Why do people have children? I’ve been wondering about this for a while. In my experience, the question is subject to something I call the ‘Hanson effect’, because Robin Hanson writes so often about it: "everyone thinks they know the answer, but all they know different answers." (source)
In the US, the cost of raising a child through age 17 is around $230,000 (no, that does not include college). And the financial cost is not even the most significant. For the mothers, there’s the physical burden of pregnancy. Children claim enormous amounts of time, energy and attention. Potentially, the years of young adulthood (roughly 25-35) are among the most productive and enjoyable in a person’s life. Yet many people in that age group will go on to have children, constraining their choices and placing considerable pressure on their material and mental resources. While you can always make more money, you will never get that time back. That despite all of this, having children is still the norm rather than the exception, is something that I find genuinely surprising.
The site wehavekids.com lists ten reasons why people have children. One in particular struck me: “It’s human nature. The simple fact of biology is that we are hardwired to procreate and pass on our genes to the next generation. This biological imperative and drive are strong in many people, who feel the need to have and raise children.” When you ask why people want to have children, this is one of the most common answers you will get. It’s easy, intuitive, and in accord with science. It's also completely wrong.
The folk theory of “people want children so they can spread their genes” seems to assume that reproduction, which is the objective of evolution, is working in our minds as a semi-conscious motive, through the so-called “reproductive instinct”, a mysterious inner force that leads us to desire procreation.
But it doesn’t work that way. There is no “instinct”; there are only adaptations. When Nature designed us to procreate, we didn’t yet have a neocortex with advanced representational capabilities. Our genes could not anticipate that we would think about having children, just as they could not imagine that we would invent contraception or engage in family planning. Instead of encoding their objective function in our brains, they did something much simpler: since reproduction happens through sex, they made sex pleasurable. And since newborn children need care, they made us want to care for them. That’s pretty much all there is to it.
If there was such a thing as a “reproductive instinct” - if evolution’s goals were explicitly encoded in our minds - it would look quite different than what people imagine. The only thing we would care about would be to spread our genes. As a result, nobody would use contraception. Folks would pay to be egg donors and sperm donors. They would sacrifice all their resources to keep making babies. Even better, they would discard babies altogether and invest in making millions of copies of their DNA and storing them in freezers, like in that SlateStarCodex story.
If that doesn’t appeal to your intuition, then what do you think gene spreading means? (Hint: it’s not about making cute little things that call you “daddy” or “mommy”. It’s about making copies of your genes: that’s the only thing evolution cares about. Babies are just Nature’s best solution for protecting and spreading genes. That said, freezers would definitely work better.)
The bottom line is that when people are willing and able to use contraception, the biological drives explain little to nothing about their decision to have children.
However, there is a basic intuition at work in this explanation, which I think is true. Folks do want to perpetuate themselves in their progeny: it’s one of their main motivations for having children. But what is it that they see as themselves?
Answer: it’s not their genes. It’s their values, attitudes, and ideas; their language, religion, and customs; their mannerisms and sense of humor, their beliefs and aspirations; their family name and family legends and heirlooms. In a word, their memes.
This may be the single best explanation for why people have children. When we think of our identity, we think of our memes and memeplexes. Spreading our memes is a way to gain status and expand our influence. Seeing our memes replicate in others appeals to our self-love, since we see more of ourselves in the world. Finally, passing on memes can give us a sense that we are projecting our person beyond death and gaining some sort of immortality, which helps us cope with our fear of death.
It turns out that having children is not about genetics. It’s about memetics. And meme-spreading, I believe, is an important and much overlooked motivator of human behavior.
This theory has some interesting implications. For example, we might expect that individuals who have a strong platform for spreading their memes over the long term (e.g. actors, artists, scientists, philosophers) would be less motivated towards parenthood. But there are two caveats: first, some memes are so personal that they can only be spread within a family. Second, since these people will tend to be successful, they may not have to face a trade-off between career and parenthood. Women are interesting in this sense, because personal success does not always spare them this choice.
Anyway, the conflict between gene-spreading and meme-spreading is not a rule. It should only apply to individuals who could achieve a lot of influence, but only at the cost of forsaking parenthood. Apart from that, meme-spreading may ironically become the unexpected savior of gene-spreading. In an age where safe sex is widely practiced, contraception is advancing, and having children is increasingly difficult and expensive, people may still be willing to go through the trouble — for the love of their memes.
Added 22/11/20. Many would-be parents show a strong preference for having natural children vs. adopting, to the point of going through difficult or expensive procedures such as IVF. This may be taken as a disproof of my theory. However, I would argue that parents are interested in the child's phenotype, not their genotype. A child who shares my genes is more likely to be phenotypically similar to me and to share my looks and behaviors. Parents are interested in their children's genetic composition indirectly, i.e. only insofar as it makes the children more similar to them. A mental experiment will clarify this. Imagine you have a gene G1 which results in the observable attribute A1. Which of these would you choose: a child with the same gene G1 that results in a different attribute A2, or a child with a different gene G2 which results in the same attribute A1?
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