This is the truth. The advice I give to expectant friends is this: get your shit together, mental health wise, before that tiny human shows up in your life. My partner and I found that the stress of having a child brings all that shit up.
Whatever it is I don't have existential crises anymore.
And people will naturally go through lots of pain if there’s hope their kids will have a better life than they did, and there’s almost always that hope, even in total societal collapse.
And a second side effect is kids force you to get to know the parents of other kids, even if only accidentally. Many people are quite starved for general human conversation, even if it is just about the immense number of diapers encountered per annum.