statement of another.
Nowhere on these websites is it acknowledged that the children of such pursuits might themselves have “prerequisites” when it comes to their upbringing. On one site, a would-be co-parent sets out their terms: “I’m looking for someone to co-parent our child with. Not looking to get into anything with anyone. Just strictly someone to have a child with.”
The misery memoir shelves of bookshops are laden with the reminiscences of damaged adults whose parents, in one way or another, weren’t “looking to get into anything with anyone”. Or to put it in less cheerily insouciant terms, whose principal relationship was with themselves, rather than the person with whom they created a new life, or the child thus created.
Having blundered, despite my own irreproachable upbringing, into parenthood as incompetently as any of the “teenage single mums” who provide such a handy focus for the odium of grandstanding politicians, I hesitate to criticise non-traditional models of parenthood. Yet when younger friends tell me of their plans to conceive a child alone, or with a semi-detached co-parent, I feel a frisson of dismay.
The desire to have a child may be strong, but it is not a need, still less a right. When drawing up their lists of prerequisites, elective co-parents should think carefully how they would answer if their longed-for child should one day ask them by what right they felt entitled to bring it into the world.