Should You Have Kids?

Josh Zlatkus (Living Fossils):

"Whether to have children is one of the most important decisions in a person’s life, but because it was never a decision humans had to make in the past, we don’t really have a good way of going about it. We have instincts to guide the lead-up—is this mate attractive?—and instincts to guide the aftermath—how far will I go to protect this child?—but when it comes to pausing in the middle and weighing whether to have children at all, our evolved psychology is, amazingly enough, fairly silent."

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"We’re wired to feel attraction (pair-bonding) and to protect offspring once they exist. But the in-between—deliberately deciding for or against children—has no deep biological script.

In short: our psychology gives us instincts for mating and for parenting, but not for deciding whether to be a parent."