It's interesting that most people's minds go there. I've had this happen myself after having a son - the original "why" almost doesn't matter or rather gets overshadowed by all the other parts of it (for most people, a deep sense of purpose and fulfillment).
To actually answer the question, my partner and I came to a place where our relationship was great, jobs were great, etc - but we felt a certain "is this it?". Sure, being DINKS is a nice life, lots of travel, easy, etc. But... hmmmmmm... is this it? Amuse ourselves until we die? Stay clean and simple, have fun, work hard... hmmmmmm....
Meanwhile there was a quiet impulse in the background beckoning towards creating something out of our relationship / position. It's hard to describe. Obviously biology is playing a role here. But what a wonderful chaotic creative thing, two different people coming together and making a third person.
So we had a vague sense of all that. And decided to go for it. As many other people have said in this thread, your life changes immediately and irrevocably when kids arrive, but for us it's been pure joy. Lots of chaos too.
My wife remarks that she didn't realize what a big hole was in her life before becoming a mother. That's maybe the best way to describe it. We had a sense that there was a hole in our lives, or something that would grow into a big hole if we didn't have kids.
I think your instincts are off and you are trying to explain to yourself why it is ok (and really, superior) that you don't want kids. In reality, you needn't explain it to anyone, you simply don't want to.
My dad's life was complete without me. I'm here to please my mom.
True story: I didn’t want kids. I knew I was selfish and didn’t want to ruin kids. But one day I pondered Psalm 127:3-5. I reasoned that if God called children a blessing then who am I to call Him a liar?
I’m glad I believed that promise. It’s not been what I feared at all.
Those verses say:
Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them! He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate. (ESV)
Hey downvoters: You don’t have to agree with my reasons. The OP asked why and I answered. Be a little open minded would you?
Edit: I'm a believer and desperately don't want children. Dunno whether this is an inconsistency in my faith or just how I'm built. This whole thread is a little maddening to me because I wish people would stop making new people, but everyone seems so happy doing it :)
There is a paradox discussed in Permaculture: “The problem becomes the solution.” Applying that to the population numbers, we may actually not have /enough/ people.
The problem of too many people becomes the solution: Get enough people acting rightly and many other problems get solved. Some Permaculturists believe the earth has the capacity for fifty billion people; it’s just that current resources are so poorly managed. We may not have enough people to solve so many of the world's pressing problems.
The alternative is to treat people like weeds. But we need a path of love, not fear.
> Tell me more about that.
Groaning at discussing personal stuff on HN, but here goes: I don't enjoy life or find it rewarding. I'd likely have killed myself a long time ago but don't because my life is not my own (bought with a price and so on). So how could I possibly want to create more people?
I have many philosophical arguments against creating children as well, such as violating the agency of the unborn by forcing them into existence, or considering the generations of suffering and death (and damnation of some?) caused by creating children, who will have more children, ad infinitum.
But none of that matters because God has a plan and it'll all make sense someday (after I die). So I (im?)patiently await that day.
But, I don't like the reason :). I've seen too many people who think kids are property that God has given them to rule over and that doesn't end with healthy kids usually.
In maybe a non-sensical way, it seems like having children is my best remaining contribution to the world. Maybe I can make a slightly better version of myself and teach him how to be a better person than I was. Otherwise, it seems like what I have learned and all the knowledge I have accumulated will essentially be wasted. What was the entire point after all? If I don't pass down all of the things I have learned, then what was really the point to ever learning it or experiencing it? And I am not talking about things you can learn from a book, I mean the lessons of life experiences.
Not sure if that is a great reason, or even if it is really the reason. Just my guess from introspection on it. Why is it that I felt now was really the time?
That being said, I can definitely see why adopting a "troubled teen" would be more difficult than having your own kid. But is adopting a baby really that much different than having your own?
> You would still be able to pass on your knowledge and
> attempt to create a better version of yourself
Psychologically, I see a lot similarities between myself and my parents, and so I expect that when I at some point have my own children, my own experiences will guide me in how I understand and help them.
