What motivates someone to have children?

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Does it compensate for the collective misery?
I more than suspect not.

Misery and love are the same thing.

If you believe that...
"I don't think you are doing it right."

I’m glad that my parents chose to have me. Life is usually worth living even if it really sucks sometimes.

The suffering, the longing, the eternal quest for more.

It's the basis of philosophy and aesthetics.

I think that's only true for narcissists.

I was very happy until the character assassination threads, the child support prenup, and the backtracking on family planning agreements...

Oh good grief. I'm not talking about the love of specific people. I'm talking about beauty and life itself.

Got plenty of that now.

---

"And The Powerful Play Goes On And You

May Contribute A Verse" By Whitman; Or A Child Who

May Change The World For the Betterment of Breathing True By me, Hehe...

Oh Dear Lord, Life Teaches DarK And LiGHT; NiGHT And DaY; Birth and Death;

Yet At Best,

Life Breathes

Best With All the Dead

Fall Colors That Create

Spring Green Colorings

From Frozen Winter Soils;

Yes, Summer Again With Bright

EYes of A Child Born in June True

Smiling With The Love of Forever Then

With A Child, A Stranger Now A Friend...

Yawn, my Mother Said As A Child Who Didn't Speak

Until Four Years Old, i Had Open Arms For Every Stranger;

True, Some Children are Timid And Afraid of Strangers Yet Not

me As i Not Only Had The Innate Gift of Oxytocin, i Had A Mother

Who Was Full Of Love, Whose Greatest Ambition in Life Was Gardening

Children of Love With Peace; And A Father From the Military And Law Enforcement,

Certainly Capable of

Protecting a Family,

if Not Much One For

Talking or Nurturing At All...

So Yeah, i Felt Comfortable in the
Environment i Was Raised in; There Was

No Strife to Feel of Anxiety; Only The Healing

Neurohormone Oxytocin That Naturally Takes Away Fear; Materially Reduced,

Yes, There Are Folks Who Shed LiGHT Everywhere They Go With Ample Dopamine;

There Are Folks Who Exude Confidence in All they Do, Without Fear, With Ample Serotonin;

And There is Grandma, Who Has Spent a Life Nurturing Many Children Through DarK and LiGHT

At The Family Get Together; Yes,

For Those Who Still Live and Love

Like They Live in A Village of LoVE iN Peace

As Generally Speaking She (Grandma) Is Usually
The Warmest Happiest Human Being FULL OF OXYTOCIN In Hugs

And Bright Warm Confident Smiles, Even if She is Crippled And Close to A Hundred Years Old...

Not Everyone is Cut Out to Nurture Children; Not Everyone is Raised To Nurture Anyone At All;

And As Science Shows, A Life Spent Working With Things, Including Abstract Constructs as We Become

More The Tools We Use Than The Warmth Humanity Breeds and Gardens; Yes, The Warmth May Go Away;

If it Ever Came At all, And That's Okay Too, We Need all Kinds of Humans to Make Our Huge Societies Work

With All the Things;

And Best With All
The Warmth too; Sure,

With LiGHT And Confidence

Too As Humans Become All the
Colors of the Rainbow And More in Feelings
And Senses to Give, Share, Care, And God YES
Heal With Others, For A Best Life Ever to Actually Feel and Sense as Real...

Yawn, i've Lived A Life in The Dark And The Light; The Night And The Day; The Living

And Damn Straight, Frigging Living Dead too; Oh Dear Lord It's Nice to Be Fully Alive; And Nah,

i Had Only Had one Child, a Son Ryan, Who Didn't Survive; And Yes, He Only Lived in Pain for 51 Days;

At Shands Hospital, His Home Away From Home, Till Death in Gainesville, Florida, 500 Hundred Miles Away;

The Physicians Attending Said if They Had Worked There Before They Had Children And Could Have Seen All

That Could Go Wrong, They Would Have Thought Long And Hard Before Having Any Kids at All; We Decided

Not to Try Again As My Wife Had Epilepsy, Complicating Everything About Life Anyway; And Asperger's

Syndrome And A Rather Mild Case of Bi-Polar too at Least on the Upside, Wasn't Always An Easy Ride

to Regulate

Emotions
And Integrate
Senses too; Yet

i Found the Manual
That Works for me; Yep,

In All Natural Free Meditating in
Flow Of Dance and Song Even more;

Some Folks Do; Some Folks Don't;

i've Surely Seen Enough of Life and
Living Death to Understand Life Ain't Fair;

Yet i Can't Imagine Any More Foolish Act
Than Not Making it Our Best Life Ever NeW NoW;

Yep, So that's What i Do, Adding So Many Verses New Every DaY FOR REAL NoW...

There Are Many Ways to Garden Life That Don't Include Having Children of Our Own...

Nope, i Have
No Regrets

For the Hell
and Heaven

i've Experienced In Life;

Yet of Course Escaping Literal
Hell of Pain And Numb For 66 Months,

And Living in the 'Other Place' For 114 Months
IS A REAL

PLUS

WiTH
SMiLes..

---

Sex. People enjoy sex. Sometimes having children follows.

Why ignore the main reason?

Your grandpappy was a Buddhist?

Yes...

Pass...

Sounds like you're looking for a proximate explanation rather than an ultimate reason (the ultimate reason being that we're most of us driven by our DNA which has to make us reproduce or it wouldn't be here, so it's really not surprising that we tend to have kids, at least not from that angle). As for the proximate explanations - the cognitive, motivational and social explanations - that's less clear. I suppose it's mostly motivational, and motivation isn't always conscious or rational by any means. In my case I guess I just caved in to my wife's pressure mostly. But I don't usually cave in to pressure. I guess I felt that in that particular case it was a force way beyond my control. Possibly part of it was that I feared that if I didn't father a child with her then she might find somebody else who would.

It's a powerful instinct in a lot of people. I once read that men's eye pupils usually contract when they see a baby, until they're fathers themselves, when they dilate, and that women's pupils usually dilate regardless. Pupil dilation is supposed to demonstrate attraction, usually. My experiences with becoming a father mirrored that male response. I only took to children after I'd become a father. Didn't much like them before that. I didn't feel I got much happiness out of fatherhood, but then I often see the negative rather than the positive in things, and the loss of freedom was the main thing I noticed, and I disliked that. My first inkling that I liked being a father was the bad feelings I got when anything threatened to take my son away from me or to hurt him. And I'll probably always feel a great sense of loss that he's grown up and no longer my little boy. So I didn't exactly want the role in the first place, and I didn't feel much serene fatherly joy, but clearly there was a strong instinctive thing going on all the time, and I became very emotionally attached to that role, and somehow I seem to have been a good father, though I didn't believe that very much at the time.

Anyway that's my male experience of the thing. There's probably a big difference between what I was conscious of feeling and what I was really feeling. It wasn't very rational, so I'll probably never be able to get it to make sense to anybody unless they've been through something like it themselves.

Beautiful insight.