Why Did You Have Kids???
An honest answer.
If you’re a parent, you know this question all too well:
Why did you have kids???
The minute you start to vent, the minute you express the slightest degree of anxiety or despair about the current state of the world, the minute you offer a critique of our economic paradigms, someone slaps you with that.
They’re so pleased with themselves.
They think it’s a real gotcha.
The entire point is to shut you down. They don’t expect an answer. They just want you to stop talking. They want you to get back to posting your little family photos on Facebook. They’ll complain about that, too.
Quite a few concern trolls have hit me with that question over the years. Even some doomers feel entitled to ask, if we were so concerned about collapse, overshoot, and fascism, why did we have kids? Aren’t we contributing to the problem? Aren’t we being a little hypocritical? They don’t mean to sound rude or anything. They’re just trying to understand why we deserve a voice.
I mean, why didn’t moms and dads anticipate that a majority of Americans would vote a verified grifter, sexual predator, and convicted felon into office? Why didn’t they see the hard fascist turn coming? Why didn’t they know the biggest companies in the world were just lying about their climate pledges? Why did we naively believe we still had another generation to get everything under control before Category 4 hurricanes start slamming into the mountains and record floods started washing away summer camps in the middle of the night?
What were we thinking???
Well, I have an answer.
On behalf of all parents who had children over the last ten years, we apologize. We’re sorry for naively believing in humanity. We’re sorry we thought a majority of the world could put up with slight inconveniences in order to ensure a future for themselves and generations to come.
We were clearly in the wrong here.
Several times a year, mainstream news pumps out stories fretting over the declining birthrate. They want to know why people in their 20s and 30s aren’t having more kids. The minute you have a kid, they ask:
Why did you have kids?
The minute you demand affordable childcare, affordable education, a work-life balance, or safe schools, you hear it:
Why did you have kids?
Why did we have kids if we expected help raising them? Why did we have kids if we expected social safety nets? Why did we have kids if we wanted a better future for them other than a dystopian hellscape?
Sorry, you’re right.
These people don’t seem to get it. Everything they consume in this world, every single thing they buy, every grocery, every package, every service, is made or provided by someone’s kid. That’s how it works. The entire world is run by kids raised by parents. No matter how self-sufficient someone thinks they are, they rely on someone else at some point along the line. Those off-grid solar panels and rain barrels don’t make themselves. You can’t just shut it all off on some arbitrary date, not unless you’re a hundred percent okay with starving.
Here’s what I think they really mean:
Why did you have kids? Didn’t you know the rest of us would sit back and let you do all the work until they turn a profit? Didn’t you expect everyone around you to continue acting exclusively in their own, short-term interests? Didn’t you understand nobody else would care about your kid until they’re old enough to get a job or fight someone else’s war? Didn’t you know every politician would continue to use their wellbeing as an excuse to advance their own agendas, even if those agendas ultimately hurt your kid?
The answer to that question is no, we didn’t.
Maybe we should have.
Nobody really knows why they have kids anymore. From a selfish standpoint, it’s a bad decision. It’s hard. It’s expensive. You give up a lot. Most mature adults decide to have kids because they believe children will add meaning and purpose to their lives. They believe this meaning and purpose will outweigh what they’re giving up. And they hope that, despite all the problems in the world, they can give their children a meaningful life so they can become happy, healthy, productive members of a society and contribute something to a common future.
If parents believed they were having children simply to feed them into an abusive, exploitative system, they wouldn’t do it.
Hence the declining birthrate.
Honestly, I’m so tired of hearing about the birthrate. We can talk about overshoot, ecology, and human rights all day long. In the end, it’s simple. If we can’t take care of the 8 billion souls we’ve got, nobody should be fretting over birthrates. A growing population isn’t always a good thing. If someone wants to grow a population afflicted with steep wealth inequality and billionaires who talk about saving the world while flying around in private jets, I say screw them.
That said, having children will always be a personal decision. Have them. Don’t have them. It’s your choice. If someone gaslights you for having a child, and they’re citing the world’s cruelty and the decaying moral standards of a capitalist hellpit as their main argument, that’s a weird position.
The trolls who ask why you had kids never seem to direct it at their own parents. Maybe you’ve noticed. They never ask their mom:
Why did you have me?
Their existence on this planet doesn’t seem to be a cause for concern. It’s okay for them to be alive. Don’t ask them how many gallons of water or how many kilowatts of electricity they use a day. That’s aggressive.
Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Imagine scientists made a machine that could wipe out your existence and negate your entire life’s ecological footprint. All you had to do was push one red button.
Who would push that button?
Not many of us.
For all the people who want to know why we had kids, even at this stage of humanity, I have a suggestion. Let’s put them on an island where they don’t benefit from the labor of everyone’s kids, and all the unseen labor that went into raising them. I bet they’d figure out the answer real quick.
Wouldn’t they?
Thank you, Jessica.
It is truly the peak of narcissism for someone to ask a parent such a question, and at the same time the peak of attempted distraction from that very narcissism.
***
We too don’t judge those who choose, or who are constrained by circumstances outside their choices, to not have children.
But for ourselves:
We have kids (now young adults) because we believed — and still believe — that they might be able to carry forward a legacy of caring & compassion for others, and build a better future.
We have kids because we have hope for a world in which caring counts more than extractive success.
We have kids because we’re living in a fucking society, warts and all, and societies go extinct along with any good they might include if there are no children to carry them forward & to improve upon them.
We have kids because we’re evolved, sexually reproducing living beings; our genetic drives are impossible to avoid having found each other by chance, bonded through (complicated but still materially-based) love, and been unimpeded by obstacles (rational or otherwise; individual, societal or environmental) to those genes propagating themselves.
We have kids because we are human, and have had the exceptionally good fortune to be able to do so — and now that they are adults, we keep loving them and supporting their pro-social successes as they are fully engaged in making that better future come to pass.
And we are grateful for both of our kids, as none of that was or is guaranteed, while also being apprehensive and realistic about the challenges they will face in their lifetimes.
A snarky comeback would be “why did your parents have kids?” A kinder way to respond would be, “the same reason your parents had you.”