When I have children I will do so because I love my partner and would like if there were more people like her and because I feel like I'm a decent and strong person that should focus my life on more than just my own desires. I also know that both of our parents would like to be part of a larger family -- the people that you love, and that love you, generally want to see you multiply. Finally, I think that having a family could be a total laugh: it's great to experience good times together and it makes bad times lighter, too.
I can imagine that it will be much easier to teach my future children to fight against vices that I've had to deal with, than to pass on morality or knowledge that came absolutely naturally to me.
People in the '80s were certain we'd soon exhaust global coal supplies. The 1880s. Now we are more likely to replace it with alternatives as run out. Before that it would have been kerosene or whale oil.
This isn't unique to fuel.
Minerals were harder to come by in the 1930s, when we had 2 billion people, than they are today, with 7.5. We've made them more abundant not less:
http://www.aei.org/publication/julian-simon-still-more-right...
This is counterintuitive at first, but we're really good at finding more efficient ways to do things.
Or... economies of scale kick in when you have enough people, especially once you don't need to dedicate almost everyone to farming, when you can add some inventors and chemists, say.
Maybe that's why historically humanity has had far more to fear from population crashes than booms.
Turning matter into MIPS is not a sin. Adding processing power is one of the best ways to make stuff more valuable.
Measured by capacity for processing information? Much better.
Measured by incidence of cholera and dysentery? Much better.
Measured by the net increase in sublime human experiences minus human suffering? Much better.
I know a lot of people don't find these values very satisfying and are looking for something else though.
When you imagine a world untouched by humanity, what is the foundational good, the bedrock value that it represents?
Stability? A dead rock is stable, I don't think that's it.
Biodiversity? Biodiversity is just correlated with heat, highest around the equator where there's more abundant energy for systems to incorporate into replication. I don't think you just want a warmer planet.
Maybe sustainability? To preserve a habitat for humanity?
I just suspect inventiveness is more helpful for humanity's long term survival, of the sort you get from an abundance of people so that we can put some to work not just on farms, but on space stations.
We've limited ourselves to two because my wife and I are both full-time software developers and we can't handle "being outnumbered" as we like to joke, but raising two boys is a remarkable experience. I've experienced many kinds of love in my life, love for family, romantic love for my wife, but this new kind of love for our children is so powerful and pure. It's so precious, drives me to be a better person for them, and I am so grateful to experience it.
I had a miserable childhood, and having an awesome and joyous time with our three children has redeemed my hurt - it's part of my memory, but no longer important.
Having kind, wise, and creative children has given me hope for the world that comes after me - and I'm grateful that have the responsibility to raise them.
It's also helped cured many of my neurosis - I don't procrastinate, I set goals, I get up in the morning, I'm not a gloomy pessimist and I'm not at irrationally angry.
And even though children are expensive - I'm richer because I have better character traits.
My kids saved my life by taking my own greed for my own life away from me - I live for them and my wife. I never knew that existed.
I’ve got a 9 mo old, and planning to have a couple more. It’s a hard to explain feeling of fulfillment and completeness, except one where I didn’t realize something was missing until I actually had them. That said I look back to the time when it was just me and my wife and really enjoy those memories too, but those have their place, time and duration and when you have kids you realize that they are something with their own relish that you can enjoy too.
I’m also somewhat superstitious/quasi hippy so I believe kids bring their own karma and destiny into the worlds, which, when interacting with your own life can change it for the better or worse. Not necessarily a reason to have them per se but an observation nonetheless.
Overall it’s been an amazing experience. I love coming home to see my little guy, and make him smile which makes me smile in turn. They are amazing little AI machines. And you can’t help thinking And helping them become whatever they are meant to become in their fullest actualization.
What if I try it and don't enjoy being a parent? The cost of a child being stuck with an unhappy parent is too much to risk it.
There is in fact - no other way.
