The trouble with having children is not only that you most often do so for selfish reasons; you must also want your children to be good, not happy.

We take it for granted that we confer value to procreation. However, whether from a naturalistic or pragmatic point of view, neither of these positions is sufficient to justify this. Perhaps we have children because it is instinctive for human beings as animals. It is, after all, a foundational instinct that we procreate so that the perpetuation of our species can happen. The biggest threat any group of beings can face is the threat of extinction, an erasure of their very existence. As beings who seek to achieve particularity and disvalue uniformity in their lives, it is a horror to achieve the former yet have it all be done away with. 

Perhaps this is why, at an individual level, we are immensely scared of diseases that make us forget. When you are at the edge of your existence, old and frail, you are left only with the memories of the person you have become. You have exhausted much of your physiology, and your mind starts to forget, and your body starts to fail, but the memory of you remains, whether in yourself or in the markings that you leave unto the world. We associate youth, energy, and health as features of dignity. To grow old is to grow undignified. The dignity of your physiology departs, but dignity tied to your memories does not, unless you forget or are forgotten. If to be remembered is to have dignity, then we have children to have dignity.

Yet, is this not deeply selfish? Even more damning, we are severely more selfish than those before us when we choose to procreate. We always do so for selfish reasons; that is a given. However, today, the stakes we face are significantly lower than those of our ancestors. At an instinctive level, we have children to prevent the extinction of the human animal. At a societal level, we have children so they can take care of us when we are old. At an emotional level, we have children because it makes us feel fulfilled or happy. 

However, since the last few decades, the state machinery has become efficient enough to supersede the family. We do not need ‘des proches’ to care for us when we fall sick. We can just go to hospitals and be taken care of by nurses and doctors. It isn’t necessarily our children who care for us when we are old, either; there are old folks homes with enough variety to suit our preferences. Where family is no longer required for physical fulfillment, we only depend on our children to make us feel emotionally fulfilled. 

But do you not feel like this is a reason too minuscule, too selfish to ask them to go through the suffering that is life? The stakes used to be that if there was nobody readily available to take care of you, you would be left to suffer painful sickness and painful death. Today, one has children merely because they bring us happiness, we find them cute, or because we think they are proof that we once existed in this world. In any case, we will tend to treat children as a means to our own end, but barely, if ever, theirs.

We live in horror of having flesh. From a bloody, messy birth, you move from one painful decision to another. It is not that you do not have brief moments of happiness at all—you do. Yet these moments are uncertain and fleeting. For every high, there are equally low lows. Pure concepts being defined by their antonyms can only mean one thing: all the happiness you feel means you risk feeling sadness of a similar intensity. 

And it is not as if you do not know this. For every time you love someone and then not anymore, is there not a hole in your heart shaped like them? For every delightful encounter, is there not an equally harrowing departure? Our lives are defined by the certainty of sadness and uncertain happiness. Our children’s lives work similarly. If we are not happy, how can we expect our children to be? And if we know happiness is so difficult to arrive at, why put our children through the journey?

Even then, the goal of our personhood is not merely to be happy, but also to be good, and what is good is never necessarily what makes us happy. To achieve happiness is instinctive. To be good is reasoned. We will not arrive at goodness by appealing to our instinct. We do so by reasoning our way to understand the ends that are valuable and the ends that are not. Is it not our ability to reason that marks the difference between us and our other fellow creations? Many even go as far as to say this faculty of reason is what determines our moral worth over lesser beings.

But people who often appeal to reason do not find themselves in a state of happiness. They do so because it is what leads them to be good, and good things are not necessarily things that make us happy. Eating provides us happiness, but it is only good for our body in moderation and sufficiency. Exerting our bodies to help others might be good and make us happy, but we might find ourselves doing so because it is instrumental to our own happiness, and not necessarily because it is good. 

Often, to live a good life, we have to refuse things that make us happy. We must repudiate wealth, excess, and waste. We must be mindful, live moderately, and exert ourselves for others as needed. Such is a good life. It is difficult, treading between two hard places, and if we see goodness as a reasonable goal for existence, we must want similarly for our fellow humans and later our children. We want our children to be good because that is how we understand a reasonable life to be. It is not a priority that our children lead a happy life, because happiness is not what makes them good. And we can only be good if we call others to do good as well. It is difficult, then, to stomach wanting children for our own happiness, having them go through the harrowing effort that is life, and then refusing them the choice to be happy. 

If and when you do end up having children, you must provide them with the necessary faculties to be good and happy in a way in which the latter does not impede the former. However, if your children then decide that they do not want to be good or somehow believe in another conception of good that is incompatible with yours, you must accept this. You cannot ask them to return the wealth you have invested in them, or chase them out of our lives, or ask them to stay if they refuse to. Because if you do, you are treating your children merely as a means to your own ends, but never theirs. If you do, you refuse your children dignity.