Yes, you should have kids

Internet complainers make parenthood seem awful. It's just the opposite.

Credit: Johann Zoffany

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Lately, we as a civilization have been having a debate about the merits of becoming a parent. The debate took off thanks to a flurry of social media posts from “DINKS” — an acronym for “dual income, no kids” — and has continued as mainstream media began reporting on the conversation.

I haven’t weighed in on this debate because this blog is obviously pro-family, and with posts like “I became a father at 36, and I'm kind of sorry I waited,” I figured my views were clear enough. But last week, Slate published an advice column¹ from a couple wondering if they should have kids. The couple was interested in becoming parents, but wrote that “from what we’ve seen online, parenting today seems … overwhelming.”

The piece struck a cord because I agree that the overall tone online about parenting is aggressively negative.

And so I would like to offer a counter narrative, a corrective if you will. Parenting has its hard parts. It’s not a walk in the park. But it’s also fantastic. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done and I’m a happier person for being a parent.

So, should you have kids? Answers will vary. You do you. And of course plenty of people who want kids can’t have them.

But if you are a person like the Slate advice seekers, a person who is considering having kids but is maybe dissuaded by nightmare parenting content, I have a simple answer: Yes, have kids. It’s wonderful. It’s worth it. Social media is filled with miserable complainers. Ignore them.

There are a lot of practical reasons to have kids, some of which I’ve written about before. Among other things, kids function as a kind of insurance policy against loneliness and isolation (and also possible financial stress) in old age.

In an age of declining birthrates, having kids is also beneficial for the broader society.

And in a slightly related vein, Mary Harrington recently pointed out that children are literally what make a community.

[…] what binds a community is kids. This is obviously true in the present, in the networks of mutual dependency that accumulate around dependent children. But children bind communities through time, as well. At the level of knowledge, stories, lifeways, and even the language itself, we’re only here because our ancestores had kids and passed on both their genetic and their cultural legacy. Those shared aspects of our culture and everyday life will only continue to exist, if we do the same. To the extent that a community views itself as a community — a people, if you like — and values that web of connection both in the present and across time, they will feel a common obligation to ensure its continuity. That means having children.

In other words, if you want a community, kids need to be a big part of it.

These are all good and compelling reasons to have kids.

But I also suspect data and for-the-common-good arguments probably don’t speak to the emotional considerations surrounding parenting. I might want society to thrive, but if I think parenting sounds awful I might not care about, say, a plummeting birthrate. And so I wanted to offer some insights into my own parenting experience.

I think what makes parenting so great, despite the downsides, is that it’s an experience punctuated by moments of pure joy. For instance, in my family each morning, after we drop our 5-year-old off for kindergarten, my wife goes for a jog before I start work. So each day, I have a window of time that is too brief to really get anything done, and during which I’m alone with the two younger kids.

We do lots of things during this time. Lately, we’ve been building things out of their Duplo legos. Sometimes we watch monster truck videos. But one of my favorite things to do is play the drums while the two kids — ages 2 and 3 — jump off the stairs into beanbag chairs. We’ve done this enough that any time the 2-year-old hears drumming, she has a pavlovian response, dragging the beanbags out to start jumping.

This is a really simple thing. It’s the kind of thing I might even forget about if I weren’t writing it down in this blog. But it’s also fun. And seeing how much joy the kids get from throwing themselves through the air brings me joy. I can’t really explain why or provide any data, but I think it’s a universal aspect of being a parent: Kids have a unique way of experiencing joy, and being around them lets their parents access that joy as well.

Here’s another example: Last fall, we all went to Spain. In the lead up to this trip, I was worried it was going to be rough. Because I have family who work for airlines, I’ve been fortunate to travel often, and I feared bringing kids would slow us down and make it impossible for this trip to live up to past outings.

In the end, the kids did slow us down a lot. But contrary to my fears, the Spain trip also ended up being one of the best — maybe the best — foreign trip I’ve ever taken. It was a blast to experience old castles and new foods through the eyes of my small children. And taking them to Spanish playgrounds was surely a more authentically local and immersive experience than whatever tourist thing I might otherwise have been doing.

Most parents aren’t going to Spain, but I think this concept applies broadly. Parenting involves many sacrifices, and they can sound awful. You have less personal time, less personal space, less money to spend on yourself, etc. Travel — if that’s your thing — becomes harder, and if you’re lucky enough to do it at all it’s an entirely different experience.

On paper, this all looks pretty bad. Shouldn’t the loss of things we like make us less happy?

And yet giving up those things actually is a path to happiness. Even with all of the sacrifices and tradeoffs, life with kids is actually better than popularly understood, and than life without kids. The net impact of being a parent for me wasn’t negative. It wasn’t neutral. It was positive.

Now, I suspect there will be people who think I’m just delusional, or a propagandist. But consider also that I was a DINK for more than a decade before having kids. I went out to eat often. Due to my wife’s job with an airline, we actually did hop on planes all the time and travel. We did all the DINK stuff and we were good at it.

Having kids changed that. But the surprising thing was that the change was for the better.

Obviously having kids is not a panacea for all of life’s challenges. But it is a positive experience for most people; researchers earlier last year discovered that 80 percent of parents find the experience “enjoyable” most or all of the time. Eighty-two percent found it “rewarding” most or all of the time. Only a minority found it tiring and stressful all or most of the time. There are exceptions to every trend and some people do indeed find the parenting experience awful. But it’s worth remembering that those are a small minority of cases — which is hardly the impression a person might get from social media.

I’m not telling everyone to have kids. Again, do what you want. What I’m trying to do is push back against the onslaught of negative parenting content. I think in an effort to keep it real, a lot of online parents forget to mention that they actually love their kids, and love that they have them. That’s a difficult idea to capture because the highlights of parenting are often quiet and subtle. But I can say that for me it boils down to one simple fact: I’m happier now, as a parent, than I was before².

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1. The slate piece actually provides a good overview of how the rise of mommy blogging changed the tenor of the discussion about parenting.

2. Some may argue that I’m happier as a parent because of how fortunate I’ve been in my life. I’m not rich, but I have a good job, a comfortable house, etc. etc. There’s no question that I’m a really, really lucky person. But the research from last year actually found that parenting satisfaction cuts across demographic divides. In other words, most people at both the top and the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum like being parents. In fact, some of the least privileged Americans were also the most satisfied with being parents. This isn’t to say I’m not extremely fortunate. I am. But it’s to say that you can — and many people do — find parenting rewarding regardless of other factors in their lives.