Why Don’t People Regret Having Children?

The Idea of Motivational Pluralism

Why don’t anyone regret having children? 

Now that is a tough question. 

People do not seem to say, Wow, what a disaster that was. What a bad move. The negatives of having children are obvious—money, anxiety, sleepless nights, sleep deprivation, all the time they take up. There is a lot of evidence saying that kids do not make you overall happier, so why?

The reason goes back to the idea of Motivational Pluralism; the fact that humans want many things. We want pleasure. We want to be good. We want meaning. We want a purpose. If you ask parents whether their lives are meaningful, they tend to say Yes more often than non-parents.

In a broad sense, it is inextricably linked to the more severe suffering and difficulties.

Danny Kahneman talks about two different kinds of happiness. Experienced Happiness (doing things when someone else taps you on the shoulder and asks, How happy are you? How’s it going?) and Remembered Happiness (when someone asks, Remember when you did that thing? How much did you like it?). Experienced Happiness with children is complicated and often lower than you would expect, while Remembered Happiness could be higher.

An explanation of it proposed by Jennifer Senior, a science writer, is that our memories are distorted in interesting ways. We often remember the peaks–we remember the good times. Remembering all of the good times you had with your children and returning to them over and over; remembered happiness would be high, while experienced happiness (day-to-day stuff: million diaper changes, getting up in the middle of the night, etc.) we tend to forget.

Now, when somebody asks, Do you recommend having kids? The answer would be to explore what it is to have kids. 

What you could find is how well it meshes with how you are or how you want to be. Professor Laurie Paul, a philosopher, called having children as Transformative Experience; it is the kind of experience that changes you. In such a way that your current situation cannot project what it would be like to be a parent, because when you are a parent, you will be a different kind of person than you are now. Different priorities. Different interests. Different drives. Different experiences.

One argument in favour of having kids is not that it scratches the itch of happiness, but that it is a part and parcel of a meaningful life.

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Source: Paul Bloom