Answer

Why Have Children When Everyone Says Not To?

Almost every message you hear about children describes them as a cost: expensive, exhausting, limiting, bad for the planet, bad for your career. Wondering whether to have any is not cynicism. It is a reasonable response to what you have been told.

Because the case against is louder than it is strong. All of those costs are real and all of them are one column of the ledger. The other column is harder to put in a caption, which is most of why you hear less of it. A culture that discusses parenthood almost entirely in terms of cost is not neutral. It is making an argument by omission.

Eternal Truths

Parenthood was the first commandment. Before anything about worship or sacrifice, Adam and Eve were told to multiply. The Family: A Proclamation to the World restates it: the commandment to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force. That placement is the doctrine’s own way of saying this is not peripheral.

Your eternal identity already includes a family. Parenthood is not something added to the plan afterwards. It is close to the centre of what the plan is for, which is why the Proclamation puts it beside the doctrine of who you are rather than in a list of duties.

What Can Make This Confusing?

Children change the life you thought you wanted. They will, and pretending otherwise makes the case worse. Most parents describe wanting a different life beforehand and not wanting it back afterwards, which is not an argument you can make persuasively to someone who has not had children, and is nearly unanimous among those who have. It is also worth saying that a meaningful life without becoming a parent is plainly possible, and the Church has never taught otherwise. The question here is what to aim for, not who counts.

What Research Shows

The findings are genuinely mixed and worth stating honestly. Parents report lower moment-to-moment ease and higher meaning. Marital satisfaction after children depends heavily on the marriage that was there before them. What is consistent across studies is that regret runs one way: people rarely report regretting the children they had.

Questions to Think About

• Whose account of parenthood have I actually heard, and who is missing from it?
• Am I weighing this against a real life or a picture of one?
• What am I afraid of losing, and is it a season or a self?

What You Can Do

Go and ask two people you respect who have children what they did not expect, and listen for the part that does not fit the caption. If you want children and it is not happening, none of the above is aimed at you — that is a different kind of painful and the commandment has never been a test you fail by circumstance. The essay behind this answer goes further.

Jesus Christ makes parents out of ordinary people, and He is not asking you to be certain before you begin.