It would prove much harder than you think. It's like describing a color to someone without using the name of the color or pointing to it. Or since you presumably don't have children, it's like trying to describe a color that doesn't exist.
Don't believe the whole dog/cat comparison. That's totally broken.
Imagine something like cute little pure innocence machines radiating pure love for you selflessly with little to no expectation in return and doin funny stuff to make you laugh.
Though it had been difficult at times (twins) and each day is a new challenge for them and for us, we made the right choice. My wife is sitting with them building Lego houses as I type this.
There is more to life than success, money, and personal ambition (make a difference).
Being a father is the highest form of true selflessness. It's like you transcend even your own desires.
However for me, having children is the most profoundly selfish thing I can imagine. Creating another person to give myself fulfillment and purpose. Especially considering how difficult climate change and AI will make life for the next generation or two, I feel morally compelled not to have children.
However, as I said, I recognize your experience is different. It’s interesting how different.
What's funny is you even think of having kids through the focus of you, like you could find purpose. That's seriously self involved man. It's not about you.
From a distance drowning looks a lot like swimming. Swimming is fun and enjoyable, where as drowning in a desire for personal fulfillment isn't.
Get in the water (have kids), it may surprise you.
I didn't exactly choose to have children. When I was younger, I suffered from a series of highly debilitating health issues (the details of which I will not go into here) and a young woman chose to take advantage of the situation and become impregnated.
Now, don't get me wrong; I love my children dearly. I did not chose to have them in any normal sense, however.> I didn't exactly choose to have children. When I was younger, I suffered from a series of highly debilitating health issues (the details of which I will not go into here) and a young woman chose to take advantage of the situation and become impregnated.
> Now, don't get me wrong; I love my children dearly. I did not chose to have them in any normal sense, however.
I want to because some of my greatest memories were with my dad. I want to enable someone to experience those feelings, and experience the other side of them as well.
So we can only share details and justifications about why we enjoy the present state of parenthood. I think one that I come back to a lot is "because somebody did it for me". I.e. I am doing my small part carrying on the human experiment, helping my new humans figure it out in the early stages. There seem to be a number of things in life that you can feel like you understand better now having been personally in charge of cleaning up another human being's poop.
It is a wonderful thing, of course not without stresses and challenges.
https://aeon.co/essays/having-children-is-not-life-affirming...
Also, this assumes that you ascribe to the anti-natalism viewpoint, which to me seems like as much of a thought experiment as nihilism.
Complex answer: I feel that its important to continue the progress of evolution, and my personal life has been very evolutionary: I've lived on multiple continents, learned a couple of languages, discarded any participation in my native culture, and discovered that ultimately all culture is a lie. Cultures are a lie that persist only in the telling.
I've done a lot of fulfilling things in my life, and I've done quite a few stupid things - I too am full of stupid. I'd quite like the world to be a better place in 10 years, in 20 years, and in 50 years .. and one of the only ways I can feel as if I've contributed to actually pushing things in a positive direction is to have children, teach them the lessons I've learned, and let them loose on the world. Some would consider this an egotistical, arrogant, narcissistic point of view, but I do believe my children will bring something to the world that wasn't there before. At least, that is the hope.
And amongst all the crazy chaos and stupidity, when I think about what really gives me tangible hope, its children. Whether my own, or other children, the experience of witnessing a child learning something I've come to take for granted, and instantly pushing my own understanding beyond the curve with a simple comment or two that I would never have considered, has been enough to motivate me.
Children are hope, manifest.
Without hope, all is lost.
My mother in law is semi paralyzed, and we support her. But it's hard because my wife is an only child.
Also due to this cultural setting, there are few old folks homes, whether government or private. Some are run strictly too where an old person can't play with their phones at night, etc.
There's the Asian businessman aspect too - a father builds a legacy, and the children take the business the father has established and expands it. It's a fantasy, especially for those born with less of an advantage, who are ambitious but want to pave the way for their children to live out those ambitions.
From a religious perspective, a pious child will pray for their parents and keep them out of hell. So it's an afterlife investment as well.
