Why Do People Have Children?

Hi all,

here is, exclusively for TheRedPill, a chapter from my new book, The Empress Is Naked: From female privilege to gender equality and social liberation. I have priced it ridiculously low because my motive in writing it is activist, not economic. You can read more excerpts and find a link to the book in my blog, TheEmpressIsNaked.wordpress.com.

Enjoy,

Adam Leonas

Procreation is obviously necessary for the perpetuation of the system. Therefore it is easy to answer the question: why does every social system need children? The interesting part of the answer, however, is to see how the system's need is transformed into a need of its members, of each individual. Or, if we look at things from another standpoint, how small, “individual” decisions to procreate are linked to the reproduction of the system as a whole.

The first thing to observe is that humans are the only beings who can consciously decide whether to have children or not. This was not always the case. Before mankind understood the mechanism of reproduction, things were simple; there was no option. Women became pregnant every 4-5 years, from when they were approximately 18 to the age of 32; they had on average 3-4 children of which 2 would survive and reach their reproductive age. The hunter-gatherer social organization required a steady number of clan members which was maintained even, if needed, with infanticide. “[F]oraging societies limited the number of infants so they wouldn’t become a burden to the group or allow overly rapid population growth to strain food supplies.”286

With the Agricultural Revolution and the possibility to produce surplus and accumulate food, every additional member of society not only didn't burden the whole, but brought more wealth. It was the era when the sacred books forbid men from spending their semen in vain: it had to be used to produce more servants for the system. Within the extended family and the household economy children were economically beneficial as future producers, carers for the elders – in short, they represented a primitive form of social security. The material benefits of procreation for society met those of the parents.

This utilitarian use of children survives to this day. In China, for instance, where the Welfare State is inefficient or lacking, society has a strong preference for boys who will take care of their elderly parents. It is mandated by law that a son must see his parents once a week; daughters are not under a similar obligation.

In the Western world, the elderly can survive based with the Welfare System, with their pensions and health insurance. In such a system, children are not financially advantageous; on the contrary they are a huge economic burden. “[T]he cost of raising a child in Greece, from conception until the age of 18, with conservative and reduced expenses, amounts to more than 200,000 euros”287. This is in a country where the basic wage is less than 9000 euros per annum. “According to an Australian study the upbringing of an average child costs one million Australian dollars (about 605,000 euros).”288

Children are therefore costly. Are they worthwhile because they may “bring happiness”? According to several studies, not at all.

“Children do not bring happiness. In fact more often they seem to bring unhappiness. That is the conclusion of one academic study after the next – and there are so many that it makes one wonder if researchers kept trying, hoping for a different result... Using data sets from Europe and America, numerous scholars have found some evidence that, on aggregate, parents often report statistically significantly lower levels of happiness, life satisfaction, marital satisfaction and mental well-being compared with non-parents.... There is also evidence that the strains associated with parenthood are not only limited to the period during which children are physically and economically dependent. For example, [researchers found that] older parents whose children have left home report the same or slightly less happiness than non-parents of similar age and status. Thus, what these results are suggesting is something very controversial – that having children does not bring joy to our lives.”289

It we take a more detailed look at these studies we will realize that the effect of procreation on the happiness of parents is not the same for both sexes. The study “The effects of offspring on the psychological well-being of older adults”290 found that “the average effects of offspring were distinctly more negative for men than for women”. Indeed, “among well-educated white men, there is a rather strong evidence that childless persons have been happier than others”. The same is true for all black men, independently of education and income level. Another study found that “childless elderly women were both lonelier and more depressed than mothers while no differences between childless elderly men and fathers were found.”291

If we summarize the findings, we see that procreation today is a burden for men, and that it has a relatively neutral or marginally positive effect for women. So why do so many people have children?

