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Comment by iopuy | Hacker News Reader

   And when you choose a life partner, you’re choosing a lot of things, including your parenting partner and someone who will deeply influence your children...

It actually really bugged me how having children was a forgone conclusion in this article.

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Most marriages result in children. Most people want to have children. It's not an unreasonable assumption to make that most people who read the article will fall into that camp.

> Most people want to have children.

How do you know? My friends who did have kids had intricate dynamics around that where 'want to have' was not really a big part of the equation. Pressure, religion, 'that is what you do', 'my spouse wants to', 'maybe now life gets better' etc are often part of the equation. For the 'want to have' you will need to look inside people's heads.

85% of women have children at some point in their lives. This is just a fact. You may know that you're not having kids, but the vast, vast majority of people don't make that choice.

Ofcourse, but he said 'want'. Want to me implies something that is not automatic. Or maybe i'm reading that wrong. And where is that 85% from? Must be per country because in some countries it must be far lower.

Sure it's not automatic, but as you can imagine there's an extreme selective pressure towards wanting children.

After all, all the people who didn't want kids, and had a choice about the matter died childless and never passed on their anti-replication genes.

Cool citation

He's not obligated to prove anything to you. If you don't believe him you can easily look up the stat yourself.

They literally just made up a random number

I'll source -- http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/05/07/childlessness/

15% of women ages 40-44 in the USA have never given birth, from which we can pull 85% of women ages 40-44 have given birth, as of 2014.

Wow, I got it right to a percentage point? I didn't realize it was 40-44, so maybe it moves teensy bit with IVF past 44. Thanks a lot for the cite.

Source = Human Civilization?

True, I don't know what's inside people's heads. All I know is what they answer on surveys.

"More than nine in 10 adults say they already have children, are planning to have children, or wish that they had had children." [1]

Is it possible that most respondents were lying? Yes. Probable? No, especially given that humans are biologically wired to want children.

1. http://www.gallup.com/poll/164618/desire-children-norm.aspx

'my spouse wants to' is exactly fitting into "most people want to have children". Your spouse is part of the marriage, hence their views within the marriage are pretty paramount.

Depending on how survey questions are asked most people (>75%) express at least some interest in parenthood.

Even if it's not a foregone conclusion, it's an important topic to discuss before entering a long-term relationship.

If one partner wants children, and is counting on that happening, and the other partner wants to not have children, and is counting on that happening, that's a huge point of relationship friction.

So, yeah, it's really important to make sure your potential partner is on the same parenting page as you are, even if (especially if) that page is "let's not be parents".

Unfortunately most people are still stuck in the mindset that everyone who isn't broken inside wants children. I've never wanted children at any point in my life, but I'm wrong apparently.

I'm not saying that you'll end up the same, but I didn't want kids until I met my wife. Before I didn't, and suddenly I did.

Everyone's different, but the right person can cause quite a bit of change in your life.

Maybe where you live and who you hang with? Most my friends decided long ago not to have kids as did we. It's not a given anymore.

But from a biological/evolutionary/whatever perspective, isn't not wanting children definitely "wrong"?

Debatable in a world that is (also debatable) overcrowded and lacking resources.

But in general sure; maybe OP has been to a lot of birthdays (as have I) where people stare at you like you just told you are a serial killer. While in reality you just don't want kids. That goes away when you go over 40 though. Then some people even start to envy you for your freedom. Generally better not care what other people think. It's a tiring and pointless thing.

What does biology/evolution/whatever have to do with the goals that you choose to set for your own life?

hence why I said "from ... perspective;" I certainly am guilty of engaging in behaviors that are "wrong" from such a perspective

Well so is eating meat everyday or looking at a screen 30cm away most of the day or not dying from an infection or having hot showers...

Who cares at this point, just live your life, you owe nothing to "evolution".

I like this view on it. I can't disagree. I was just saying that there is some merit to being called "evolutionarily broken" for not wanting children. Whether you think that's good or bad or meaningless is another issue

Evolution is just a methodology, not living entity with desires and goals. If your genes allow you at the age of 20, to look so stunning that you have 10 children before you sadly die from the effort expended to look so swimmingly handsome, then your genes will soon proliferate to every corner of the globe. We'll call that successful 'evolution', even though most people today would be horrified that you only lived 20 years.

From that perspective it's also wrong not to want to impregnate other men's wives on the sly and have them raise the kid for you.

Well, natural phenomena (like having mates and children) don't always go according to the plan.[1] That's why nature populates the earth with enough people to ensure most of them will follow the rules of evolution/biology/whatever.

But I'm guessing that even those people who don't want children are following the rules of natural selection. "Only the fittest will survive" is then translated to something like "only the genes of those who want to pass on their genomic data will survive".

[1] People have free will after all.

If we were completely asocial, independent creatures, then perhaps. But humans - and therefore their genes - have always lived and died in groups, and even a primitive tribe may stand to benefit from having a small amount of individuals unburdened by child-rearing. From the point of view of the gene, what's important is only that some part of the family tree propagates; the number of dead-end branches doesn't matter. Therefore an increase in reproductive drive could easily be deleterious to a particular gene's long-term survival.

Disclaimer: I have no knowledge of the role of child-free individuals in our era of evolutionary adaptedness. I'm just pointing out that evolutionary dynamics are a lot more nuanced than "more children = good", especially in social animals.

I don't get this impression at all. My wife are in our early 30s and in a minority among our friends (educated coastal folks to be fair) in having kids. I'd say in my circle it's not socially acceptable to express that people should have kids. If anything, the opposite bias exists. I know a lot of people who want kids but try not to express that opinion because it's not "cool."

Parents still push for grandkids, but that's different. Being a parent literally changes your brain chemically. My dad never said anything about grandkids, but after my daughter was born it was literally two years before he could have a conversation about something other than her. And he's one of those "interesting people" (traveled the world working on healthcare programs in the developing world) that has interesting things to talk about.

There's a bit of the tragedy of the commons at work here. Raising kids is expensive, difficult, often thankless work. And yet if no one did it, you wouldn't have any of the nice things that are more-available to people who don't have kids. Furthermore, given that political attitudes appear to be strongly heritable, it seems like the political attitudes that correlate with the class of people who deliberately don't have kids will also wane.

You're not necessarily wrong. It's a matter of whether one has a well-developed dream or talent that isn't child-related. The reason this matters is because we need long-term sources of meaning and responsibility in our lives. Starting a family is ipso facto the traditional thing to do and our traditions know more about us than we do. Changing course is possible but one ought to have good reasons in mind first.

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