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Comment by MrHamburger | Hacker News Reader

If we are talking birth rate, it might be great to also find answer to a question: Why have children? In the past there were logical reasons to have children like they will help on the farm, more warriors for our tribe, or they can work in factory to increase revenue of a family.

Today ROI on a child is always negative. Members of modern society have no rational reasons to have children and I think most people innately know it but are unable to put their finger on it.

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For people that want to have a child, and not trying to justify their lack of ability to have one, "ROI" doesn't factor into it. I think you are attributing way to much credibility to your imaginary conception of why people would want to have children.

This response seems to indicate you don't have or want children. There's the emotional and human aspect to having children. Love, family, respect, etc. I'm throwing words around but if these things mean something to you then you'd understand.

I feel western society has lost many of these but you see these concepts upheld in immigrant families in the US.

As a person who has kids, I agree with you to some extent - a decision to have kids is not necessarily rational, you don't take ROI into account that much. However, life with kids, in spite of many negatives, feels much "nicer" overall.

Yeah, I have four kids, and I'll be the first to tell you that it's not a logical, rational decision; it's an emotional, probably hormonal, one. For people like us (the HN crowd, in general) who are drawn to computers, math, logic, etc. and pride ourselves on it, I think that can be tough to understand and accept. It took me a while.

With no intent to disparage women, I think the "baby crazies" are very real. My wife and I got married in our early twenties, enjoyed a few child-free years, but then they hit hard. In her mid-twenties, it became very clear that there was no way my wife would be happy if we didn't have kids, and ROI had nothing to do with it.

Even when there might have been a positive ROI for having kids, I'm pretty sure that nobody looked at it primarily in that way.

I guess the only thing you do is work and invest all money you earn, since ROI is apparently the only thing that matter.

What are you going to do with all that money when you die?

Family. Legacy. Meaning. Joy. There's a lot of reasons to have a child.

this. OP skipped a lot of factors in his calculation.

"The heart has its reasons reason does not understand"

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