Family of Creation - Children
The implicit vs explicit choice; the motive to have children; addressing your doubts; taking a bet on legacy
Children
Much like the section on siblings, I am somewhat limited in what I can say about children. What I can do is try to use my experience to reduce your concerns about having children. I want to talk about the motives to have children, how the experience itself can help us become the person we need to be to be a parent, and a little bit of selfish philosophy.
I am a father, and I'm a reasonably happy father at that! I love my daughter, but she is an infant. I plan on having many more children (hopefully 3-4, my wife's health and timing permitting) but I don't have them yet.
What I know about children is limited to infants and toddlers (mine), my own remembered experiences as a child, and second-hand experience both for children (i.e. via observing my friends as a child) and for parents (my friends who have children).
I'm also going to comment here that I'm a man, and as such I underwent (as far as I know) less neurochemical activity in response to having a child than my wife did, and I absolutely underwent less physical shifts than she did.
To complete the comparison - a healthy relationship with our children has us take the exact opposite role of the healthy relationship with our parents. We have a responsibility, after bringing them into this world, to nurture them to adulthood. We can give them guidance - with our spouse, their genes and most of their memes come from us (though that does not necessarily make them predictable!) We invest in them, as we were invested in, and see the benefits..
If we have a strong family, they will help us in our own aging, and pass down our legacy. They help us complete a life well lived, having forged the next chain in our family's history.
Explicitly having Children
For most of human history, there was not a particular need for 'motivation' to have children. You simply had them, assuming you had a spouse and were fertile. Obviously, however, fertility is crashing.
There are many components to the reduction in fertility, and it's beyond the scope of this book (and my expertise!) to talk about all of them. There are physical factors and social factors. However, many of these can be overcome with sufficient motivation.
The following is utter speculation, and not particularly well researched speculation at that.
One under-discussed barrier to having children -- in comparison to the psychological barrier from financial and social costs, the physical problems caused by ballooning obesity, the issues with people putting it off until too late -- is that there's simply a lot more to do at night these days.
Until relatively recently, there really wasn't that much to do at night. Certainly, you could operate by candlelight, but that had financial limitations (even with things like rushlights). Metropolitan areas obviously had more to do, but in general sex was one of the more interesting things you could do at night.
Between sex being about the most interesting thing you could do in the dark, and the lack of birth control, it's unsurprising people had larger families. Obviously, labor was often the limiting factor on ability to get work done, and there was quite a bit of childhood death, so additional bodies paid themselves off as well (disregarding even the religious factor).
Today, we have a lot of stuff that we want to do when we might have had sex in the past. I realize this is a delicate subject for people, so I won't go too far into it. But how often, especially as you passed out of your more passionate years, did you decide it would be more pleasant to relax, to simply hang out with your spouse, to do something other than have sex with them? I'm not saying that's wrong, even.
What I am saying is that having children moves from implicit (no birth control, sex as entertainment, social condition encouraging it) to explicit (make the choice to have kids, including dealing with the sacrifices that you perceive around the matter).
I think it is beyond this article to fully convince you to have children. I'll have to come back and do that. I can, however, summarize.
Coming to Maturity
Once again a personal theory, but I somewhat suspect that it is more difficult to truly come into your own 'as an adult' without some kind of life or death responsibility on you - there are certainly other ways to go about this, but having children seems to be one of the most consistent ways for people whose lives are messy (not truly damaging or dangerous, but simply not well put together) to get them together.
More than that, it's the most consistent way to be brought into the stage of life where you are responsible for the continuity into the next generation - both as a result of, and contributing to, the various elements of nurturing, investment, passing down legacy, etc. In a real way you are the core of the community, at the stage in your life where you are shaping the next generation, generally productive economically or domestically, and living on your own.
Children are not a panacea to people's issues in any way - we all know someone who had, and some of us ourselves have experienced, a parent whose issues got in the way of or was exacerbated by their parenting. But just as often, if not more often, it gives parents a mirror and that responsibility to address issues as far ranging as a sense of self worth (being responsible for new life), frustration with elements of their looks (easier to love in someone else, and reflect it back at yourself), or time management.
I can give one example that is incredibly personal and close to home. My mother had a temper all through her twenties, and was determined to never be a parent. She was, frankly, convinced she would kill a child.
