Why does anyone want to have kids?

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I don't understand why anyone would want to have kids, especially in today's world. Having kids is a big responsibility and a huge investment. You have to feed them, provide them with certain necessities, change them, pay for them, save for them to go to college, hire babysitters every time you go out, and many other things. Life is hard enough when you don't have kids. Why does anyone want to make their life harder and more stressful than it has to be? This world is becoming a cruel and crappy place. We have terrorism, diseases, bullies, sex offenders, shooters, drug addicts, and many other horrible people in this world. There are not a lot of good paying jobs out there and college is expensive. None of us asked to be brought into this world. Why do you want to subject someone else to this world? You just get old and you die. And you have to go through so many other challenges in between.

Agreed. I don't really understand it either.

For every species, new life represents hope. Hope of continued existence, hope for the future. Without hope the world would become an even bleaker place than it currently is.

Humans become even more dangerous when they have no hope or drift into a state of feeling completely bereft of hope. Parenting, though, is not for everyone, some people are so completely unsuited to it that their children lose hope so early in their lives that it takes them a lifetime or at least several decades to develop some hopefulness again.

Personally I think living without hope is like spending your life in a darkened room that the sun can never enter. So far none of my children have resented me giving birth to them and "subjecting them to this world", and they would certainly tell me if they did (I encouraged them to express themselves honestly!)

You don't have to understand it. There were also people who didn't see the point in the past, and—guess what?—their genes died out with them in favor of those from people who, among other things, did have a drive to reproduce.

Why?

Love.

Because there is no better feeling in the world than holding your child in your arms, feeling them breathing against you, kissing their head and seeing a little smile on their face.

Being a parent, to me, is the greatest honour and privilege. The most wonderful thing in the world. I would have missed out on the most amazing feeling in life if I hadn't experienced it.

Sure, it's hard work and at times it's painful enough to feel like my heart is being ripped out and crushed, but that's also the best thing ever. To love someone so much that you feel like you're going to die from the pain of loving them so much, to me means I'm really living.

^
This really speaks to me.

I simply don't get a couple of the above posts. I don't see any hope in the world either. Or love, for that matter. To me, it's borderline criminal to have kids, especially today when it is virtually certain that civilization will have collapsed by the time they're 30.

I live in a relatively prosperous California suburb and I see pregnant women and women with little babies and kids all the time. I can't help thinking how stupid they are to have kids. I have always regretted that my parents had me, and vowed when I was as young as 13 or 14 to never bring a life into the world who didn't have a choice in the matter. Life is such a horrible thing that to actually create one is just unconscionable.

I often see tweens and teens who I think of as "bubble babies" because they were born during the financial bubbles of the 90s and 00's. I get that most people didn't see the crash of 2008 coming, the info was all there but the mainstream media buried it to an extent that you had to know where to look online to find it, so people who had materialistically comfy lives went ahead and had kids based on the info they had, and didn't expect a wallop like the 08 crash to show up.

But today? You'd have to be stupid/ignorant to think that "the economy is wonderful" like the MSM tells people. So, having a kid is cruel to the kid. I know that MSN news is constantly removing article comments that expose the truth behind the lies.

I totally agree! This is the worst time to have a Baby! There is no way I would bring another child into this world, as messed up as it is now! One is enough! I feel sad at the prospect that she will have to face a lot of scary, sick and sad things, before it is over. I don't want another one to go through that, if I can help it. As much as the thought of having a Baby, with the one I hope to marry someday would be interesting, it isn't worth the heartache. It's also impossible. LOL.

I agree with you. I'm HFA and have 2 boys - ages 21 and 14. I feel bad that they are growing up i a crappy world. Thank God, my 21 year old is at a college in an excellent field. At this college, it is tiny, and they only do naval architecture and marine engineering. He has already had several job offers and he isn't even done with college yet. They averag 5-6 job offers per graduate. As for my 14 year old, he is concerned about the state of the world. I pray for him every day. It's tough.

And yes, I have been in a state of somewhat chronic overload since I've had my kids. I really deeply wanted children and am glad I had them. However, I don't think anyone should have kids if they don't want kids. It is a tremendous sacrifice, expense, and responsibility, and there are days when it is unbelievably stressful. For me, it was when they were really small and needed constant attention and care.

Hmm, not sure how this was intended but it seems disproportionately hostile. It seems logical that a person with no desire to have children would not feel threatened by the idea that "their genes died out with them." This would not be perceived as a bad thing. It also seems a strange response to someone asking a question to simply reply "you don't have to understand" and leave it at that.
Personally I don't understand either, but I assumed that due to alexithymia. There is no emotional motivation for me to do this being, as you pointed out, a labour intensive process. The desire to have children and any satisfaction in same seems to depend on normal emotions. With the numbers involved in the human population, the continuation of the species is definitely not contingent on me reproducing. Quite the opposite - the survival of our species may well depend on human population control, in order to be able to replenish resources and relate less waste.
Plus, I don't like children.

My parents had me in the middle of the cold war, I'll have well above average levels of Strontium 90 in my bones to prove it. Why anybody chose to have children when a Nuclear war seemed inevitable is quite baffling, but then both of my parents were born during World War II when there was still the potential for a Nazi invasion. There's probably been far worse times to have children than now, but we don't know for sure, it's the unknown. I had mine when things had cooled down a bit, I worry what they might have to face up to but it's never been easy living on this planet, whatever your species.