Thu. February 28
Why Have Kids? They Make Life Meaningful
by Mark Tapson
No sooner had I cleaned my seven-week-old daughter’s poop off my lap the other day (don’t ask) than my two-year-old tried and failed to empty a jug of milk into a teacup she had perched atop a stack of art books (you have to understand what a book fetish I have to fully appreciate how traumatizing this was). Why, I tried to remember, did I decide to have kids?
In his new book about America’s declining birthrate, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, Jonathan Last calculates that the cost of raising just one child, when you factor in skyrocketing college tuition and hidden costs like lost second-parent income, now tops $1.1 million. “Children have gone from being a marker of economic success to a barrier to economic success.” As if that weren’t deterrence enough, Last notes correctly that “to raise a child is to submit to a staggering amount of work, much of which is deeply unpleasant. It would be crazy to have children if they weren’t so damned important.”
By “important,” Last means necessary for the maintenance of a fertility rate that won’t one day lead us to extinction. But preservation of the species isn’t what motivates most parents to have children; they have them for any number of personal reasons—when they do have them. Pets now outnumber kids in America, Last writes, by more than 4 to 1: “Pets have become fuzzy, low-maintenance replacements for children.”
It’s hard to blame people for preferring pets and freedom. Putting diapers on babies puts a damper on a freewheeling lifestyle. To be a parent—a good parent, anyway—means that from Day One the child replaces you as the center of your universe. “Having kids is, literally, no fun,” says Last. “Researchers have been studying the effects of children on their parents for decades and the results are nearly always the same. Having children makes parents less happy.”
So why have them? What compels people to make such a crazy commitment? I’m going to speak only for myself now, but one of my motivations was a growing sense of purpose. Lamenting the childless trend, Last observes that “modernity has made us deeply unserious,” and that phrase resonates with me on a personal level. I waited a long time to have kids—I’m probably twice as old as the average first-time father—and one of the reasons I decided to have them when I did was that I had come to the unsettling realization that my life had been, well, deeply unserious up to that point, and it was now or never to turn things around and justify my existence. And that included wanting a family for the first time in my life.
But what about the studies claiming that children make parents less happy? Perhaps because I got a much later start, that hasn’t been my experience, and a new study actually reports that though parents may be less happy than the parentless in a superficial sense, their lives are far more meaningful. Bringing little ones into this world who depend on you for everything forces you to take life seriously and to clarify your own purpose on earth. Purpose gives your life meaning, and when your life has meaning beyond the narrow and empty confines of aimless, ephemeral self-gratification, then you have a shot at real happiness.
In a 2010 article in New York magazine about parenting appropriately titled “All Joy and No Fun,” Jennifer Senior points out that
for many of us, purpose is happiness. . . Martin Seligman, the positive-psychology pioneer who is, famously, not a natural optimist, has always taken the view that happiness is best defined in the ancient Greek sense: leading a productive, purposeful life. And the way we take stock of that life, in the end, isn’t by how much fun we had, but what we did with it.
Don’t get me wrong—there was a host of other reasons I decided to go forward with a family, chief among them the fact that I finally found myself with the right mate with whom to have one. But choosing to get serious and responsible about life was a driving factor. And despite all the poop and spilled milk, I’ve never been happier or more fulfilled.
Mark Tapson, a Hollywood-based writer and screenwriter, is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He focuses on the politics of popular culture.
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I would like to see studies looking at the “happiness” of couples whose children are now grown to adulthood compared to those who decided to never have kids at all.
From my single guy’s observations, the single life is like a line. It peaks, and valleys, but usually gently. Peaks equal happiness, valleys equal unhappiness.
The married life with kids seems to make both the peaks and valleys a lot starker. Sublime happiness, but serious unhappiness to the point of despair. I think it’s to the point where a lot of men feel like they don’t want to risk the valleys, since it can be life-shattering if a marriage fails or things go wrong. Or another analogy, riding a motorcycle; awesome fun, but you risk your life each time you go on the road. So it’s a rough thing.
Also, I understand you are trying to inspire people, but single people have lives full of purpose too. You’re saying that life without them isn’t serious or meaningful, and that can rub some of us the wrong way. For some of us, the responsible option is to realize we won’t make good fathers and not have kids.
Thanks for your response, dmdutcher, but actually, I didn’t say that life without children isn’t serious or meaningful. I said that purpose gives one’s life meaning. For me, having children was part of taking life more seriously and responsibly and purposefully than I had before. As I wrote above, I’m really speaking only for myself here.
In retrospect, I realized that you may have gotten that impression from the title, which taken by itself is a bit misleading.
I don’t think it was really just the title, but to me it came across that kids were more meaningful due to the hedonistic, unserious approach to modern life. You said you had kids because you finally felt serious and responsible about life too. That study mentioned that negative experiences gave more meaning, and you made the point that the parents vs the childless tended to have more meaning even if less happiness.
So I may be reading it wrong, and I apologize if so, but it came across to me as having kids tends to be more meaningful than a life without them due to those external factors. Since you are giving us reasons “Why have kids?” that is. If it’s just having purpose in general, than I am mistaken and you are right.
Yes, dmdutcher, but your initial concern was that I was saying the childless life can’t be serious or meaningful. Obviously it can. As for whether life with children is MORE meaningful, that too depends on the adults involved (and the kids). But for me and nearly every parent I know, the answer is yes, having children has deepened our sense of purpose, enriched our lives and given them more meaning. I’m sure there are many exceptions on both sides. More power to those as self-aware as yourself, who are good-to-go without kids.
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The “studies” that show how much it costs to raise a child are so laughable, and always have been, that I think they must be created by people who intend to discourage people from having children.
My wife and I have had three children who have grown into young adulthood (2 college graduates and one about to be); even factoring in the tuition we’ve paid and the student loans we’ll be paying for quite a while, we haven’t spent anywhere near 1 million (which would be more than we both have earned in the last 24 years).
Now, if we had had more money we could have spent more, but our children certainly had more material goods and opportunities than either of us had growing up (and I never felt deprived growing up). Certainly a parent could spend millions raising children, but it doesn’t have to cost that kind of money.
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What a selfish reason to bring people into existence.
The purpose of your children’s lives is to make YOU happy? You can’t have decided to have children for the sake of making THEM happy – because they didn’t exist yet, so it was for your sake. You forced other humans into the world so that you could benefit from it, is that what you’re saying?
All people have children for their own “selfish reasons”. That’s just how it is. People fall in love and want to make their own little love creation. I don’t know if there is any other reason why most people have children other then to benefit their life in some way. Which is how it should be, people should have children because they want to not because they should have to.
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