> Before having children, you may enjoy clubbing, skydiving, and LSD; you might find fulfillment in careerism, travel, cooking, or CrossFit; you may simply relish your freedom to do what you want. Having children will deprive you of these joys. And yet, as a parent, you may not miss them. You may actually prefer changing diapers, wrangling onesies, and watching “Frozen.” These activities may sound like torture to the childless version of yourself, but the parental version may find them illuminated by love, and so redeemed. You may end up becoming a different person—a parent. The problem is that you can’t really know, in advance, what “being a parent” is like. For Paul, there’s something thrilling about this quandary. Why should today’s values determine tomorrow’s?
I hate arguments like this, PARTICULARLY when the topic is becoming a parent. Sure, you might become a new person and love being a parent far more than missing the aspects of life you sacrificed to be there. OR you might hate it - I have at least one friend that told me "I love my daughter, but I hate being a parent" in a terribly gut-wrenching way. To say you don't know - that you CAN'T know - what it's like to be a parent without being one doesn't mean you should just shrug and give it a try. Ditto the same rationale for other arguments - there are many things you can't know if you'll like until you try it, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to decide if you will in advance.
Of course you'll never know if you'll love being a parent, you won't know how it can change you, and EVERY parent has moments of frustrations that are not the same as regretting having a child/children. But if you become one, there's at least two lives that can really really suffer if you hate it, so it's worth dedicating some effort to thinking about in advance.
Finding parenthood worthwhile is a very very common state for humanity (for good reason!) and most of us have benefited from that. But we shouldn't assume that it will just work out that way, for ourselves or for others.
I think you may be missing the point here. It's not don't think about whether you should or should not and plan as much as you can accordingly – your ambitions. I think it's actually don't expect you can know how you will feel – your aspirations. And more importantly don't deterministically tell yourself how you should feel about what you aspire to become.
Allowing your aspirations to more flexibly become whatever the situation requires is important. As described in the finish with respect to the time between we aspire to do something and work toward those aspirations:
> “what happens in the meanwhile is also life.”
Life gets in the way, and as people we certainly can change for good and bad.
Another framework for thinking about this comes from some of Jonathan Haidt's research in The Happiness Hypothesis: most people have a residual equilibrium of happiness.
One example from his book: if someone gets in an accident and becomes paralyzed, they'll suffer great sadness, but that first sip of orange juice through a straw through, man, what a joy.
So essentially humans will adapt to find sources of happiness as circumstances change.
Re parenting: it's not like you suddenly discover a hidden passion for changing diapers, rather, your body will adapt to find a way to derive happiness. And the interesting thing is, it will be totally genuine!
I never thought I wanted kids. I had one because my wife wanted one. Then I fell in love so hard that we had two more really quickly and I am in the process of transitioning to stay at home dad. If I had waited until I was ready and certain I would have never known how happy it was possible for me to be.
I became a parent at a young age. Here are my observations:
1. Being a parent requires adult-like time management. Time management skills and focus are what separates adults from immature old people.
2. I have become a better manager and professional because of parenthood. Children really are your worst critics and often irrationally so.
3. The things I see childless adults do that I have never had the time or money for are things I have never missed and don't regret. I don't like clubbing and other vain social experiences and I don't drink. I did jump out of planes before having children and if I were interested in investing money in this I would force my children to do with me (regardless of what they want).
4. When I vacation hiking up a mountain is more fun when you can force a complaining child to do it.
5. You become really good at recognizing self-serving interests and immature behaviors in other adults, because you have had expert level practice from parenting children. Its like looking through a one-way mirror, because some people have no idea of their own behavior and how others around them interpret it. Sometimes those self-serving people have children of their own and its clear in the consequences of their parenting.
6. Children are expensive. I am absolutely not exaggerating when I say I have always wondered how childless adults don't have enough money to live in either a mansion, own a Ferrari, or at the very least be an investment millionaire off an average person's salary. After 4 military deployments I could easily live in a cardboard box (if not for spouse, children, and pets) and become a cash millionaire off my salary plus investments in about 7 years.
7. Children make you less portable. I have often thought of moving out to a highly secluded area even if it means getting by on next to nothing. Unfortunately, spouse and kids like money and suburbia. Most adults without children take this for granted and waste it.
8. Children are an unintended predictor of success. If you can convince a child to do it you should have absolutely no problem selling it to an adult for money. You sell something to a child by forcing it on them intentionally driving large amounts of bitching and crying only then to take it away from them. This is how I got them to be self-motivated about competition athletics.
I was slightly surprised by the author tackling such a time-tested knot as first-time parent decision-making and "OMG how do we make good decisions about _anything_" decision theory.
