"Does the ‘right’ reason to have kids actually exist?"
Choking at The Great Circle Of Life
Original column: Carolyn Hax, April 19 2024.
Carolyn published this column more than a month ago. I’m only getting to it now, though, because after my initial howl, I needed to collect my thoughts.
The LW wants to know the right reasons to have kids. The letter presents five “wrong” reasons, and says we all agree they’re “garbage.” I’m quoting here—both the reasons and the comments are the LW’s:
To keep a relationship together. (It could make it worse.)
To have someone to take care of you in old age. (That gives them a role they didn’t ask for.)
To make your parents happy. (It’s your life, not theirs.)
To copy your friends.* (That’s immature.)
To give yourself a life purpose.** (You shouldn’t make new people to feel purposeful; get a hobby.)
The LW is tempted by a sixth reason—”because I wanted to”—but says it’s the “least substantive” reason of all.
Carolyn’s answer to all this is reeeally hard to follow. She does overwrite! She overthinks, too, but if you read it a few times, you can kind of tease out what she’s saying. She says there are two good reasons to have a child. One is “a yearning for family life”—so far, so good. But the other is “a belief the children you add to the world are, for lack of a better way to phrase it, justifiable.”
And potential parents should engage in “moral calculation and situational awareness.” Whatever that means.
How any of this confusion is supposed to help the LW, I don’t know. Believing your kids are justifiable—wasn’t that the problem for which the LW sought help?
The much bigger question, though, is why suspect new life isn’t justifiable? Both Carolyn and the LW assume that’s in doubt. Their reason? For both of them, the sticking point is that the children never consented to live! “Children can’t ask to be born,” writes Carolyn, and a potential parent doesn’t “have the standing” to assume a kid would want to be. The very idea of having a child therefore, is essentially “presumptuous.”
Someone needs to tell Carolyn that “the very idea of having a child” is to continue human life in general, and your own specific people or family in particular. Why are the LW and Carolyn so timid about this, The Great Circle Of Life? Why the preemptive apology to a child, for causing it to be born? Why the self-abnegation?
The answer is in the LW’s list: They’re uneasy because a parent might get something out of parenthood for his or her own self. The parent might get care from the child in old age, or a life purpose, or even, God forbid, happiness. If the parent does benefit in these ways, then the whole child-rearing enterprise is ”presumptuous” and “not justifiable,” because the child never consented to provide any of that.
Readers, how many of you live with obligations you never asked for? This is a normal and inescapable condition of every life. It’s also a beautiful condition. We become our best selves in the fulfillment of our duty to others. But per the LW—and Carolyn doesn’t challenge this—the only justifiable child would be one who owed nothing to anyone.
Please save me from having to know that child.
Hax’s signature idea, repeated in many of her columns, is that you can’t expect anything of anybody. Ultimately, you can only rely on yourself. Superficially, this idea has its appeal. But this question about why to have children invites us to push the idea further, and see where it takes us. If you can rely only on yourself, is anyone else entitled to rely on you? Are all human being just atoms?
I’m beginning to think the LW was right. Maybe some people shouldn’t have kids.
Chance this letter is fake: None. Though one of my kids has pointed out that I always say that…
* Re: Reason three, how many people actually do this—have a kid to copy their friends? I’ve never seen that, and I’m sure I’ve been around longer than the LW.
** Reason five is especially gobsmacking. Collecting stamps can be a reason to live, but continuing the human story by nurturing the next generation—not so much.