"Just wondering...

...if anybody here can think of one unselfish reason for having children."

How about this: To make the world a better place in the future.

Just pointing out that I feel it's silly to try to single out one particular aspect of human behavior--childbearing--and require that it meet a criterion that neither it nor any other human act may be able to meet. Everything we do is rooted, at some level, in selfishness, because everything we do requires a self.

anonymous u said there is no selfless reason to hVing a kid, i respoded that was a pretty egotist view, since u appear to semi subscribe to that sort of thinking give one selfless thing you have evr done

The last thing this planet needs is more people. If you feel the need to raise a kid or two, then you should adopt them. There are plenty of orphans around, due to the violent and irresponsible nature of our species. The overall goal should be negative population growth.

How does having a child make the world a better place in the future, exactly? Do you have a crystal ball? How can you possibly predict the outcome of another autonomous human being's behavior or choices?

There's no way to predict with 100 percent certainty what will happen in the future.

Having a child is, for many people, the ultimate expression of faith and optimism. Parents have faith that their children will be good world citizens who help improve civilization in the future, and do the best they can to raise their children to be these good world citizens. There's no way to be sure of this outcome, but there's no way to be sure of anything in the future. Uncertainty about the future should not stop people from planning and preparing for the future. (For example, a sensible person saves today for retirement years, even he or she may be run over by a bus tomorrow.)

Many of the anti-child people are pessimists, and they're expressing a type of pessimism that has been around for thousands of years. That's their right. I just hope these pessimists never need assistance from anyone of a younger generation.

The optimists and the pessimists will never agree, and there's no point in a debate between the two sides.

PXTOT may want to label as"reductio ad absurdem" all responses to his / her proposition that having (American middle class) children is selfish and bad for the world, but that doesn't mean that his / her position doesn't have logical holes...

Working this through: let's say for the sake of argument that middle and upper class Americans stopped having children, and only adopted orphans. Since education and wealth are the two factors most likely to drive down birth rates anyway, eventually you'd start to run out of adoptees also, accidents notwithstanding.

And once you run out of replacement people in the US, you have the challenge of finding people to do things. You might even have to import people from other countries to do the work of maintaining an aging population, and what do you think the odds are of those imports (some people might call them immigrants) settling for a lifestyle of lesser affluence? Unless, as part of this population reduction program, the American middle class had renounced urbanized, post-industrial living and dispersed into minimal impact self-sustaining collectives... unlikely.

And why would there be a supply of people from other countries? Well, partly because a rational response to poverty and high mortality rates is to produce children to support you later in life.

And that's the problem with the "let us all die out crowd" -- there's a fundamental failure to recognize the economic consequences of their "ethically clearer" approach, and I'd argue that's a function of affluence. Here's the fact: people are bad for the environment across all times and circumstances -- when do you think all the trees in Europe were chopped down in the first place? -- because we are motivated to change nature to suit us. If in fact we've already accelerated the pace of degradation to kill ourselves off, then it's a self-correcting problem.

To round out the thought, I'd suggest that the people who argue for zero growth definitely have a closer correlation of philosophy to economic needs, although zero growth really means about 2.7 children per 2 adult household to allow for pre-adult mortality rates.

So, you could argue that in fact unless we all agree to stop breeding and let the chips fall where they may in supporting ourselves as we age and die, the non-breeders are in fact getting a free ride off the breeders' labor in producing the next generation of workers to support them.

"So, you could argue that in fact unless we all agree to stop breeding and let the chips fall where they may in supporting ourselves as we age and die, the non-breeders are in fact getting a free ride off the breeders' labor in producing the next generation of workers to support them."

The last time I checked, people without children still pay taxes towards public schools and social security taxes. I hardly call that a free ride.

UNDER the age of 10.

Nobody UNDER the age of 10 will ever throw up on you.

Yeesh, I know they're just prepositions, but the two really aren't all that easy to confuse, are they?