You can’t reason your way into becoming a parent.

Whether to have kids is often seen as a lifestyle choice, these days, at least among couples who like us live in the metropolises of this world. I had conversations with friends about the pros and cons myself. What do you get, what do you have to give up for it. Do you prefer scheming for a promotion from your boss or a self-drawn picture from your daughter? Would you rather master the art of the sales pitch or knotting dinosaur balloons? Is your ideal Sunday spent optimizing your island-hopping travel adventure or building the perfect tree house? I understand even better now why these considerations always felt off. With a child your identity and your values change, so the you who has the child is not the same you who made the decision. People who never wanted kids now love being a mom or dad. Or the other way around.

I think this problem lies at the heart of the psycho-cultural reason why especially the „urban creatives“ struggle with partnerships and families. (The economic reason is of course that rents are too damn high.) Becoming a partner and especially having a kid means you become less of an independent individual and more of the entity called family. It’s a collective identity that’s impossible to grapple with when these questions are still theoretical. It only makes sense if you feel to be a part of it, and it to be a part of you.

Agnes Callard refers to goals like becoming a parent as “aspirations:” Things you think you might value once you’re there, but you know too little about at the start of your way to know why future-you will like it. I like the idea that we cultivate what we enjoy. Your first opera might be boring, your first surf or game of golf frustrating, you might not like your first meal of a foreign cuisine… and you might in the beginning not know what to do with a toddler. You see others enjoying it and so you get curious to figure out what it might give you. But it takes time to warm up to these things as you have to learn to appreciate them and what to appreciate about them. The reward is that these journeys make you bigger in the sense that there is now more of the world that’s also part of who you are.

Parenthood is similar to these others, but the change is even stronger. Becoming a parent includes making another person part of who you are, to make their needs part of your needs, their happiness part of your happiness. You grow not only as an individual, but in a way that „you“ now includes others. You have to aspire to become bigger in this way, because the individual you have been before has few ways to anticipate what it will mean to be part of this new entity. What was rational or irrational for you as an individual or one person in a partnership might not be rational or irrational any more when your kids and family become a part of you.