So I found this post quite interesting:
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/03/gnxp-readers-do-not-breed.php
(I'm quite sure that the demographics of this site closely parallel the demographics on Gene Expression).
Research seems to indicate that people are happiest when they're married, but that each child imposes a net decrease in happiness (parents in fact, enjoy a boost in happiness once their children leave the house). It's possible, of course, that adult children may be pleasurable to interact with, but it seems that in many cases, the parents want to interact with the children more than the children want to interact with the parent (although daughters generally seem more interactive with their parents).
So how do you think being child-free relates to rationality/happiness? Of course, Bryan Caplan (who is pro-natalist) cites research (from Judith Rich Harris) saying that parents really have less influence over their children than they think they have (so it's a good idea for parents to spend less effort in trying to "mold" their children, since their efforts will inevitably result in much frustration). And in fact, if parents did this, it's possible that they may beat the average.
(This doesn't convince me in my specific case, however, and I'm still committed to not having children).
It strikes me as on-topic for a blog about rationality to describe my thinking processes concerning working out why I wanted children.
The urge is eminently biologically plausible - I come from a long line of successful replicators, after all. And just because this manifests itself as "I want sex" doesn't mean I don't also want the abstract result of sex. I also like the idea of bringing up a child.
But I had to justify the urge to myself, as the social circle I found myself in (punk-descended indie rock in Perth in the 1980s) tended to be very negative about having children. A few people had them, but many were powerfully negative about children, considering humans to be a curse upon the world, an ecological disaster, and the world to be too horrible to bring children into.
(This was the last decade of the Cold War, the feeling of which I find almost impossible to actually explain to almost anyone under thirty. We were young, but we seriously expected we could die with minutes of notice and were powerless to stop such a thing happening. It makes for good punk rock, but doesn't seem to me to have been a healthy environment.)
So I had to come up with rational justifications of my feelings. Of course, this sort of justification backwards from the predetermined outcome is highly improper. But it did come up with useful ideas for me to then attempt to play forward and examine closely: "my children will be an improvement in the world" (which I think is true) and "the world is not in fact awful, it's the best it's ever been" (which I also think was true and has continued to be true). This and "and anyway, I actually want to" was sufficient for me.
Note here that my thinking was not particularly clear (e.g. I privileged the hypothesis terribly), only sufficiently clear to satisfy me as to my own rightness in thinking differently to others around me. I am certainly not advocating the above as a model of how to think well, but as a case study in inchoate attempts at rational thinking about something personally important.
(And, by the way, many of those who expressed such opinions concerning children have since reproduced themselves.)
This is worth noting. Contrary to the hindsight-ridden narrative of the Cold War that is common nowadays, according to which it had already wound down by the 1980s, there was in fact serious anxiety about a USA-USSR nuclear conflict almost right up to the dissolution of the latter country.
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