Why We Choose to Have Kids
“They come through you, but not from you.
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.”
-Khalil Gibran
In the past, perhaps people were motivated to have children because they needed the farm hands but for most people in modern society, that sort of practical motivation is no longer relevant. So, if we don’t need the cheap labor anymore, why do we have kids? Some common answers include to love, be loved, share love, for legacy, companionship, purpose, and because of biological yearning.
Let’s start off by examining some of those answers in more detail. It’s hard to imagine a more intense love than the love between parent and child, so it’s understandable that people might have children so they can experience that. Legacy also makes sense. It’s natural to fear mortality, and many people view children as an extension of themselves. Thus, by having kids and eventually grandkids and great grandkids, you sort of get to feel like a part of you lives on and you’ve somewhat dodged that whole pesky mortality thing. Companionship also makes sense. We’re social beings. We’re not wired to be alone and, many cultures believe our family members are those that are most likely to be there for us. Purpose is also a powerful reason. We all have an innate desire to be needed, and the way young children need their parents is life-or-death. The stakes might change as we get older, but having kids (and grandkids) can still provide a sense of purpose.
That leaves the biological urge. However, scientists and psychologists have proven that this urge comes from societal conditioning, not biology. As feminist Lena Hollingsworth observed, “If the ‘urge’ was actually innate or instinctual, we would all feel it... and we don’t.” Or as Laura Carroll, author of The Baby Matrix: Why Freeing Our Minds From Outmoded Thinking About Parenthood & Reproduction Will Create a Better World, wrote, “For women, there is no real evidence to support the notion that there is a biological process that creates that deep longing for a child. And the same for men; there’s no real evidence linking biology to the creation of parental desire.” Realizing that a yearning for parenthood is not a biological imperative allows us to look harder at why we want children. The source of that drive is probably less internal biology than we previously thought, and more a factor of our external conditioning.
While some of these reasons may be valid and others are not, I’d like to propose there is another common reason people choose to have kids: We have kids to try to fill the holes in ourselves. This most likely happens unconsciously. We hope our kids will provide us with the love, purpose, or happiness we do not feel internally. We hope our kids will accomplish the things we couldn’t. Or, to put it bluntly, we unconsciously hope our kids will fill emotional holes we feel within us.
Legendary child psychologist Alice Miller theorized that we have kids in an attempt to feel the unconditional love we never felt from our own parents. She also theorized that this is a deeply unconscious desire, and people are regularly unaware of just how conditional their parents’ love was. In her book The Body Never Lies, she explains, “At birth and throughout their later upbringing, we instill in them [our children] the necessity to love, honor, and respect us, to do their best for us, to satisfy ambitions – in short, to give us everything our parents denied us. We call this decency and morality. Children rarely have any choice in the matter. All their lives, they will force themselves to offer their parents something that they neither possess nor have any knowledge of, quite simply because they have never been given it: genuine, unconditional love that does not merely serve to gratify the needs of the recipient. Yet they will continue to strive in this direction because even as adults they still believe that they need their parents and because, despite all the disappointments they have experienced, they still hope for some token of genuine affection from those parents.”
Miller, like many in her field, explored the ways our survival instincts lead us to idealize one or both parents. After all, at first we are reliant on our parents both physically and emotionally, and if a child were to believe a parent’s love was conditional, that could be tantamount to death. Thus a child is forced to turn the guilt inward for they are unable to view any such shortcomings as being that of the parent’s. The parent’s love must be viewed as thorough, and the fourth commandment, “Thou shall honor thy father and mother,” must be respected. The kid has no choice but to defend the parent and is left with no option but to direct the guilt and blame inward.
Miller took issue with the ingrained nature of “Thou shall honor thy father and mother” in our society. She wrote, “Many of the Ten Commandments can still claim validity today. But the Fourth Commandment is diametrically opposed to the laws of psychology. It is imperative that there be general recognition of the fact that ‘love’ can do a very great deal of harm. People who were [unconditionally] loved in childhood will love their parents in return. There is no need of a commandment to tell them to do so. Obeying a commandment can never be the basis for love.”
In reality, having kids is hard and even the most loving parents doubtless have moments when they regret their decision to have kids. This is often communicated to children in direct and indirect ways. And of course, some parents communicate such messages more frequently and more harshly, thereby intensifying the abuse and its consequences.
To take this one step further, many parents fail to recognize their children as autonomous people. As children mature, it is natural for them to individuate and want to find an identity that is separate from their parents while still enjoying the comfort and security of their caregivers. The concept of representing the family, carrying the family name (in the case of “juniors” they are not just carrying a surname but are more thoroughly a forced symbolic representation of a parent) can cause great difficulties in establishing autonomy. As Khalil Gibran stated in regards to children, “They come through you, but not from you. And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.” It is ultimately unhelpful, unfair, and unhealthy to think of our children as part of us, or as our property at any stage of their lives. This difficulty in defining clear boundaries gets more complicated when parents are trying to fill whatever holes they unconsciously feel within them.
We all have a right to get our emotional and physical needs met. The problem lies in using our kids for this purpose. Children are sensitive, and will know that their parents want to use them for this. What’s more, they can’t fulfill adult needs, and asking them to is unfair. It is not our children’s responsibility to compensate for our shortcomings, or the shortcomings of our parents. They are not our caretakers, therapists, or partners. Expecting children to fill these roles causes us to resent them when they fail at a task that was always unconscious, unspoken, and impossible to succeed at. More dangerously, we unintentionally teach children that it is more important to fulfill other’s needs than to be true to themselves.
Parents who realize this strive to take care of themselves first, by doing individual work and cultivating a support system of other adults. That way, they need not rely on their kids to get their adult needs met.
To take care of ourselves, we must first mourn the losses that began in our own childhoods. Our parents had no choice but to fail us; they were set up by the shortcomings of their own parents. We are all human and thus imperfect. However, through awareness we can begin to break these cycles. There was a time when beating children was not just acceptable, the thought of not beating children was thought of as poor parenting. “Spare the rod, spoil the child” was the perceived wisdom of its age. My parents were of the first generation that this idea came to be questioned. As they began to view this as a form of physical abuse, things shifted and they broke a cycle of physical abuse that tragically their own parents and grandparents were not able to see the harm of.
It is important to realize, this is accomplished through progress, not perfection. I believe every generation of parents seeks to progress the ways in which we raise our kids. And, I believe a big step forward for future generations of parents will be realizing we can begin to fill our perceived holes from the inside, rather than seeking to get them filled externally, which never works in any sort of lasting manner.
If we think the way we feel, then the secret to feeling beautiful, whole, and complete is realizing you are already beautiful, whole, and complete.
Ask Yourself:
Do I feel incomplete?
Why do I think people choose to have kids?
What is a parent’s responsibility to his or her kids
What is a child’s responsibility to his or her parents?
What other adults could I get support from?
What needs do I have that I may be subconsciously wanting my children (present or future) to meet?
What needs did my parents ask me to meet for them?
Am I willing to tell myself, “I am already complete” and I am willing to move forward on the path towards believing it?
Next Letter: Spoiling Kids