But then I realized that in an existential periodical like The New Yorker, there just can't be a final answer. More like some observations about various points of view. Which is cool. But the strange definition of an "ambitious parent" toward the end of the article does read a bit more like a misguided knock on ambitious people in general, ever the clowns of the infinite-pie existentialist world view. :-)
As a coach myself, I'm frequently in situations where clients ask me to weigh in on decisions. While I'm happy to do so, even the best news from me--maybe something like, "you are absolutely on the right track, and I know it, and I think you do too" is not nearly as great as a different sort of piece of news: The decision-making sphere _even after becoming a parent_ or making some other drastic decision is so wide open as to be essentially incomprehensible. Our senses so often tell us lies about our actual options. IMO this is why we have cultural archetypes like Doctor Who. People who come in and show us that our reductionist views and the resulting expressions of judgment are often just so childish and self-protecting. Dive in! It'll be OK and we'll just keep working on it. It's not like you make a decision and _then_ stop making other decisions.
And that's another really important thing that's often overlooked in favor of the decision-theory or intuitive spreadsheeting-weighting stuff: You can build a personal model for navigating change. Using such a model, you will simply be more bad-decision-proof on the negative side, and on the upside you'll be more prepared to capitalize on good decisions.
In fact you can in many cases derive from that change-navigation model a sort of time machine. Ziiip! The worst parts of the decision just got undone. Parenting might seem unique in this way because you probably can't undo that child--there's this new dependency that didn't exist before that now demands your attention. But really, here comes Doctor Who! Look, it's a fascinating new world, not a problem. And in balancing the needs of the subject (I don't know what I'm doing!) and the needs of the object (wahhh!) there is an incredible new world teaching us lessons that apply everywhere else.
I'm surprised to see no mention of decision paralysis. Hanging over every decision is a meta decision of how much effort to spend in making it (and so on, recursively). Given all the unpredictability the author points out, many decisions don't get much more benefit from much more thought.
He offers a response to L.A. Paul and a way to choose in light of changing selves. I am not sure how convinced I am myself, but it is very good philosophical work.
Ruth Chang has by far the best approach to decision-making I've ever heard. Her TED talk is linked below. The key take away is determining first: "What do I stand for". And, afterward putting all your focus and energy behind your decision. In the end, if you lose, you lose. On that score I find Jordan Peterson tremendously helpful, and also linked below.
About parenthood I might add this... our brains are wired to minimize the negative where our children are concerned. All manner of rationalizations, identification, and denial works in favor of maintaining the parental bond. Its more important to decide what you stand for, than it is walk in the path of those of us so afflicted by the bias of being parents. It is great. It is also brutally hard and in the end, one way or another, you have to let go.
> My personal opinion on the matter is that children are 49% horrible and 51% of pure bliss and it's that 1% which makes the whole difference.
In my head I think of it similarly: the mean of the experience of living before and after having a child is roughly the same, but the variance is much higher after. Which side of the mean I'm on varies, and I honestly don't know where it will end up over time. That's why it's so hard to know whether I regret it or not. Given all the positive stuff (ya know, the unconditional love and all that), I can never say that I regret it, but in so many ways life is also just objectively so much worse now.
Well put. That also strikes me more broadly as the dynamic between youth and age, or inexperience and experience. The BEFORE phase is always ignorant by nature, but the AFTER phase is remarkably good at forgetting what it was really like.
I beleive the prevailing studies are that parenthood is associated with less joy but more meaning in life compared with voluntary childlessness. (Involuntary childlessness is not associated with increased joy or meaning, and is more associated with increased loneliness)
I liked the first part but then simplified the reasoning of the article and the philosophers it cites is: "there is no reason not to have children no matter how your life is now or how yiu want it to be" which makes sense if the author is trying deep inside to cope with his own decision.
I hate arguments like this, PARTICULARLY when the topic is becoming a parent. Sure, you might become a new person and love being a parent far more than missing the aspects of life you sacrificed to be there. OR you might hate it - I have at least one friend that told me "I love my daughter, but I hate being a parent" in a terribly gut-wrenching way. To say you don't know - that you CAN'T know - what it's like to be a parent without being one doesn't mean you should just shrug and give it a try. Ditto the same rationale for other arguments - there are many things you can't know if you'll like until you try it, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to decide if you will in advance.
Of course you'll never know if you'll love being a parent, you won't know how it can change you, and EVERY parent has moments of frustrations that are not the same as regretting having a child/children. But if you become one, there's at least two lives that can really really suffer if you hate it, so it's worth dedicating some effort to thinking about in advance.
Finding parenthood worthwhile is a very very common state for humanity (for good reason!) and most of us have benefited from that. But we shouldn't assume that it will just work out that way, for ourselves or for others.