ONE EVENING, while out drinking together, Matthew and I reached that point, familiar no doubt to other fathers and sons, when we both vaguely sensed the need to get away from the usual mundane chatter about football and work and say something, however stumbling and incoherent, about what we meant to each other. We talked about how pleasant it was that we could now drink together without resorting to the mutual recriminations that had dogged our earlier relationship. We talked about how much we had in common and how we had slowly developed a grudging respect for each other’s rather different lifestyles.

It was at this moment that Matthew asked if I could answer a question that had been troubling him for some time. Why was it that I had so rarely shown any enthusiasm for my role as his father? Why had I so persistently shied away from being a proper or a normal dad?

I explained that I had never wanted to be a conventional father. Neither had I been alone. Matthew’s mother, despite the many sacrifices she had made while bringing Matthew up on her own, had been equally unready to adopt a traditional maternal role. But this was not, for either of us, solely a matter of biography. It was also an ideological choice. Many of the parents we knew back in the Sixties shared the view that to regard one’s child as some sort of educational or occupational project was thoroughly reactionary. Children were to be left to create their own life, follow their own passions. If that meant that they ended up as a carpenter or an itinerant hippie, then so be it. Didn’t Matthew have somewhat similar feelings about his own two small children?

No, he told me, he did not. As far as he was concerned, my libertarian approach boiled down to little more than a licence for me to ignore his needs and thoughtlessly pursue my own. What other explanation could there be for my constant moves around the country, my serial philandering? “Now that I’m a father myself, I’m determined not to go down that particular road. I want to experience through my children a childhood that I didn’t have myself. I want to give them one home, one school, one coherent life.”

It was a fine speech. How could I be anything but embarrassed by the contrast of Matthew’s commitment to his children and my own behaviour towards him? But I had a question of my own that I knew might cause him equal concern. Why, I wondered, had there been so many occasions when I’d seen him in the depths of despair about his role as a family man?

He immediately admitted that his attempts to be a better parent were often bedevilled by the sense that he was personally deriving little benefit or value from his sacrifices. Too often he found himself looking at friends and childless colleagues and envying their freedom, their lack of responsibilities, their full and exciting lives. In his bleaker moments, he asked himself the question that he had originally put to me: What are children for?

Childbearing and child-rearing have become highly problematic. There are, of course, straightforward reasons for this.

Modern methods of birth control have created the possibility for all children to be chosen. Couples are no longer forced to have children because of the economic need for another breadwinner or to ensure that they have someone who will support them in their declining years. Neither are most modern women in industrialised societies propelled towards childbirth by powerful religious and cultural expectations. In theory, even if not always in practice, every child can now be a wanted child. But how does one balance such a want against career and good times? What are the costs and the risks of having children? What difference will a child make to my life? How can I justify my complaints about the frustration of child-rearing when my children have been freely chosen?

The problem is that our freedom to choose has not simultaneously provided us with the means to make sense of our choices. Instead, declining birth rates point to a previously “unthinkable” development — one that can only be fully understood by a shift in our sense of the value of children and our increasing uncertainty about how they might contribute to our own sense of wellbeing. We appear to be entering a unique period of history in which more and more people can no longer see the point of children. Children are not simply being planned, they are being actively avoided as an expendable part of our existence.

What, then, has gone wrong? An important clue can be found in the scenario first envisaged more than 50 years ago by the political and economic theorist Joseph Schumpeter. He had no time for the Marxist argument that the bourgeoisie would be ousted by the revolutionary working class. The middle classes, he predicted, would eventually disappear because of their decision to apply to procreation the same economic analysis they used for so many other aspects of their lives.

This is a compelling argument. As citizens of capitalist societies, we are all used to thinking in terms of costs and benefits. It comes so naturally to us in most circumstances that we are inclined to characterise it as common sense.

But our attachment to this way of thinking, our commitment to what has been called “economic rationality”, can become a great source of frustration and unhappiness when it is applied to areas where it is inappropriate.

Instead of telling each other about the pleasures that can be derived from having children and watching them grow up, we fall back upon the economically based stories that inform so much of the rest of our existence and thereby come to regard our children as at best strangely disappointing and, at worst, pointless.