I think the drive to have children is so illogical one might call it a mental illness. Why do you need a kid? “I dunno, it just made me feel better”. Why didn’t you adopt? “I dunno, just wanted my own”.
It’s the most basic survival instinct maybe? Jesus what a dumb fucking comment, holy shit.
I am always flabbergasted by people trying to argue that having kids is illogical, selfish, unnatural, etc. Like, the fuck you think we’ve been doing as a species for millions of years? What ya think every other living being on earth is doing?
People trying to reinvent the wheel and making something mundane unnecessarily complicated just annoy the shit out of me. No one is forcing anyone to have kids (at least in societies that don’t ban abortions). You don’t want them or don’t feel equipped to have them - no one cares. But yeah let’s make your own insecurities and traumas and whatever personal reasons you have into an ideology that promotes that creating new life is bad per se.
Having kids is neither good nor bad. It is not selfish or altruistic. It just is. There is no need in overly moralizing it.
The adoption part really strikes a nerve with me, too. “My own,” is always how I’ve heard it and it’s so indicative of a purely self-centered reason for wanting children - it’s not about the children at all, it’s about the parent. But, that’s never what you’ll hear from a parent when they try to describe how selfless the ineffability of parental love is for their child: “I can’t explain it, you just have to be a parent to understand.” I don’t buy it, as there are countless unloved/unwanted children doomed to grow up in toxic or abusive environments, as well as many step-parents and adopted parents who clearly love their children as much as any biological parent.
I think of it as more of a fear of death and passing on your own genetics as of way of soothing that fear.
Totally devalues the kid as their own person though (common thing for parents to do).
