The Case for Kids: A Letter to the Hesitant

On Responsibility, Tradeoffs, and the Lives They Shape

Hey y’all - a few weeks back, I published a piece arguing that the anti-kid argument is gaining ground, that it deserves to be taken seriously, and that we can’t afford to leave it unexamined. While it didn’t go viral or anything like that, it did seem to resonate more than anything else I’ve written here so far. Before going any further, I just want to say thank you. The response, the engagement, and the thoughtfulness in the replies were a really meaningful way to ring in the New Year.

One comment from Kathleen Kilcup (Marsh) particularly stuck with me because it put words to something I’d been debating about including in the original piece but felt there wasn’t enough space to add it in. The question was: What is the deliberate, honest case for children that leaves out moral preening and actually engages in moral reasoning?

After sitting with that for a bit, it became clear to me that the best way to answer it was to write directly to the people who are leaning away from having kids. This is a deeply personal decision, shaped by real constraints, real fears, and real costs. It doesn’t deserve slogans or abstractions. It deserves a personal response, offered in good faith.

So that’s what follows. Let’s dive in.

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I don’t think you hate kids.

If I had to guess, you think they’re expensive. You think they complicate careers that already feel fragile and demand time and energy you’re not sure you have. You might also think kids are hard to deal with, and that the adults raising them often look exhausted and perpetually behind.

As a dad with one kid, and someone who hopes for more, I want to say this up front: all of that makes sense. I’m not here to judge you, or to pretend your concerns are imagined. I do think, though, that taken on their own, they leave out some important parts of the picture.

I think you’re making reasonable responses to the world as it exists right now. Housing costs are high. Childcare can be punishingly expensive. Work has a way of bleeding into everything. When life feels like a constant effort just to stay afloat, adding a kid into the mix can sound less like a meaningful choice and more like a way to make things worse.

So, if you have serious financial or medical reasons that make having children a bad decision right now, I’ll be the first to say that this piece isn’t for you. There’s no value in pretending having kids will magically override real constraints. But if you find yourself saying you don’t want children while also feeling a little unsettled by that conclusion, it’s worth slowing down and asking whether that instinct is telling you the whole story.

I want to be clear about what this isn’t. This isn’t one of those “you don’t know love until you have kids” arguments. You’ve heard that before, probably more times than you can count. And if it worked, we wouldn’t be here; that’s not what I’m interested in. The case I’m making doesn’t rest on sentiment or moral comparison. It rests on responsibility, tradeoffs, and what those tradeoffs do to your life - and to the lives of others - over time.

There’s no getting around the fact that kids are a real and permanent responsibility. They limit flexibility. They create obligations. They force choices in a culture that increasingly treats keeping your options open as a virtue in itself. Those constraints are usually framed as evidence that parenthood is a bad deal. I’ve come to think they’re closer to its defining feature.

A lot of hesitation around having kids centers on ambition, and that concern deserves to be taken at face value. Yes, children can slow careers, close off certain opportunities, and take time that might otherwise go toward travel, credentials, or professional recognition. That’s real. But what tends to get missed is how tightening time forces honesty. When time feels abundant, goals multiply and commitment stays optional. When time tightens, priorities sharpen. You get clearer about what actually matters, and less interested in confusing motion with progress.

This narrowing isn’t just about work. A life built entirely around flexibility often favors range over depth - many possible selves, none fully inhabited. Kids push in the opposite direction. They anchor you to particular relationships, places, and rhythms. That can feel restrictive if freedom mostly means being able to escape. It can also feel stabilizing if freedom includes the ability to build something that lasts.

It’s not an accident that research consistently finds parents reporting lower day-to-day happiness (particularly in the early years) but higher overall life satisfaction later on. Stress is easy to measure. Meaning is harder. It accumulates slowly and often only becomes clear in hindsight. That gap matters, because it explains why parenting can look so unappealing from the outside even when it adds something durable over time.

