What Is the Point of Having Kids?

It's about the pursuit of expansiveness.

I burst into tears while driving my teenage son to camp earlier this summer. I remembered that he would celebrate his birthday without us, and that he’d be 15 by the time I saw him in a week. Fifteen years old. Where has the time gone?

It’s such a cliché, but it truly feels like yesterday that he was an adorable, insatiably curious little toddler who managed both to delight and enrage me in short succession. And in that moment, when I looked at the gigantic, confident, capable young man that he’s becoming, I promptly started bawling (though, admittedly, he still delights and enrages me a great deal).

It didn’t go over well.

“Mom? Are you OK? Mom! You’re being weird. Mom, this is so cringe. Please stop. It’s not a big deal! Ugh, why do parents do this?”

“I hope you’ll understand someday,” I wailed, and then forced myself to stop because I didn’t want to embarrass him even further by showing up at camp with a puffy red face.

Being my oldest, he is the child who transformed me into a mother, which makes our bond feel unique. I was a young, unmarried university student when he arrived in the world, and I was totally unprepared for the job that awaited me. He was a witness—a guinea pig, really—to my embarrassing ineptitude at times. And yet, we made it. We flourished. Now he sits beside me in the car, long and lanky, several inches taller than me, with a deep voice, an abundance of strong opinions, and a never-ending torrent of sass.

(And yes, I am married to his dad, and we have two other kids. It all worked out.)

Why Have Kids?

An old friend emailed me recently to ask what the point of having children is. She has never wanted children, but now her partner does, and so she faces a difficult choice. She doesn’t want to “lose freedom” by becoming a mother, nor does she want to lose her partner. She wondered if work can fill one’s sense of purpose, or if it’s only children that give life real purpose.

I have been mulling this over, wondering what to say in response. Having kids is one of those Big Life Things that you can’t undo once you have started down the path, so it’s impossible to have an objective perspective on it—sort of like entering a romantic relationship or having sex for the first time. It’s an irreversible act that changes you permanently. You are instantly biased by your own experience. Because I cannot un-become the mother I’ve become, my thoughts will naturally be pro-child.

I do believe that my kids have made me a better person. When your own needs and desires become secondary to those of a tiny being whose survival requires your care, you cannot help but gain a different perspective on life. My kids made me kinder, softer, more patient, and capable of a ferocious loyalty that I had never felt before. “Mine” became “ours,” or better yet, “yours.” They made me care suddenly about certain governmental policies and healthcare and environmental protections and quality of education and urban design—things that had once only been vague concepts, but now had personal implications.

No doubt other factors can improve a person, too, but I do think self-improvement is virtually inescapable when you’re an adult in charge of raising a small human. We all may improve by different amounts, at different rates, based on our starting points, but I suspect there are very few adults who stagnate or worsen as human beings by having children, whereas it seems easier to do that when you don’t have kids.

What Is Freedom?

I would push back gently against my friend’s notion of losing her freedom. I know where she’s coming from—it’s harder to hop on a plane to exotic destinations when you have a bunch of kids at home needing to be fed and driven to soccer practice—and spontaneous, frequent travel is a very lovely kind of freedom, indeed. But it is not the only kind of freedom.

There is freedom to be had in having constant companionship and living in a warm home surrounded by the people you love most, and who love you back. I live with my favourite people on earth, and I get to see them every single day. It's great.

I see freedom in eradicating future loneliness. I’ll always have kids coming home at Christmas, and grandchildren to snuggle in coming decades, and younger people to talk to as I grow old. My kids are human investments that may complement my financial investments and will enrich my quality of life as I age. That’s something no money can buy.

Is Parenting Heaven or Hell?

I recognize a common undertone in my friend’s email, the presupposition that having kids is like signing up for 20 years of enslavement. I suspect this comes from the Internet, where social media amplifies an absurd dichotomy of what parenting is. You’ve got either the “everything is perfect and look how cute we all are” momfluencers who make everything look effortless and perfectly matching, versus the “parenting is hell and I’m losing my mind every minute of the day” contingent that is guaranteed to scare people off.

As Timothy P. Carney wrote in Family Unfriendly, “If the algorithm feeds you hours per day of frazzled, exhausted, overstretched, and anxious moms, you are more prone to feeling all of these emotions.”

I have found parenting to be neither of those two extremes, though there are certainly fleeting moments of both. It is intense, for sure. I remember feeling startled the first time I heard the phrase “gentle parenting.” It was used by a dear friend who is one of the most well-intentioned and loving parents I know, but it was so at odds with my own experience of raising three energetic sons that I had trouble comprehending it. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for treating children with empathy and respect, but gentle is not a word I have ever associated with parenting since my first baby was born.

Parenting guts you on a level that nothing else can. Having a kid externalizes your heart, makes you feel profoundly vulnerable, and introduces you to a strange new spectrum of intensified emotions. No one but my kids can make me flip from blissful adoration to absolute outrage in a split second. Raising children is the most emotionally aggressive experience of my life. It is the opposite of gentle. It is vibrant and raw and gritty and exquisite. It’s both exhilarating and exhausting, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

And that’s precisely what I always wanted out of life—to pursue expansiveness, even when it scares me. Having babies pretty much guarantees an expansion of one’s world, without requiring overseas adventures or professional advancement. Who cares if it’s hard? The most rewarding things in life are born of challenge and struggle. “No pain, no gain,” as the saying goes. I don’t want a life that is overly easy, anyway. Would that not feel like an underlived life, one that hasn’t quite had all the juice squeezed out of it?

I don’t presume to influence my friend’s decision; only she knows what is best for her, and kids might not be it. I fully respect whatever she chooses to do, and know she will have a beautiful life, no matter what. But by asking for my opinion, she sparked a reflection on what has been the most formative experience of my life. And thinking about it made me hope on her behalf that, someday, she too will look at a spectacular gigantic teenager and think, with absolute wonder and disbelief, “I made you. And thank god I did.”

You Might Also Like:

What Do We Parent For?
Why I Don’t Homeschool
Sometimes You Just Need to Be the Parent

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In the News:

• Radio interview for CBC Prince Edward Island: Host Laura Chapin and I went deep into what it’s like for my teenage son not to have a smartphone (see my recent Globe and Mail opinion piece on that), as well as why I’m unimpressed by Ontario’s insipid new school phone policy. (I don’t love the fact that the audio quality makes it sound like I have a lisp!)

• Thursday, September 12, 6 PM: I’m giving a talk at the L.E. Shore library in Thornbury, Ontario. Please join if you’re in the area.

• I’ve also been booking lots of talks to school groups this fall. Get in touch if you’d like me to come talk about digital minimalism to your group! I might even travel…

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