The numbered items are from Kelley’s recent post, comments below are mine after a bit more than a decade of experience.
- Having children is a good – perhaps the best – way to disseminate your values to the next generation.
Provided you have values to disseminate, know what they are, and especially know the difference between values and opinions because while your values may be identical your opinions will often clash.
- Children are entertaining, much better than any other streaming option you might pay for.
Absolutely true. My wife and I have a running list of every brilliantly stupid and stupidly brilliant thing our progeny has said. It is long and growing ever longer.
- There is a profound and primeval joy in helping a helpless infant become a functioning adult.
Experiencing this right now while having both an infant and a teenager at home. You tend to forget how large that gap actually is since you cross it in daily — nay, hourly — increments, but it is complete helplessness on one end and taking the metro from school by yourself and going on a field trip to China on the other.
- A primeval and foundational need of all humans everywhere is to belong, and to be loved.
For being loved alone you could also get a pet, but there is also a need to love that — and please fellow cat lovers do not kill me for writing this — no pet can completely fulfill.
- It is exceedingly rare for anyone born to later regret having been born, so the gift of birth is huge.
Well put. Though of course you also take a piece of your heart and put it into someone else, and then things may happen to them or they may be the thing that happens to other people, with strong feelings either way.
- If it all works out through adolescence, you will have friends for life.
Amen.