The Existential Relief of Having Children

We aren’t equipped to decide whether to have children, but that’s okay—we aren’t equipped to regret having them, either.

I work with two kinds of clients in my practice: those with kids and those without.

I’m exaggerating a little, but there is a marked difference between the two, manifesting both in what these clients talk about and, more profoundly, how. If I had to nominate a single difference, it would be that my clients with kids just don’t have that much existential anxiety anymore.

Let’s switch tracks for a second. Have you ever noticed how at a job, not having enough work produces a different (and usually worse) state of misery than having too much?

For example, when I first started my practice, I was a ball of anxiety. I remember thinking that, as an introvert, it would be nice to spend much of my time at home, creating a website, tweaking my profiles, and reading articles. But it wasn’t. I was a mess, and it wasn’t only because I was poor. It was because I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror and call myself a therapist. I was without definition, directionless. My identity, as well as future, was up in the air.

My practice has grown since then, and now, ironically, I wish for fewer clients. After a particularly long day, I sometimes feel physically sick, overwhelmed by the suffering I have witnessed and my own paltry role in healing it. But strangely, no matter how busy I get, I never feel as bad as when I saw hardly any clients at all.

One way to conceptualize the difference is between fitting in and fitting it all in. When someone has nothing to do at work, they worry that they have no value, no role, in the group. Perhaps they are dispensable. When they have too much to do, they worry about how they can get it all done. Of the two, I would argue that the former is worse because it is tied to the evolutionarily-more-threatening possibility of social exclusion and irrelevance, which pales in comparison to the logistical frustration of task overwhelm.

My wife has a related way of thinking about the difference. She contrasts the anxiety of having too little to do with the stress of having too much to do. If we stick with this distinction, then what I’ve noticed in my practice is that anxiety—in particular, existential anxiety—is more destabilizing than stress. This offers a window into how parents can say they are happy despite being, from everything an outsider can observe, complete trainwrecks.

Children and Philosophy

Now don’t get all up in arms. I’m not saying that parenthood is the path to happiness. Rather, I’m using parenthood to tease apart different shades of an emotion.

Anxiety asks: “What should I do?”¹ Stress asks: “How can I do this?” Existential anxiety is a subset of anxiety that is aimed at the big questions. As Mary Oliver asks in her poem, The Summer Day:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

Existential relief is having an answer.

Humans don’t seem to be very good at asking—or at least answering—the big questions, which is why for many people, existential relief remains elusive. Continuing to ask ever-more-sophisticated versions of the same question doesn’t seem to help, either. Philosophers don’t have a reputation for being very happy. Perhaps this is because the mind wasn’t made to solve such problems:

Philosophy: another byproduct of evolutionary mismatch?

I say the following with much love for philosophy, but a prerequisite for the kind of deep thinking it requires is not having anything more important to do. By “important,” of course, I mean the business of survival and reproduction—you know, the things we did for hundreds of thousands of years, and for which our brains are exquisitely designed.

People have an easier time tackling “smaller” questions on more actionable timeframes. How to do something as opposed to what to do, generally. Within the what category, “What should I eat now?” is easier than “What kind of person do I want to be in ten years?” Existential questions are often too big to answer, or rather, have so many potential answers that we can ruminate on them forever without finding any footing or making any progress.

In short, if you are overwhelmed by Oliver’s question, you aren’t alone.

Now let’s return to work. Work is the cause of about a third of my clients’ problems. It’s what most of my clients spend more of their waking time doing than anything else. Plus, similar to how people want their spouse to be their best friend, a mind-blowing lover, a dutiful in-law, and a responsible parent, people now want their jobs to pay the bills and fulfill them, too. Such high expectations leave a lot of room for dissatisfaction.

But here’s the odd thing. As soon as one of my clients has a kid, they usually stop complaining about their job. What’s happening, I think, is that before kids, people often expect their job to provide purpose, meaning, belonging, and direction. It should answer the big existential questions like who you are, where you fit in, and where you’re going. But then kids come along and satisfy all those dimensions and more. The job thus comes to occupy a different role. Instead of “Does this job fulfill me?” parents begin to ask: “Does this job pay the bills and get me home on time?”