The answer lies in what Eric Berne identifies as children's “usual function of structuring time for their parents”292. They solve the “eternal problem of the human being [which] is how to structure his waking hours”293. It is what common people refer to as “give a meaning to your life”. These are people, the majority, who throughout their lives cannot find another meaning than converting their unstructured time into structured, so they can handle it and bear it. They remind one of the tactic of “nerds”, who like role-playing or other table games which create a structured environment in which they can interact safely. In this sense, procreation is what “life-nerds” do to keep themselves busy.

This description is schematic and leaves many factors unaccounted for. Between existential angst and structured parental time, the second is obviously preferable. In this regard the above analysis is not intended to blame people for choosing to have children. (The life-nerds). It only aims to highlight the tragedy of contemporary social life, where children are used by their parents as an outlet to unfreedom and lack of meaning.

For women, however, there are also biological reasons to have children, contrary to assurances from older Feminists that it is all about social expectations. “I was desperate for a baby and I have the medical bills to prove it. I still have pregnancy dreams, waiting for something that will never happen”, wrote Germaine Greer herself, the same Feminist who emphasized the precedence of “independence” and career over procreation. Women's strong bond with their babies gives them intense pleasure, due to their neuroanatomy and their hormonal functions. Oxytocin, also called the “bonding hormone”, which regulates the maternal behavior, is strongly associated with the centers of pleasure and reward in women's brains.

“[M]any women experience the first “mommy brain” symptoms long before they actually conceive a child... 'Baby lust' – the deep-felt hunger to have a child – can hit a woman soon after she’s cradled someone else’s warm, soft newborn... The sweet smell of an infant’s head carries pheromones that stimulate the female brain to produce the potent love potion oxytocin – creating a chemical reaction that induces baby lust.”294

“Baby lust”, thus, is not a social construct but a biological reality, intensified by our society. It is what pushes women to have a child at all costs, like a drug addict who will do anything to get her daily fix. It is one of the strongest roots of the alliance between women and the system.

This said, raising a child is not necessarily a bad thing. It is like having a Ferrari. It is actually nice, but if you don't have the money to support it and the time to enjoy it, it will become a burden and make you miserable. You also need to know how to drive, and to be good at it, otherwise it makes no sense. Herb Goldberg writes that

“There is, I believe, in this day and age where children do not necessarily enhance the survival potential of the family, only one 'right' reason for a man to father children, and that is that the process of being a father excites him and is seen as enriching, fulfilling and joyful, and the realities of his life allow him to participate fully.”295

Family more often than not does not help a man mature. It stunts him. Men who marry and have children expecting it to make them more mature are like the student who not knowing the answer to a question writes whatever comes to his mind, hoping that by chance he will score some points. “Having children should be saved for last, for the time when the man has played out his fantasies, has had relationships with many women, explored and given himself the gift of finding out who he is.”296 Maturity, money, free time: if all these three conditions are not met, a father turns into a tragic figure. From this perspective, the fact that working-class men have children at all is one of the greatest tragedies of our times. In the Middle Ages, there were already revolutionary movements of the poor, expressed in the medieval form of heresy, that rejected reproduction and refused to have children, “not to bring new slaves into this 'land of tribulations'”297 – a precious vein of thought that is now unfortunately lost.

The children of the working class have parents who have no time for them. Due to their egocentricism, which is a normal psychological stage in their development, these children come to believe that they don't deserve their parents' love and time. That is an amazing intuition. It is exactly what their parents think, considering that it is their personal right to bring children in the world, even if they don't have the preconditions to take care of them, even if they can't offer them the quality parental time children need in order to have a dependable psychological basis for a life worth living.

The man bears the greater part of the financial responsibility of the family, even though he has much less time to spend with his children than his wife, who works less and enjoys the company of her children more. This “transfer of happiness” from the man to the woman makes the man more unhappy. It is notable that it does not make the woman much happier than if she didn't have children. Despite the intense maternal pleasure, and despite the protection her man offers her, the system's assurance that “children bring happiness” is a deceitful lie, even for women. It is just not such an egrerious lie as it is for men.