Triple Post Tuesday: The Motivation To Reproduce

Over the past month or so, I've been thinking about why people have kids and the various factors that influence my mindset. It seems to me that many people, however consciously, see having children in the Disney-sense, where having a perfect spouse and perfect kids means you have a perfect life and live in a castle where forest animals do all of your chores. Another way of looking at children is that they are an unfortunate side effect of sex, although I think this viewpoint is largely confined to teenagers and college students who are more focused on getting laid than the repercussions that it might carry. Finally, there is the viewpoint that you have to carry on the bloodline, although I think this view has largely died out. In this day and age, I don't know that there are many bloodlines that are held as highly as some used to be.

The General Other's view aside, I have been questioning whether to have children, partially because I don't know if I would be a suitable father and because many of my female peers say that childbirth is unappealing for obvious reasons. This logic should give me peace of mind, but for some reason when I talked it over with my parents (that is, if my not having kids would disappoint them), I was left with an overlying feeling of uneasiness. This feeling came back this morning, when I learned that my brother might not have children either. I thought about it for some time, and came to the conclusion that people's eagerness to have kids may not be due to any Disney-morality or because of an accident. Rather, they feel like I do, and fear being alone in old age. Thinking ahead, I feel a strange insecurity about not having any relatives when I get really old. While I'm sure there will be other people, and by then we will no doubt have made great advances in communication, it still seems odd that I might not have any immediate family at some point in the future. And this is what I think motivates some people to have kids, however much they realize it.

Mind you, it isn't entirely based on that somewhat-depressing note. I also feel that having kids/a family is one of the things people view as necessary to have "truly lived." Movies such as The Forty Year Old Virgin are a good example of this. If our society didn't expect (nay, demand) that all of its members be sexually active by age 25, such movies wouldn't exist as they would have no impact.

So I feel that, in the end, it is a mixture of deep subconscious fears, our desire to be remembered, and societal expectations.