While we’re on the subject of what the human mind was and wasn’t designed to solve, I personally don’t think it was meant to ask the question of whether to have children, which is why so many people find it a difficult decision. Rather, the path was to fall in love, have sex, and then desperately want to protect what resulted. The good news is that there are some psychological protections no matter which route you choose.

Hidden Wonders of the Mind

A wonderful thing about human psychology is that we don’t know what we don’t know. That is why there is such a huge divide between parents and non-parents, but also why plenty of people can be incredibly happy without kids—even if they would have been happier with them.

By the same token, why does nobody ever say that having kids was a mistake? I’m sure politeness and optics is part of the explanation. Another part is that the mind tends to protect us after we’ve made an irrevocable decision. When we can’t do anything to change something, we tend to move on better than if we can. This might be especially true when the decision in question is, well, the main goal toward which evolution is pushing us.

Indeed, the reason people don’t consider their kids mistakes is that it’s a huge evolutionary win. That is not to say that people have this conscious thought. Humans had children well before Darwin came along, thank you very much. Nor does this mean that because reproduction is the vehicle for passing along genetic information, people should have children. All it means is that when people become parents, they fundamentally change. New parenting systems—previously latent modules—come online and make them a chemically different entity.

Broadly speaking, the dramatic changes that happen to parents can be explained by latent modules, which exist for other things such as language, puberty, and emotions. These modules activate once certain environmental conditions are met.² In the case of parenting modules, this condition is obviously having a child. If the conditions aren’t met, then the modules don’t turn on, which explains why being a parent is largely incomprehensible to nonparents. Nonparents genuinely have no idea what it’s like. It’s like explaining vision to someone who never had it.

This reasoning can be used to better help people grow and mature in other ways. Therapists working with teenagers and young adults especially are often asked by parents how Johnny can “grow up.” Sometimes these cases are called “failure to launch.” I occasionally see this even with adults who are in their mid-twenties to thirties. The default clinical assumption is that a person needs to “grow up” before they can grow up. For example, they need to “spend some time alone” and “get to know themselves” before committing to another relationship. They need to “learn responsibility” before being given responsibility. Hell, even job descriptions fall prey to this misguided logic; they often want applicants to have done all the things the job requires. But if I’ve done everything the job demands, why would I apply? Don’t I want at least some portion of the job to be new? Challenging?

My supervisor has a better way of thinking about maturation. “I usually tell my clients that if they want to grow up, they should have a kid,” he’ll say with a smile. It’s tongue-in-cheek, of course, but it also emphasizes the natural order of development, which is that people respond to the challenges in front of them. The most compelling incentive to change is present necessity. Johnny is going to have a much easier time growing up when he must.

Distraction and Productivity

So far, I have argued that parents experience less existential angst or anxiety because parenthood is an answer to existential questions such as: who am I? and what is my life’s purpose? Partly for evolutionary reasons, we would expect to this answer to stick more than being in a great relationship, having a fulfilling career, or pursuing a craft or hobby. But parenthood also comes with a cost. As is blatantly obvious to anyone who has seen a parent, parents are incredibly stressed—how will I get it all done?—not to mention tired, sexless, frustrated, and overwhelmed. That’s the basic tradeoff, and as we saw above, the nice thing is that whichever route you choose, you’re largely protected from regret. Nonparents don’t fully understand what parenthood entails, and parents can’t go back.

Now, not being a parent myself, it wouldn’t have been fair to publish this article without consulting some of my friends with kids. After about six months of chasing them down, I finally managed to have a few breathless conversations, and here is what I learned.

First, a friend who had plenty of existential angst before children agrees that she no longer has as much, but she doesn’t attribute this to “answering” any questions so much as being too distracted with survival—a bit like our cartoon above—to ask them. As soon as she has capacity again, she says, she’ll “return to the book and find it on the same page.” This made me think of what a difficult transition it is for people who invest their worth and purpose in their kids and then face a major transition when those kids leave the nest. I can see this happening in slow motion with one of my clients. Her life is crumbling around her, and the only redeeming thing left is her newborn. I’m worried that she’s going to push everything away except this baby, and then be devastated when, in perhaps a decade or so, he doesn’t want her around. But I’m sure this is a hard balance for everyone to strike.