For people on the fence, perception plays a larger role than it usually gets credit for. Unless you have a career or community that regularly involves children, the most visible moments of parenting tend to be the worst ones. A toddler melting down on a plane. A loud scene in a restaurant. Those moments are real, but they’re not representative.

What you almost never see are the unremarkable stretches that make up most of family life. Quiet routines. Kids absorbed in play. Parents who are tired but steady. None of that stands out in a crowd or makes for good content, so it rarely registers. Judging a decades-long responsibility by its loudest moments is a bad sampling method. It’s like judging adult life entirely by tax season and airport delays. Those experiences are real, but they’re not the whole story.

That distorted picture is reinforced by the way responsibility is treated in modern life. The hardest parts are highly visible, while the steadying forces that make responsibility sustainable tend to be informal, uneven, or easy to miss. When the costs are obvious and the reinforcement is quiet, the risk can feel one-sided. Responsibility can start to feel like something you carry alone, even when others quietly benefit from the effort.

The problem is that opting out of being a parent doesn’t actually fix the imbalance - especially when it becomes common. When enough people decide the responsibility isn’t worth it, the burden doesn’t disappear. It concentrates. A society that treats responsibility as something best avoided eventually struggles to find people willing to carry it at all.

Even if you never plan to have kids, this question doesn’t end at personal preference. A lot of everyday life depends on people taking on long-term responsibilities whose payoff doesn’t arrive quickly or neatly. Raising children is one of the clearest examples. The effort is front-loaded and intensely personal. The benefits show up later, quietly, in the form of people who can be relied on by others.

When fewer people take on that responsibility, the effects don’t announce themselves all at once. They show up gradually, in small frictions that add up. In places like Japan, where very low birth rates have been a fact of life for decades, daily life has slowly thinned out. More older adults live alone. Some die without anyone noticing for days or weeks. Care facilities exist, but there aren’t enough people willing or able to staff them. What’s missing isn’t policy or funding. It’s people.

Japan matters not because it’s uniquely broken, but because it reached this stage earlier than most. Versions of the same pattern are now visible across much of the developed world, including here in the US, and in countries with generous parenting policies. Fewer children, fewer extended families, fewer care workers, fewer informal networks that notice when someone hasn’t been seen in a while. Different cultures, different systems, all the same basic drift.

A lot of American life assumes that drift will stop on its own. We rarely notice how many of our expectations - from care in old age to basic social stability - quietly depend on there being enough people raised to step into those roles. When that assumption weakens, nothing collapses overnight. Life just becomes a little less reliable, a little more isolating, and harder to navigate without personal backup.

None of this requires treating children as economic inputs or future tax payments. The point is simpler than that. Societies endure because people commit to one another across generations. And one of the great mistakes of modern life is assuming that meaning has to come before commitment, when more often it’s the commitment that gives life its weight and direction.

The case for kids isn’t that they’re easy, inexpensive, or compatible with every lifestyle. It’s that some responsibilities are worth taking precisely because they tie you to something beyond yourself. If you’re undecided, the real risk isn’t that you’ll choose wrong. It’s that you’ll mistake the avoidance of responsibility for freedom, without fully accounting for what that avoidance builds - or quietly fails to build - over time.

Most of the pressure pushing you away from kids makes a certain kind of sense. You’re responding to real costs, real constraints, and a culture that treats keeping your options open as the safest possible move. But caution, left unchecked, has a way of hardening into default. What starts as hesitation can turn into a settled way of living, not because you chose it deliberately, but because it felt safer to never fully decide.

If you’re on the fence, I’m not asking you to ignore the tradeoffs or pretend the risks aren’t real. I’m asking you to consider whether responsibility itself might be part of what you’re missing. Not as a burden you have to endure, but as a structure that gives weight and direction to your life. Some commitments narrow your world in ways that make it smaller. Others narrow it in ways that make it deeper. Kids belong to the second category.