Materialism aside, children are fun. They're cute. On a rough day at work, it's nice to have someone miss you.
They're nice to have around the house and nice to share the home with. What's the point of becoming rich without someone to share it with? The spouse only lives for so long. You need someone to be with in your 90s, someone to visit you when all your friends are dead.
There were other, worse reasons - at the time I felt like (vaguely) intelligent people had an Idiocracy-style responsibility to try and make more clever people, which isn't a point of view I like at all, looking back. However, I _do_ think the world needs more _compassionate_ people, which I think we've so far achieved. I also had a strong belief that I wanted to do a better job than _my_ father, which isn't a particularly good reason to have kids, but there you go.
It's a funny, difficult decision really. It's a very big commitment for an introvert to make - I don't think there's a lot of advice out there for geeks looking to procreate, who value their 'me' time very highly. And more generally people don't talk about the negatives, which leads new parents to doubt themselves when they hit the many, many rocky bits. There's a balance of _wanting_ to have kids (perhaps for unfulfilled emotional needs), and thinking you _should_ have kids that I suspect is impossible to get right.
Whether there's a good decision procedure to know if you'd be a good or happy parent, I have no idea. If you think about everything you've ever seen a person close to you do, good or bad, and imagine all those behaviours crammed down into a frenetic 12 hours, every day, for a very long time, does that seem fun to you?
* Because I thought I could be a good dad
* Because I thought I had enough education and would enjoy teaching a mini person
* Selfishly, assuming you do a decent job, you'll have someone to help when you're older. Not as a carer but someone who can take major decisions on your behalf
* Because the world needs more scientists and I figured I could brainwash a new one
Got a well-paying job, there were no longer any obstacles that could be used to rationalize, so with some apprehension we decided it was the right time to try. After a few months she was pregnant. Our son was born 6 years ago, I was 27 at the time. We also have a daughter now.
It hasn't been easy, we don't rely on family or outside help to raise them, mostly, and there are other things you simply can't predict. But such is life. No regrets, life is much richer than before. Children add a new dimension to life.
All the delays before we finally committed to having children seem so pointless in retrospect. We were just putting off moving on in life.
Can I suggest a better question would be "why did you choose to have more children?" And did the reasoning change from n+1 to n+2 ...
As to why we did not choose to abstain from having children - which in my opinion would be the real choice to make given that having children is the normal result of two healthy people of fertile age and opposite sex having intercourse - I can but say that I wouldn't be here to argue this point if my parents had made the choice to abstain from having children. I quite like being here. This might sound trivial but it really isn't, just give it some thought.
That said as my Dad always said, there is no convenient time to have kids, which couldn't be more true.
Having kids is an amazing journey, but not for everyone. I totally respect people who choose not to have kids. With kids, at different times you will think it is the best and worst decision you've ever made. Lots of highs and lows. But ultimately it is very gratifying and helps you to better see the world beyond yourself.
I always assumed I wouldn't have kids, because I just never wanted to. And then my brother had a kid, and I met someone who I thought I could actually be a decent co-parent with, and the combination made me think it was totally doable.
On top of that, I read about a longevity study which showed that connections in old age are the biggest correlation to happiness. And when I imagined myself aged 70 with kids, and aged 70 without kids, the first one made me feel a lot happier.
I'm totally aware that having kids tends to cause a dip in happiness to start with, but I'm fairly confident that I'll feel a lot happier, and better about my place in the world, with children than I would without.
Because most traits, including IQ and conscientiousness, are strongly heritable, and therefore assortative mating + smart-people-not-having-kids is one of the worst large-scale social dynamics happening today. Because people who deliberately choose not to have kids when they are otherwise capable (financially, mentally, physically) are free-riding on the hard work of everyone else.
Middle class families are already doing their bit here. Additional income taxes on DINKs (via higher base rates and breaks for supported children) could really help the next generation of lower class children, and therefore society as a whole.