In a conversation with another friend of mine, someone quite similar to me, we talked about how there is almost a sense of, well, productivity, to being a parent. Like me, he used to write daily and yearly plans, and his mood depended in large part on what he was able to accomplish in a given period of time. Since having kids, he says everything has changed. He no longer cares what he gets done in a day as long as his kids are happy and healthy. “It’s as if my To-Do list has been reduced to keep children alive,” he says, “which I’m able cross off every night before bed.”

My friend is able to cross this off every night because parenthood is a bit like yardwork: it’s a physically challenging, but not very technically difficult job. I mean, sure, you see people entering contests for how well they trim a hedge, but that’s all pomp and style. Functionally, it really doesn’t make much of a difference whether you have straight lines or sharp corners. Likewise, the difference between a tight and loose diaper isn’t life or death. Some food is surely better, but a wide range will get the job done, as evidenced by the difference in what babies eat throughout the world. Ditto with how babies sleep, whether in the crib or their parents’ bed, or on their back, side, or stomach.³

Now, many parents might agree with me so far, but contend that the real finesse of parenting comes later, once the kid can walk, talk, and internalize some of the things you say. But it turns out that’s not really the case either. Much more than we previously realized about child development has to do with what is called the “nonshared environment”—the influence of the social world outside the home—and its interaction with genes. Parenting matters for childhood experience, but much less for adult outcomes (e.g., personality, intelligence) than we long assumed.⁴

Given the effectiveness of a wide range of strategies on incredibly resilient little ones, parenting is a fairly reliable way to feel productive, proud, and accomplished. All you need is an extraordinary amount of physical effort—no big deal, right? Parenting is also, as I am arguing, a reliable way of answering the big existential questions and finding some existential relief thereby.

The next step is to pass whatever anxiety is left over onto your kids, and dust your hands clean of the matter.

Conclusion

If existential anxiety is wondering what the hell you’re doing with your life, then having a kid who demands all your time, energy, and resources—and makes you into a biologically different person—does a pretty good job of taking that question away, both practically and psychologically. For parents, much of what mattered before matters much less now. Parents are routinely talking about this perspective change—even when you try to stop them—and a changed attitude toward work is just one example.

From the evolutionary point of view, this makes sense. The role of many of our modules is to bring us to the point of reproduction. Once those modules have done their job, and new modules are up and running, it makes sense that priorities (and thus behavior) would change. Parents are in a different life stage with different evolutionary goals.

To really drive home this point, consider sea squirts. At the start of their life cycle, they are mobile. They search for a place to anchor, where they grow and then reproduce. Since they no longer need nervous tissue once they anchor—they are sessile—they digest their brain tissue. No, I’m not suggesting parents are brainless, but I am saying that evolution gives rise to systems that are specific to life-history phase.

The brain-fed sea squirt

Of course, people can get existential answers through means other than kids. The nice thing about getting older in general is that we begin garnering more respect in our communities, careers, and families. We start taking on more responsibility and transition from receiving help and guidance to providing it. There is also some path dependence to older age; our options are cut short by the limited time we have left. In short, usually no matter what happens, we graduate from asking what it’s all about. We’re just past that stage of life.

1. “What to do what to do;” Edward Abbey writes in The Monkey Wrench Gang, “that same old question.”

2. An example is the finding that that female rats fast-track puberty when in the presence of an adult male (or even his urine).

3. American parents really get up in arms about this stuff, which is something I’ve learned firsthand over the past few years. (I’ve also learned to recognize when they don’t want to hear my counterargument.) But the fact of the matter is, babies throughout history have slept—and in many places today, still sleep—in the same “bed” as their parents. Various positions of sleeping (back, side, stomach) are also common across cultures and time.

4. This is a nice summary of the major findings about and implications for parenting.