What Are Children For? by Laurie Taylor and Matthew Taylor

One can see why some female reviewers of this book have seen red. A father and son, both social policy experts and mellifluous media operators, both parents – but one, on his admission, a largely absent father – dare to question the meaning of children in our lives. Mothers have always found it hard to take lectures on parenthood from men who prefer to sit in the pub pontificating rather than take the kids to the park on a cold day.

But if you can get past that tongue-in-cheeky title, the Taylors prove thoughtful and largely rigorous guides to our rocky modern terrain, which now includes a dramatically falling birth rate, growing numbers of childless women, the rise of consumerism and the divide between parents and the child-free. What stories should we tell ourselves about the place of children in this new world?

Rather neatly, the Taylors find the answer in the very nature of the problem they pose. If, as they argue, we have come to measure our lives in terms of economic success and consumerism, then children are a clear cause of human failure. They drain our funds and our fun. It is only when you step outside a costs-and-benefits mindset that they even begin to make sense. Children just are. It is in being with them, in loving them, even in being bored by and with them, that our best qualities can emerge.

The real strength of this book lies in its evocation of the anxiety and confusion at the heart of the modern secular middle class, cut adrift from tradition, religion and once-meaningful ideologies. The Taylors conjure up a picture of individuals wedded to the idea of hedonism while wading in the inevitable dissatisfactions it produces.

This scenario, however, is incomplete and rather bleak. For there are many people who have long learnt to live outside a paradigm determined by "income maximisation" and who have also learnt to mix and match old traditions – including the legacy of the work ethic and some personal discipline – with new opportunities and realities.

What Are Children For? is haunted by the absence of evidence from these other, possibly more modest, lives. It draws largely on the experience of career parents and the powerful singles tribe. The complex reality and morality of caring, present parents, particularly mothers, remains shadowy.

Each section begins with an engaging fragment of dialogue between father and son. In the end I wanted more of these highly illuminating exchanges and less impersonal sociology.