On Having Children

Thinking about why people want to have children has helped me to reconsider the entire structure and purpose of society. I am going to break the reasons down into 2 categories. 2 seems like very few, but I am going to try.

Some people have children to fulfill a "duty" to a "higher" power - whether that power may be their partner, their family, a deity, or society varies. The other reason would be to bring a conclusion to an existential crisis that the subject is experiencing. In the latter, this potential parent has realized that they're a finite being. That being said, and after setting up this dialectic, these two reasons are not mutually exclusive. They can be comorbid or we could consider them on a spectrum or axis.

It's likelier that whatever the socio-philosophical reason may be for procreation, our biological drives lie at the true heart of it. Our DNA programs us to want to have children, but due to our high level of sentience, we feel like we're making a choice.

Societal norms and social order are a mask to provide existential meaning, but these attempts are ultimately prepackaged. Society, in a Jungian sense, is our collective consciousness. We're saving our norms for the next generation; to alleviate their "growing pains" and the hard realities of being mortal. Sometimes societies do "too good" of a job at this - obsessing over control and safety, to ensure a continued success according to a very limited, but "proven" method- case in point, the medieval Christian Church. After generations of civil warring, invasions from outsiders and general degradation of living conditions, the Church's secret to success was the creation of a rigid structure by which parishioners either adhered to in order to provide their lives with meaning and purpose, or eschewed, only to be labeled as an outsider and potential danger to the flock. This way of life was eventually challenged by the Reformation's reaction against the Church's own decline into decadence and bureaucratic bloat.

And so we see this pattern repeat in various ways over the course of human history, but in the end, all share similar structures: of self-regulation, control and an overall promise of safety for the vast majority, as long as we buy into it. When we accept these rules, we also potentially sacrifice individual liberties, or our own will to power. The modern American society is not necessarily as omnipotent as the medieval church, which had managed to create spiritual, material and political unification, yet many Americans feel obligated to uphold certain values and standards of living. For the "average" American, this seems to include going to college, having a "career," getting married, starting a family and owning property. These "norms" are so strong that they might drive people to commit heinous acts, to doubt themselves and their self worth, or to drop out of society so completely as to be invisible.

So for many, children are just the next "thing to do"and although this may seem a callous way to categorize people, it also is backed up with way too many examples of parents who abuse their children in a variety of means - through emotional neglect, overindulgence, physical violence, complete lack of guidance, instilling the same anxieties within them, et. al. For someone checking the boxes of the life, their hope may be that the child will impart great significance on their lives. And it doesn't mean that they don't love their children any less. But this sort of acceptance of societal norms without thinking can lead to a parents' expectations of their child to be unrealistic and ultimately unattainable, letting down both the parent and child in the end.

For others, the child is a source of hope, something that needs you to to survive. It may awaken a sort of slumbering meaning within your own self, as you see how fragile life is. For someone in the throes of an existential crisis, who feels like they're rudderless, the child presents a potential to provide meaning. The romanticization of the "child as savior" is as fraught with problems as the "checking the boxes" of life. So what is the future parent to do? How do you not put all of your eggs in the child basket as providing all of the meaning one can ever truly need?

Since I've grappled with my own mortality from a fairly young age, I would say that I have thought a long time about this topic and still feel an urge to procreate. This new life would (hopefully) have an expiration date much later than my own, essentially projecting myself into future possible worlds. So is it selfishness that makes me want to have a child? Is it, as I mentioned, a romanticization of possibilities? Is it succumbing to the society in which I live? I don't know the answer to any of these, but I do think that it's important that I am thinking about it in the first place.

And in the long run, this desire, when completely stripped down to the bare bones, is really just the evolutionary process continuing on. Our impetus to create life, whether couched in a "social norm" or a "philosophical  quandary," comes down to our DNA programming us to perpetuate the human race. Is that cynical? Probably, and for the myriad, creative ways in which we can consider this or that about our world, biology cannot be denied. We have just become really adept at creating greater and greater lenses to look through toward our own existence.