Should You Have Kids In Law School?

Update:  The Unbearable Lightness Of Choosing Children

Chronicle of Higher Education op-ed: Should You Have Kids … In Grad School, by Anastasia Berg (UC-Irvine) & Rachel Wiseman (Managing Editor, The Point):

The role of children and family in private and public life has become a flashpoint in the public discourse. The musician Charli XCX mused about whether she should have a baby on her summer-defining album Brat. JD Vance’s comments on “childless cat ladies” dominated several news cycles and caused an unexpected public-relations crisis for the Trump campaign. The question has become so heated, and so unavoidable, that some have begun to wonder aloud: “Why is 2024 suddenly about kids?” Not content to leave such questions to the pundits, public intellectuals including Becca Rothfeld, Melinda Cooper, Mary Gaitskill, Ross Douthat, and Tyler Harper Austin have entered the fray.

The topic has hit a nerve — perhaps above all among those in the progressive and liberal chattering classes, for whom the question of whether to have kids has always been fraught: How could people, especially women, reconcile children with intellectual and creative ambition? With feminist commitments? With the grueling professional demands of academe?

In our recent book, What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice, we discuss the forces animating this public anxiety. Recently we sat down to talk about how scholarly environments can exacerbate these tensions and whether academics can move beyond ambivalence when it comes to children.

Rachel Wiseman: Is there anything about having kids that feels particularly incompatible with academic life?

Anastasia Berg: I think one very big obstacle to having kids in grad school is the fact that there’s no sense of that being a real possibility — not for secular liberal and progressive students, anyway. The grad-school colleagues of mine who had kids were religious, and it struck the rest of us as an outré life choice — one more insane thing religious people did — not something that might make sense for us. One nonreligious acquaintance married an older woman and had a child with her (she had already had two). And people were deeply worried for him. Fast forward a few years: He’s where he wants to be professionally and has a full-grown boy, while I’m trying to make tenure while changing diapers.

Which is to say, I’ve come to think there might even be something particularly compatible about having kids and grad school. In many cases, especially in the humanities, the timeline to graduation is, while not infinite, nevertheless flexible, and so is your day-to-day schedule. For all the challenges and uncertainties of grad school, in some respects it offers ideal conditions for raising babies. That said, if I try to imagine what it would have been like to try to tell one of my grad-school boyfriends I was actually into the idea of having kids soon … well, again, the appropriate response seems to be laughter.

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