Advice on Why to Have Kids

If you don’t have kids yet, the first question is: Why Bother?

There are a lot of theoretical and philosophical kinds of reasons: perpetuation of the species; the ability to create a life; everyone needs someone to love, right?

Who needs those silly reasons!

The main reason to have kids is because life just gets plain fucking boring. As you enter your late twenties and early thirties, the exciting parts of your life are in decline. You get married, or at least engaged, so the hours spent obsessing over relationships are now freed up. There’s no reason to sit around thinking about what you’re going to be in life because, well, you’ve had your pick of jobs and your career is underway. No use analyzing your mate or your jobs until the end of time to determine whether they were the right ones. It’ll only piss you off (particularly if you chose the field of law).

Any late teens / early twenties obsession you had with movies or music or fashion or local sports teams starts to mature and fade. Rushing the field after a big college football win at age 30+ with all the kids really isn’t something you want to get yourself involved with.

Your friends get married and/or have kids, so they don’t have as much time for you. I had one friend explain that he thought he was too busy to have kids, but his opinion changed after he realized that his friends were no longer going to be available to him because they were minding their own young ones. With his newfound freetime, he realized that he did, in fact, have the time to have his own kids.

In some ways, it’s kind of the reverse of survival of the fittest. Those of us with boring lives fold first, until the actual interesting people are forced to go along and get married and have kids.

OK, really, I’m not saying that my life was actually boring when I was 27. But I could read the tea leaves and saw where this was all going. I could picture the 48-year old version of myself working hard through the week only to settle in on Saturday for yet another 7-hour afternoon session of college football. Just picturing that somewhat sad, lonely version of myself made me realize that without children, I might do something ridiculous and drastic like take up marathon running. Now really, these are some bored people, just running around for several hours for no apparent purpose. Without kids, I might start doing the crossword regularly. I might “make time” for Jeopardy several nights a week. Having kids saved me from that. At least for the 25 years they’d be puttering around the house.

But another reason to have kids is companionship. Companionship can be a very valuable thing. When I was a single white male sitting in my apartment alone drinking beer in the middle of the afternoon and my girlfriend came home, I was told I had a “problem” and looked “like an alcoholic” and such. Now that there are kids around, when I sit in my house drinking beer in the middle of the afternoon, I am “acting like a dad.” Now generally I’m only allowed to indulge like that in the afternoon if I first do something dad-ly like mow the lawn or something like that. If having access to an open bar for the late afternoon and early evening is the prize, I’m more than willing to put 45 minutes in on the yard. Even the 17-year old version of me could have seen what a good deal that is.