I don't know if this was a realistic self evaluation of her own temper, or if it was (in my opinion, more likely) an exaggeration due to low self-esteem. However, she obviously had me (as I write to you here). I never particularly experienced her temper growing up - I can recall a few cases, but nothing that really stands out. Her temper had a long fuse, and while she got frustrated at me once or twice, I never experienced the real thing.
Humans may have many ways that we can be a little dysfunctional, but we are not an actually psychologically fragile species. Having children is part of our lifecycle, and our unconscious is rather good at conspiring to make us do what's needed to bring that child to maturity, just as our forefathers did to us. Trust, a little bit, in yourself as a living system.
Addressing Doubts
According to Pew1 , 60% of childless adults younger than 40 say that they are unlikely to have children. There's a bit further of a justification in there as to why, but I don't think I can really address the sub-items for 'some other reason' without knowing more, so I won't.
Against all trials and tribulations, your ancestors had children - often many - dealing with tragedy, medical issues, and poverty. I would say that most of your ancestors, going through life's struggles, still were grateful to exist. Perhaps I'm wrong, but they nonetheless kept going. They had loving families - at least some of them - and lives worth living.
Children can cost less than you think, and yield more than you might anticipate. There's an entire book about this - Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - by Bryan Caplan. Like many things, it's on my list of things to read. Regardless, you don't need to give every kid a silver spoon, private schooling, infinite after school tuition, private universities. Give them love, educate them, nurture them - and they'll probably turn out pretty close to their capacity regardless.
Will having children reduce the amount of time you can dedicate to leisure? Yes, absolutely, but you'll find at least some of that missed leisure time will be returned to you in the joy you get from children.
Will you be more tired, have to make more financial sacrifices, and have some of the optionality of your life reduced? Yes, but there will be a broader financial support net and source of energy to help you as you get older, far beyond what you might see from failing pension programs.
Will your time and energy to tackle your legacy - writing, career, etc. - be reduced? Yes, but you will have one of the highest success rates of will|legacy|immortality, the world will resemble your will more, and you will have more insight into the breadth of the human experience.
If you are worried that you will be able to experience less, try less things, simply have a less varied life: Children provide a route towards a type of fulfillment and/or happiness that is not available otherwise (note: not the only route towards fulfillment/happiness, just this type).
If you are truly, truly a miserable person, then there's no way that I can convince you by reference to the pleasure of simply existing that having kids is worthwhile. I will say that if you feel some obligation towards continuing the legacy you have received, that it is worth seriously considering regardless.
Finally, there is the simple fact of the matter that like I’ve discussed, our families are more likely to be similar to us than anyone else. Our children inherit our genes, and our memes - as well as those from our partner. If our branch of the human tapestry terminates, then that is a future world that resembles your will less. With more children, there is a chance it resembles it more.
The future belongs to those who show up. Will you? Be fruitful and multiply, upon the earth, and into the stars.
Variety and the inconsistencies of legacy
Your children will not be you. They will not be your partner. They will pull from both of you, and they will emerge traits that were hidden in your heritage that you might not have even known about.
Children will become their own people. We are roughly equivalent, genetically, to our parents, siblings, and children. Our children, however, are the ones that _we_ are responsible for nurturing, just as we were nurtured.
However, just as it is rare that we come out precisely how our parents expected, we can't expect the same from our children. Non-shared environmental factors, hidden heritages, the unknown blend from your spouse - these will create a new person.
I talk a lot about legacy, will, immortality. I know there are some people who think that I view children too much as a vessel for our immortality, rather than their own person, and while I think I need to address that more fully in a discussion about how you receive the legacies handed onto you, I want to touch on it now.
Your task is to raise the best person that you can, because if you don't your legacy will die out regardless of how much of it they want to carry on. Yes, you should endeavor to give them memes that they want to emulate, that you give them the desire to reproduce and pass down their own as well. You should seek to inspire the future generations. But it is more important that your family continues, in gene and or meme, hale and hearty, than it is a specific idea of yours continues.
As a person, the legible parts of yourself, even to yourself, are the surface. There is so much more to us than we are able to put words to, and even more to our partners since we are not inside their minds. Trust that a well raised child will do what they can to emulate many of your best parts, and seek to fill in parts that don't fit. Have more children if you want to pass down more legacy. Write your ideas down, create artifacts, and provide a way to maintain it throughout the generations instead of just immediately in the following generation.
They will be your immortality one way or another - while I certainly advocate doing your best to carve your will into the universe, acknowledging the limits of what we can do will make success more likely, and sweeter.