About having children

Last year a survey was published in Great Britain in which people who were the right age to start a family were asked if they planned to have children. Most replied no, they would rather get rich and have fun. This finding merely confirms what we know from the statistics: in most European countries the birth rate now is significantly lower than it was in the 1960’s. In many countries it is even below the replacement rate, so populations are set to decline. The German newspaper “Bild” even ran a scare-mongering front page story suggesting that the Germans were now an endangered species. In practice of course, such extrapolations are rarely fulfilled and I’m sure the pendulum will come to swing the other way. I’m confident the trend will be reversed, but for the time being there is this problem in our societies that people are not having enough children.
In the survey, even those who said they were thinking of having children saw problems preventing them. Some were not sure they could reconcile starting a family with their career prospects. Others were uncertain of finding the right partner. Indeed, as these days so many mariages end in divorce and many potential parents themselves come from broken families, they may feel a reluctance to visit such an experience on their own offspring.
I find all of this rather sad. I myself am the father of two children, a girl and a boy, and they have been a great source of joy and satisfaction to me over the years. I didn’t have them until I was in my thirties. By then I had come to feel that just having fun wasn’t really self-fulfilling. I had always enjoyed the company of children and wanted my own. I had come to feel that I had found the right partner to start a family. So we did and in a way the only thing we have regretted is not having started earlier.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that having children is easy. First there are all those sleepless nights. Then there are the never-ending nappies to change. As they become toddlers they require constant surveillance. Basically you have to reorganize your entire life around them. And so on. Then finally, when they become teenagers (which is the stage ours are at) you have to manage the difficult transition towards their becoming independent adults. Children are extra responsibility, extra worry, extra stress and extra expense. My brother, who doesn’t have children, once tried to demonstrate to me how much he was saving a year by not having them. But that of course is not the point.
Along with the diffculties each age brings, each brings many pleasures. Broadly speaking, when children are small and innocent, they offer the parent an opportunity to rediscover the wonders of being alive in our extraordinary and varied world. I remember with mine playing in snow, lying outside on August nights spotting shooting stars, watching wild animals on walks, visiting caves for the first time. Their initial enthusiasm about things can dispel our hardened blasé attitude of taking everything for granted and through them we can see the world again through a child’s eyes for the quite remarkable place it is. Rilke wrote that growing up was a process of unlearning, becoming less open to experience, forgetting - being with small children can be a way of reversing that. Then there is the whole dynamic of play that parents can rediscover to their advantage. As their children get older parents can introduce them to more adult activities, giving rise to a particularly enriching sharing of experience and complicity. I enjoy going to English speaking theatre with my daughter, climbing via ferrata routes in the Dolomites with my son, playing electric guitar music with them. Later, children want to go their own way and that can be the source of some friction. But a close human relationship is never totally easy and this is only to be expected.
If you decide to have children, you’re in it for the long haul; it’s a great shared adventure with its ups and its downs.
Now of course all of this may not equate with some people’s idea of “fun” as experienced in the modern consumer society, where the norm is one of purchasing instant gratification. However, to think in those terms is to miss the point of life. In many ways real satisfaction and happiness can only be achieved through a degree of effort and commitment. The real problem experienced by potential parents is doubtless one of choice, the fact that people think about it too much and see only the inconveniences and constraints on their comfort as individuals. In the past, children happened and parents just got on with it - as they still do in poor countries.
Of course in those situations there is and was a good reason for having children: they represented your insurance policy for old age, they would look after you in return for your having looked after them. In our modern societies that task is often seen as falling to the state, so children appear less necessary. Paradoxically though it is the very fact that people are having fewer children while living longer themselves that has brought state pension schemes to the verge of bankruptcy - quite simply there aren’t enough young people working to pay the pensions of the ever growing number of old retirees.
However, it is not for macro-economic reasons that I want to encourage people to have children. I genuinely believe that having children can improve the quality of your life, as it has mine.
Firstly it brings home to you forcibly that you are not the centre of the universe but part of an intricate web of human relations.
Secondly, if we consider, by observing nature, what the ultimate purpose of life is, then it must merely be to reproduce, to perpetuate the species. If you don’t have children you’ve failed in that fundamental mission.
Thirdly, if you really believe in the value of life, then surely the greatest gift you can give is life to your children.
Finally, the only thing that will remain of most of us when we die (genetically but in a broader human sense too) is our children.