But even past the genetic level, as somebody with education and moderate means, I do feel like our children will also be well educated and with the support of our resources will be able to make positive changes to the world.
I happen to agree with you on the broader point. People who put their lifestyle/career ahead of family might be a net drain on society. But you can't force people to procreate or stop others based on their socio-economic standing.
All you can do is give disadvantaged children a step up with better resources: better public schooling, early-years nurseries, free school meals, etc. And adult education for those without jobs. And pay for that with higher income taxes at the middle class, with breaks for having and supporting children (within limit). Essentially an added tax on DINKs to support lower class children.
Another way to put it: if my offspring keep the strain alive, maybe my genetic code will live to see the end of history.
I now have two kids, and the thing that will overwhelm me with emotion is the fact that I brought into the world beings that will both suffer and die. But I never blame my parents for doing the same.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yvxadj/the-mothers-who-re...
http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/sc-regret-children-...
I wanted to have kids to get fulfillment from the mentorship and difficulty. I like to be behind the scenes, helping other people find success and fulfillment, and primarily just providing a platform for them. I like to do it on a small scale, with big impact. I like to pay for things for the people I care about and watch them become independent of me. All of those things I learned relatively early on and led back to the pattern of paternalism and altruism in parenting. So I think I had the drive before I identified it as kid-having.
I am not surprised at all that a lot of people are choosing not to have kids. Many people seem disinterested in it and that to me leads to lose-lose situations between the parents and kids. Many divorces seem to be based on the fact that they only got married in the first place because of an accidental child and then tried to do the "honourable" thing. If you don't want to have kids, don't try to make yourself, just live somewhere where that is normal and OK.
As a person, I tend to find meaning in a few select activities. I like work, I work a lot, I enjoy it intrinsically and deeply. I always felt I would find meaning in kids in a way equivalent or more so than I do in work. I find no meaning in most friendships, institutions, "changing the world", cultural traditions, status, etc. I just care about learning, working and having a big impact on a small group of people around me (ie. family).
I think most people these days are too cautious when it comes to having kids though. You really don't need to both have six figure incomes, own a house and be in your mid-to-late thirties to be "ready". I think that culture is shifting back though, as people who wait until too late have more fertility issues and find it very tiring to keep up with the kids. It takes a village to raise a child, you can't replace the village with two rich middle aged people, that seems to just be a recipe for more misery than people who do it sooner.
I would choose this again 100%. I would always advise people, if you want to have kids, and your partner doesn't, find someone who does because those feelings don't go away. If you don't want to have kids, really really work to avoid having kids, because feeling like a victim combined with this process must be the definition of hell. It's not something you can be non-committal about. It's, do I want to be all in on this, or not, one must decide.
I was talking with a woman just this morning about her kids, one starting having kids at 13 and has 8 now and the other is 14, stays out till 3am (when she comes home at all) and is probably on the fast track to becoming a baby making machine.
I think a lot of people are entirely not cautious enough when it comes to having children.
However, the impact was much greater than we had imagined. The sense of responsibility increased my work efficiency (income) at least five fold, the affection bound us all together like nothing else ever did before, and brought out the parental qualities I never thought I had inside me.
...and after two years, the second one is on the way... :)
I wouldn't change it for the world, but it's not like we sat down and did an exhaustive analysis of the impact that it would have on our lives before we made the decision. We both wanted kids, so we had them. QED.
Some people try to rationalize the choice, but it is a primal driving force. It can also been seen as the desire to have sex. Although in some configurations there are less than optimal results.
There is a balance, many of my sons don't really have a relationship with their fathers. Seems to be less of an issue with my daughters friends. I suspect I could have a much larger net worth if I had worked more. But I am glad I made the choice of spending as much time with my kids as I could.
I think one of the important things you can do to build a lasting marriage is to make sure you put your spouse ahead of your children on a regular basis, even just in small ways. You have to maintain the intimacy in your relationship even when it's not easy to do so. There's nothing wrong with locking the bedroom door once in a while.
This is also a reason why I got married, although under some other reasons.