Can someone explain the desire to have kids? I have never felt it.
Also, I thought animals that reproduce sexually have a desire to have sex, and then kids end up happening as a result.
Children are enthusiastic, sincere, unjaded and open to new experiences. They find joy and fascination in the ordinary things which adults have long lost interest in. Where adults obsess over profit and loss, a child will play with a pile of dirt and a shovel all afternoon. The world needs profits but it also needs the continuous renewal and reminder of wonder that children provide.
Another aspect is more abstract, maybe? When I was a child I was loved and I always had adults around who looked after me and caught me when I made mistakes and made everything right. My parents weren't perfect and made many mistakes themselves but as a child I really believed that the world was as it should be and if there was a problem someone would make it right. Of course as an adult I know that isn't the case but the consequence of that environment is a potency that has always been a part of me.
I think that relationship between child and parent is something that needs to exist in the world and the best way to ensure that is to take on the role of the parent.
Another way to see it is that I owe my parents a debt so great I cannot possible repay it, no matter what I do for them. My only chance of relief is to take that debt and "burden" another generation.
That's well said.
For animals where the young are independent from birth, a desire for sex is sufficient to have offspring that are not only born but survive to reproduce themselves.
Mammals are mostly much more high maintenance than that, and human young are unusually high maintenance even among mammals, because they are born relatively physically undeveloped, largely to accommodate giant brains. Humanity, therefore, would not have survived to be here today if humans weren't generally genetically programmed to seek not only to have sex but to want to engage in child rearing.
But that does still not tally with a pre-meditated rational conscious desire to have children. We certainly wouldnt expect to see that in other mammals.
I think the type of conscious decision to have kids discussed in this article may be a socio-cultural phenomenon.
There are documented cases of stone-age level people who had not actually made the connection between sex and resultant children. We are not certainly imbued from birth with knowledge like that.
I agree with you there are also likely strong cultural influences which are unfolding mostly separately from any genetic dynamics.
Survival of memes and survival of genes are a little different, but not entirely independent; once you have a concept of the relation of sex to reproduction (which huma societies demonstrably have had for quite a long time, in general, even if there are some primitive exceptions), a community (and it's ideas) is much less likely to becomem influential, or even survivez , if it doesn't value reproduction unless it's somehow in a symbiotic relation with a community that does; this may be somewhat less true today (an interesting discussion), but in most of human history this would have been a big deal.
Also, that aside, it serves as a rationalozation of the lower level drives discussed earlier, and a social value framework that includes elemenrs that provide rationalizations that enable a feeling of understanding of lower-level drives provides a kind of (strictly speaking, fallacious, but that's not important to it's value in promoting acceptance) validation for the whole framework.
Families which transmit this value have a powerful natural-selection advantage, so you're more likely to come from a family which does so.
There's also a powerful advantage to discouraging family members from examining the value too closely, so the value tends to be held in some kind of religious regard, and the idea of rejecting it tends to be seen as selfish, even though bringing a child into the world is the biggest claim on community resources most individuals can ever make.
After having four kids that desire is definitely sated, although I still do love holding and being around babies. The feeling was never as intense as the desire for sex, food or sleep, but definitely palpable. I suppose it's similar to the desire many have for a pet or companion.