Children

Sticking with the theme of relationships, and the expectations of society, I have always wondered what drives people to have children.  There are simple answers you can give, like the instinct to procreate and increase the size of our species, but those answers are ones that can be logically reasoned away as behaviours that are too primal for a species that supposedly evolved beyond that state of being.  I say supposedly because you can make the argument that there are plenty of people that haven't evolved at all.

There are other answers that are more complex like the desire to raise someone with love and affection and do everything you can to protect them and help them thrive.  You can have that with a pet though, those aren't things unique to humans, and if the internet proves anything it's that people love looking at pictures, GIFs, and videos of animals more than they do of people, baby animals in particular.  Even without the internet I have known people who think their parents love their pets more than they love their own children.

There are unorthodox answers to the question though, and they suggest motivations that are arguably immoral.  The foremost being boredom, or in other words, people have children because their lives are boring and they want something to do - for the next 18 years, or 25 now by some accounts.  The immorality in this situation is obvious, there should be a genuine desire to have a child and raise it, not simply the decision to do it because you can't think what else to do.  I know of a few marriages which I have long contemplated the fact they had kids was actually an attempt at keeping their relationship together.  This in itself opens up a whole slew of criticism for being motivated by entirely the wrong reasons not to mention the fact that this doesn't usually work, if there are problems in the relationship, a child won't resolve them, if anything it is much more likely to make them worse which will create a toxic environment for the child.

There is a growing number of people who are deciding not to have children at all.  This is a movement that has grown across the world.  There is a video that is very informative by Dr Hans Rosling, a Swedish statistician who sadly died in 2017.  The video deals with the world's population and the reality that it is no longer growing at the pace we perceive it to be growing at.  Over population isn't a concern anymore, the birth rate is lower than the death rate, the only reason the population continues to rise is because of longevity, but there is a boom in population that happened long ago which has not reached its finality yet, and when it does, there will be a "death boom" just as there was a baby boom, and the population of the world will rapidly decline as a result.  This is set in stone now, and even if birth rates were to ramp up globally, that decline will still happen.  In many countries this decline has already begun, for example Japan has an ageing population and a birth rate much lower than its death rate, the population is declining by around 300,000 people per year.  This has led to Schools etc closing as there aren't enough children to sustain them.

People are choosing not to have children, choosing to put their careers, and their lives first.  This does raise a question, would you actually want to have children, if nobody expected you to have them, would still make the choice?  If you already have them would you have more?  I find it fascinating that those who already have them are the most likely to actually say no to having more.